"Amb. Chas Freeman: The Dangerous Myths We Tell Ourselves About China, Russia, and Iran"
by Nima R. Alkorshid,
Dialogue Works (May 24, 2025)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BIYLdqZKDI

Chas Freeman:

[1:10] I see effective statecraft diplomacy from both sides. I see statecraft and diplomacy being skillfully practiced by the Chinese. I don’t see that from the United States. And, in fact, the department of state, which is the policy-making body that monitors and manages relations with foreign countries, whether they’re enormously strong, powerful countries like China or Brazil or whether they’re Malta or the Seychelles or Maldives, is being dismantled and is headed by people who have no experience dealing effectively in International Relations. So, the immediate prospect is not good.

I think John Mearscheimer is quite correct in his theory describing the United States and other European or European-related countries. That is to say, we do react as Graham Allison described in his Thucydides Trap idea. We do react militarily. We try. to oppose the rise of others. We insist on hegemony. That is our history. It derives from Europe. I don’t think it applies really very well in East Asia. Pacific Asia never had – or, I should not say never – but for two millennia it has not had warring states, which are typical of Europe. I mean Europe is full of relatively small countries that have been at war for much of history. That has not been the pattern in Pacific Asia. It has been the pattern in India, by the way. India, like Europe, is an extension of the Eurasian landmass, a peninsula. It has had this same kind of pattern of states contending with each other by whatever means they can come up with. Very Machiavellian. Actually, the Indians outdo Machiavelli in their own way. They make him look like a very devout Christian.

[3:27] “You know, I think my problem with John Mearscheimer’s theory is that I think it is a strategic theory that does not take account of cultural factors, geography and history adequately. So, if you look at Pacific Asia, what you’ll find is historically there was this enormous culturally preeminent, scientifically preeminent, best-governed state called China. It had different constitutional orders: cultural orders equating to a dynasty. And it was often ruled by foreigners. For the last thousand years, the most recent thousand years, for 600 years it was ruled by foreigners. So, this is a very different pattern than Europe.”

[4:24] “Countries around China all engaged in state trade with it, which we describe as tribute. Something like President Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and UAE. You know, they all did nice things for him because they want to be on his right side. But they also did things with an economic motive. They hoped to make money by what they were doing. So, I think the pattern in Pacific Asia just doesn’t fit very well.”

[5:06] “But, of course, he has described our behavior very well. And I think we are very foolishly leading with our chin. Very likely we are going to get into a war and we’re going to be very sorry about that because we’re not going to win it. We can talk about why but the main thing is, instead of almost sociopathic or psychotic approach to China which says ‘We can’t tolerate the rise of China. It will do exactly what we did, that is it will try to become a global hegemon.’ We didn’t intend to do that originally. If you look at the 19th Century, you’ll find Americans constantly saying: ‘Well, we will never be imperialists.’ Of course, by the end of the century, we became imperialists. And after World War II we occupied the whole world outside the Soviet Block and China, North Korea, and Vietnam.

[6:18] I think we mirror image. We look at the Chinese and we imagine they’re like us, and they’re not. They have a different history. They have a different geography. They have different relationships with their neighbors. And what they want is different. What they want is deference, respect. And that is particularly the case because the arrival of the West on their doorstep about 500 years ago. Macau dates to about 1519. That was the earliest Portuguese Empire incursion into China. The Dutch occupied Taiwan. The French tried to take it from the Chinese. Europeans divided China into spheres of influence. And when I include the Russians in that because they took a lot of territory from China and they also insisted on special rights in Xin-jiang and Manchuria, Mongolia.

I don’t think that one theory of foreign affairs fits all cases. I’m very worried about where we are headed. Not so much because of what the Chinese are doing because they are very risk-averse. They don’t want a war. But there are people in the United States who are gearing up for war and trying to invent reasons to go to war with China.

[Nima R. Alkorshid] . . .

8:29: “I think Mr Trump is a wild card in any game. There is no effective, orderly policy process in Washington anymore, on either international or domestic affairs. He is served by people who are, frankly, mostly unqualified for the positions they have been put into. Maybe they’ll learn on the job and perform well, but that’s not likely. So, Mr Trump makes decisions. And it’s not clear whether he, you know… We know that he loves money. Like Willie Sutton the bank robber he wants to go where the money is. For Willie Sutton it was the banks. For Donald Trump, that’s Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE. That’s where the money is. But does he think strategically? Or is that all that there is to him? And his approach to China has been driven mainly by Peter Navaro who is an economist who graduated from Harvard, though it’s a little hard to see how he did given what he believes. His theories are derided. They’re regarded as a joke by most economists. And he believes that China has exploited the United States terribly. So, he objects to the fact that the United States pays China for all kinds of goods and services by printing money. We don’t actually export enough to China. Why is that? It’s not that China has a high tariff wall or it’s not even that the Chinese are not like the Japanese and Koreans who don’t want to buy foreign products. The Chinese love foreign products. But we are not producing those sorts of things (goods). Services are a different matter. We have a trade surplus [in Services] with China. They pay a lot of money for licensing American technology. And now we’re trying to cut them off from that technology.

[11:04] So this doesn’t make any sense at all. If you look at the two countries, China has about something more than four times as many people as the United States, but it only has 7% of the world’s water and we’ve got almost a fourth of that. It has one third the arable agricultural land that the United States does. On that it must support four times as many people. If we had the same ratio of people and arable land in the United States, there would be four billion people living in the United States and we would behave very differently than we now do if that were the case.

But the other part of this is, it makes enormous sense for China to buy American or Brazilian agricultural products. I mean, Brazil is in much the same position as the United States. It’s rich in resources. It has a lot of arable land and it could create even more by doing terrible things to the forests in Brazil. So, if you ask yourself how should you manage this? Let’s say – I know you’re Muslim -- but let’s use the example of pork. If you want to grow pigs, or hogs, it’s much more efficient to do that in Brazil or the United States than it is to do it in China because that consumes a lot of grain. It consumes a lot of water. You should do it on this side of the Pacific, not the other side.

[12:48] And the same is true of a lot of things. So the trade theories that this administration is following are basically a demonstration that they don’t agree with David Ricardo about comparative advantage and how trade works. They don’t agree with Adam Smith. They basically repudiated all the classic economists. And this – they’re entitled to do that if they want – but we’re seeing that their theories don’t work. You know, the uncertainty that the tariff policy has created, the shortages that have been created are causing all kinds of effects. In the United States, small businesses which depended on Chinese imports are now going out of business. Not only out of business, but because the owners, the entrepreneurs who started those businesses may have mortgaged their house as collateral, as security for the loans they took out to start their businesses, they’re going to lose their houses. They’re going to be homeless. And they can’t make any decisions because they don’t know from one moment to the next what the tariff rate will be and what Mr Trump will do or not do.

[14:18] And the US government is being impartially dismantled. So, for example, if you’re a farmer the weather service cannot provide you with the information it used to because it has lost staff and it has lost funding. And so on and so forth. So the United States is engaged in a very peculiar self-sabotage and the Chinese are not. And there is a very interesting phenomenon now which The Economist magazine, the most important, best written conservative magazine in the English-speaking world, which they’ve not finally noticed, and that is Chinese technology is now spectacular. It’s not just high-speed trains or electric cars or solar installations or wind power installations or nuclear power construction or hydro-electric power or electrification or urbanization architecture construction techniques. It’s amazing.

[15:36] “So we now have the phenomenon of vloggers, people who use video to blog, going to China and taking photos of amazing things that don’t exist in the West. So, China is gaining admirers, even as the United States alienates other countries.”

Now, if there were a war, the war would be seven or eight thousand miles away.

. . .

[23:45] There is no escalation control at all. There are no understandings. There is no dialogue about how to prevent escalation too the nuclear level between the United States and China is very, very dangerous. You know, during the cold war, we had a very elaborate and frequent dialogue with the Soviet Union on these questions. And we had arms-control proposals. We have no such thing with the Chinese. And I would have to say, looking at the conflicts around the world, there is no coherent proposal for an end to the Ukraine War. The United States is a participant in that war with Ukraine. Yes, a proxy participant, mostly. But Ukraine can’t do various things without direct American support. And it has had that. So, we are a co-belligerent in that war.

[24:45] But now we are pretending to be a mediator between Ukraine and Russia. Well, the two roles are not compatible. Trump went to West Asia, to the Arabian Peninsula, the Persian Gulf. He claimed he got a lot of commitments or pledges or indications of transfer of capital to the United States. Maybe there is something to that. Maybe it’s just a pipe dream, I don’t know. But he didn’t, apparently, talk very much about the genocide in Gaza. There isn’t any American proposal on Gaza other than his “Gaza Riviera” proposal which basically endorses the genocide and involves removing all the Palestinians from Gaza and putting Gaza under American control. There is not even an effective plan for providing humanitarian assistance to Gaza as babies die by the hundreds and thousands from starvation. So the Israelis are still claiming that there is no starvation in Gaza. But by doing that they’re simply demonstrating once again that what they say is seldom true. So, more often than not, it’s a lie.

[26:13] Look at the situation with Iran. There is no proposal there … [professional diplomats always optimistic] Is there a strategy? I don’t see one. As the United States is dismantling the competence of its own government, it is behaving in an erratic manner both domestically and internationally. It is doing grave strategic damage to itself; for example, the attack on Harvard University. Harvard has for a long time been rated as the top university in the world. And the latest list for evaluating universities in terms of their scientific and technological progress still puts Harvard at the top of the list. MIT is tenth. Numbers two-through-nine are Chinese. This is a change in the world. So I would argue, in the end, contrary to what John Mearsheimer predicts and what Graham Allison identifies as the Thucidide’s Trap, the United States really has a great deal to gain from leveraging Chinese prosperity and progress. The more prosperous China is, the more it can buy from the United States, or Brazil, for that matter.It’s a good thing for China to become prosperous. The more technologically advanced it becomes, the more we need to collaborate with it if we are to advance ourselves. So, I think our policies are, frankly, very self-destructive and very dangerous.

[29:18] Nima Alkorshid: . . .

Ambassador Chas Freeman: China’s trade relationships driven more by the other countries involved. You look at the Belt and Road initiative, for example. The projects that emerge from that – the empowerment of China’s policy banks, banks that have state lending capacity – to lend to projects that create connectivity in a constructive way. But there is no office in Beijing that says what these projects should be. They follow the dictum of the late Deng Xiao-ping: “You cross the river by feeling the stones with your feet.” So, the government says to people:” We want you to help the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And if you produce projects that are good for the Congo and good for us, we’ll give you the money for that. But we’re not going to tell you what to do in the Congo or how to do it, or anything else. And we’re certainly not going to tell the Congo what it should do. We’re not in that business. So this is a very commercial sort of approach. Of course, the Chinese want to make money. The Chinese state-owned companies, standard Chinese private companies, construction companies, they want to make money. But they know that if they design a project in the right way, they can get state backing for it; diplomatic backing and, far more important, financial backing.

[31:41]This is how it works. But the United States has no similar mechanism. We say to our companies, You know, we’d like you to do more in Africa. And they say, OK, who’s going to pay for it? And we don’t have an answer. So, this is a competition that is stacked in favor of the Chinese. What is the objective of the Belt and Road Initiative? It is basically to remove all the barriers to movement of goods and services in the entire Eurasian land mass and, at least, East Africa. Of course, Latin America has now signed up in many cases, not Brazil, but Chile, for example, is exploiting this. So, the Chinese get a lot out of that because Latin America is very rich in resources, I mentioned water, you could say agriculture, you could say mining, and increasingly industrial things. That’s why, you know, producing Chinese electric cars in Brazil makes sense. That’s a wise decision on the part of Brazil. Take the old Ford factory and turn it over to a Chinese company to produce electric cars.

[33:20] The United States has banned Chinese electric cars. This is stupid. So I salute Brazil. You guys are smart.

Nima R. Alkorshid: . . .

[34:21]Amb. Chas Freeman: "[34:21] Amb. Chas Freeman: "The Chinese performance in Africa got criticized for several reasons. First, when they started out, they didn’t know how to work effectively with African labor. So they brought a lot of Chinese to work there. I will tell you a story. I won’t identify the country but I chair a company and that company does business all over the world, including with Chinese companies. And so, in this case, there was a proposal for the construction of a cement plant with this country and my friend and partner and I met with the other country and very quickly reached agreement in general terms about how to – actually, two cement plants -- and my partner said I have to build the mine for the grave, the stones. And they said yes, you have to do that. And he said OK. And then, at the end of the negotiation, they said ‘How long will it take you to build these two cement plants?’ And my friend did a little calculation on the back of an envelope and he said ’17 months.’ And they said: ‘the French said it would take four years, and they wanted three times as much money to do it. How can you be sure?’ And so my Chinese friend said, ‘Well, you know, I’ve been to your country and it’s a lovely place. I enjoyed my time there. But we don’t pay our engineers and workers by the time. We pay them by the job. So they have an incentive to do it as quickly as possible. And I’m sure they’ll love your country, but they will miss their families. And we tell them, you should only work 12 hours a day, and they work 16. And we tell them they should take one day a week off and they refuse. And we tell them you should take a vacation once in a while and they say, no, they want to get home. And so he said 17 months."

[36:58] And this is a problem, obviously. African labor is – with the exception of South Africa and – is not really as sophisticated as Asian labor. So, that’s a cost that has to be borne. But the Chinese have learned. They are now using many more Africans. They train them, either in China or on the spot. They build good projects. Some of them are vanity projects, you know, things like sports stadiums and government palaces, and so forth. But a lot of them are roads, railroads, projects that involve agriculture or mining or engineering.

[37:40] And finally I would just say nobody’s noticed but there are now three million Chinese living in Africa. Who are they? They are small business men and women who have gone there. So they go to a place, you know, Nigeria is a tough place to do business because the Nigerians are very, very smart at business. Nigeria would be very rich if they stopped focusing their brain power on stealing from each other which they do, you know. But the Chinese are there. They sell textiles. They sell shoes. They sell groceries of one sort or another. And they don’t intend to go home, you know. They’re raising their kids there. And they’re not telling the Nigerians or the Angolans or the Kenyans or Tanzanians or anybody else how they have to organize their society. They’re trying to fit in. They’re not demanding special privileges. So this is quite a contrast with the history of the West in Africa which was colonial, exploitative. . . .

[39:00] [comments about a film of a coup and poor performance by Brazil, France, Spain, etc, in Africa and the origins of the BRICS forum ] ...

. . .

[48:44] Amb. Chas Freeman: “Yes, I think that is the case. We proclaimed a desire, a very healthy desire after the end of the Cold War for a Europe whole and free. But the Ukraine War has produced a Europe divided in which democracy is in retreat. So, both ideologically and in security terms, it has been a disaster.”

“Of course, it has also been a disaster for Russia to be put in a position where it had to – felt it had to – go to war over whether NATO would intrude in Ukraine or not. This was badly mishandled by both sides, I think. The Russians perhaps may be excused because-- for most of when a lot of the bad things happened -- they were too weak to do anything about them. But it’s very hard to excuse the overextension of the West. Why, you know, dividing Europe and perpetuating or recreating the confrontations of the cold war was a very bad idea. And the people who have suffered the most from this, of course, were the Ukrainians. Ukraine has been depopulated, its industry destroyed, its agriculture ruined in many cases. Its young men sacrificed on the battlefield – not so young because there aren’t many young men in Ukraine – their demographic pattern is they have an extremely low birth rate in Ukraine. And Ukraine’s basic problems: corruption, authoritarian government, hostility to Russia, lack of adequate connections to the European Union, none of these things have been fixed. They’re all there. And because Ukraine is such a mess, there are opportunities to come to a resolution of it.”

[50:59] “I understand that President Trump is trying to hand this off to the new pope. I don’t know whether the Pope will accept that role or not. Somebody has to mediate and they have to do it on a basis of realism. And the realism is that people who lose wars like ceasefires and people who are winning wars don’t want ceasefire. And so, focusing on a ceasefire is the wrong place to focus. What you have to focus on are, frankly, the three issues the Russians have raised. What is the status of minorities in Ukraine? Can they use their own language? Can they preserve their own culture?

[51:44] Now, of course, the Russians have taken most of the three – four – oblasts in the East which are predominantly Russian-speaking. Of course, Crimea is also predominantly Russian-speaking. None of the people living there have any desire to live under Ukrainian rule. And so, to force them to be under Ukrainian rule is a violation of democracy. And Russia is not going to ask them to be under Ukrainian rule. So, trying to get those territories back at the negotiating table is an exercise in futility.”

. . .

[52:15] “The two most important issues are: will there be a hostile foreign force stationed in Ukraine aimed at Russia? Russia will not tolerate that. Very understandably so. And so, Ukraine has to be neutral. And if Ukraine is neutral, can it join the EU? Can it become a prosperous bridge as well as a buffer between the rest of Europe and Russia? With sufficient imagination, yes.

[52:49] And finally, of course, we have to get rid of the confrontation in Europe. Europe really ought to be whole and free. And the only way it can become whole and free is if Russians are recognized as part of the equation and have some kind of role in the governance of Europe alongside other great powers like Germany, France, Italy, Spain. And this war awaits an imaginative solution. And that solution has to be based on reality on the ground. It cannot be based on the propaganda of the West which says that Russia is in terrible condition; has lost a million men or 750,000 men or some preposterous number; its economy is failing, which is not true. Its armaments industry can’t support the war. That is also not true. I mean, man people in the West wish those things were true. They’re not true. You can’t conduct an effective negotiation on the basis of daydreams. You have to recognize realities and to date the West has not done so. Europeans have no peace plan at all. Trump wants peace, I think, but he doesn’t know how to get it. And the Russians have a very clear plan, which is to start with the Istanbul Agreement that was reached in March and April of 2022. And if Ukraine won’t accept that as a basis for resolution now, the Russians have threatened they will take more land, not less. This is not a good situation.