Biden’s SOTU, Blinken Visits China, EU Bans Russian Petroleum Products, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, President Biden gives the State of the Union address. U.S. Secretary of State Blinken visits Beijing. And, the EU's ban on Russian petroleum products takes effect. It's February 2nd, 2023 and time for The World Next Week. I'm Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Ann Robbins.

MCMAHON:
Longtime listeners of this podcast will know Carla has been a regular guest of Jim Lindsay and I, but this week brings something new. Carla steps in as our new full-time co-host of The World Next Week. Little bit of introduction, Carla is a senior fellow here at the Council. She is also faculty director of the Master of International Affairs program at Baruch College's Marxe School of Public and International Affairs. Carla brings with her years of experience as an award-winning journalist at both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and we are really happy to have her join the show. Carla, welcome.

ROBBINS:
Thanks Bob, it is great to join you and I know Jim Lindsay is an incredibly major act to follow, but I will persist.

MCMAHON:
I should also note that some listeners have already mentioned to me they are going to miss Jim's pronunciation of Bob and his Bostonian accent among many other things.

ROBBINS:
I know, but I'm slightly different. I also have hair.

MCMAHON:
All right then with that Carla, let's start in Washington, DC. Next Tuesday, President Joe Biden gives his annual State of the Union address while speaking to both chambers of Congress, each one by the way, now under the majority of different parties. Biden is going to be expected to highlight accomplishments of his second year in office, policy priorities for 2023. It's going to be another one of these spectacles that we've seen play out and the word divisions will come forward. What can we expect President Biden to talk about Carla?

ROBBINS:
This is, and I looked it up, the ninety-ninth annual message or State of the Union and Biden had 38 million viewers last year, which is pretty good, but still 15 million fewer than watch the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Cincinnati Bengals. It is an incredible opportunity to outline his priorities and preview his expected presidential campaign to the American people and to rally and challenge Congress to action. For as long as we have covered them, Bob, these speeches are always at least as much about optics as substance and this is going to be Biden's first time as you noted, speaking to a GOP led house and with Kevin McCarthy rather than Nancy Pelosi sitting behind him along with Vice President Kamala Harris. 

We're going to have to watch to see whether there's going to be heckling like there was last year when we saw Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert chanting, "Build the wall." And if you know, there was also that incredibly uncomfortable moment when he began talking about military burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan and how it had given many veterans cancer, including possibly his son Beau, and put them in as he said in "flag draped coffins." At which point Lauren Boebert screamed, "You put them in there, thirteen of them." Talking about the troops killed at the Afghanistan airport. There could be some really raw moments like that. 

I doubt McCarthy is going to tear up Biden's speech like Pelosi did to Trump in 2020. The relationship is still pretty new, but we should watch that space. Knowing Biden, he will likely himself have a mixture of tough talk for his Republican opponents while offering some sort of unity agenda ideas that he hopes could rally moderate Republicans. There are a considerable number of moderate Republicans as well we shouldn't forget in the House.

On substance, oh yeah, there will be substance. Biden will certainly talk about the need to raise the debt limit. I don't expect a lot of scare language there because he doesn't want to spook the markets and there's still several months before the crisis really hits. He's going to talk about how they've launched infrastructure projects as a sign of the good that government spending can do and his argument for continuing social spending. He will press again definitely for gun control after the most recent horrifying shootings in California. How he handles the question of police reform after the horror of the Tyre Nichols beating and death. I don't know. Certainly not going to call for defunding the police. He will make a very strong pitch once again for continued U.S. support in Ukraine. Biden is a famously voluble guy. His handlers have been really good at keeping that tendency under control since he became president. He spoke for sixty-one minutes last year. Bob, I now have a quiz for you. Can you guess which president gave the longest State of the Union and which the shortest?

MCMAHON:
I'm going to throw out, I have been a reader of Jim Lindsay's blog where these types of pieces of trivia are appearing in quizzes. I think the shortest might have been the first president, President Washington, something incredibly short. Maybe it was his first. But, maybe the longest was Bill Clinton?

ROBBINS:
You didn't even have to read the quiz. You just had to know Bill Clinton to know. Bob, you got them both right.

MCMAHON:
Yay.

ROBBINS:
Bill Clinton spoke for an hour and twenty-eight minutes, which gives you a sense of how voluble Biden is because it's not that much longer and the shortest, there was no timekeeper, so we don't know how long it went, but it was 1089 words for George Washington. Bob, you are an incredible student of such things and I congratulate you.

MCMAHON:
Well, Carla, thank you. And I am mindful of the new book by CFR President Richard Haass on the importance of civics and sort of Americans learning about their own democracy first. 

I wanted to ask one follow up to what you laid out there on we should watch for the speech, which is Ukraine. Much has been made about whether or not you're going to see a stiffening of support, meaning a more resistance of support for Ukraine, especially from House Republicans where there have been some rhetoric in that direction. Are we going to see any sort of overt displays on behalf of Ukraine and Ukraine's travails as well as Ukraine's struggle?

ROBBINS:
I think as you saw when Zelensky came and spoke to Congress, there's still an enormous amount of support for Ukraine there. If you look at the polling, I think Americans are still definitely there in support of it. You do have on the far-right of the party and somewhat on the far-left of the party, people who don't like to spend money on military aid and don't like to do anything internationally. Certainly for now, the support isn't wavering I think for the core of both parties, but I think it's something you're definitely going to have to watch. It's interesting when McCarthy during the campaign said, "No more blank checks," and then he got pummeled by that and he backed off. I think for now, but that doesn't mean you don't have to tend it. I expect that Biden will make a very strong case and will have to continue to make a very strong case.

MCMAHON:
It was about twenty years ago that then President George W. Bush coined the term axis of evil at a State of the Union address that created all sorts of response pro and con. It's in some ways still reverberating in terms of U.S. policies in the region that axis was Iran, North Korea, and Iraq, which some people said was kind of an awkward axis. Any sort of broader worldviews we should expect from President Biden as he channels the Ukraine struggle or other international efforts?

ROBBINS:
Well, I don't think he's moved very far off of his original view, which is this is a battle between democracy and autocracy. The Ukraine fight fits in perfectly with that. Biden is a traditional Cold War guy. That's what he grew up in and this is a world he understands really well. If we hear a lot about international affairs, which I don't expect we will hear it, I think framed in the democracy versus autocracy, but my bet is it's mainly going to be about domestic and with Ukraine getting the largest focus. Will there be a tweak on China? There may be well be a tweak on China, but I think it'll be mainly focused on Ukraine.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, I think you're right. Every year I'm mindful of the people like us who count the times foreign policy is referenced and it's usually very scant.

ROBBINS:
That's because we need to keep ourselves in business.

MCMAHON:
Well there's that too.

ROBBINS:
Bob, let's continue on to a meeting that may be only slightly more welcoming than what Biden can expect from the new GOP led house chamber. This weekend, Secretary of State Antony Blinken goes to Beijing to continue the conversation President Biden and President Xi started at last fall's G20 summit in Bali. What should we be looking for out of that meeting?

MCMAHON:
Well, first of all, in terms of the visiting list, it wasn't clear as we came into this podcast Carla, whether or not Blinken was going to meet with Xi Jinping. As you said, the Xi-Biden meeting has been much pointed to as a sign that the two countries can have if not cordial, then constructive person to person talks. We'll see what can come up in this visit. It's the first by a U.S. secretary of state since Mike Pompeo in 2018 and those were very tense times. The fact of the visit itself is important and so there'll be very careful sort of construction of wording around a whole host of issues. 

And just every day there are more reminders of why this will be an important but also a potentially very tense visit. Just today there was a lot of news about the U.S. and the Philippines reconstructing or engaging in a new deal for the U.S. use of Filipino bases. I think it's something along the order of eight or nine locations where U.S. forces can be stationed to some extent and that gives the U.S. a new perch in China's backyard and an area that China has allotted to itself as part of its territorial waters. Philippines is very concerned about this. It's a signal of how concerned generally China's neighbors are about its moves in the South China Sea area, but it's also a signal about why Taiwan remains an area of concern. Taiwan will be certainly referenced. Everybody will be watching very closely the way both countries refer to Taiwan. 

There'll be certainly talk about Ukraine. I think the administration is going to reinforce its talking points about not supporting Russia's war effort and looking for signs that China is not only not aiding Russia militarily, which it appears it has still not done, but not aiding it rhetorically. China's still, the official line has been very much pro-Russia. Official media very much tout the Moscow line about who's at fault here, namely the United States and NATO. It'll be interesting to see as we get close to the one year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine how China is positioning itself on that front.

There's the issue of the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act, the scaling back of technology trade to China that the U.S. is stage managing, it is rallying allies to limit high tech chips that China could use. It's a very much concern to China. China's rhetoric ahead of this visit has been very much about, "Let's stop this foolishness about competition and we're all going to work together." Certainly, for those who want to see the glasses half full, there are still many areas where the two countries have a lot going on.

On the media front, you will have the announcement, I think sometime this month of Marvel movies coming back into Chinese theaters. That's a big boost for Hollywood studios to get the Chinese public watching Marvel movies and if not others as well. There'll be discussion of other ways in which the two countries can be involved in trade. While there's been a lot of rhetoric about the U.S. clamping down on TikTok, the very popular Chinese firm run video platform, there's no real imminent scaling back of TikTok and there's just a great deal of trade between the two countries.

The decoupling issue is again for all the things that are going to be watched closely, Taiwan, Ukraine, decoupling is another area and we'll have to see whether the two sides are sending out language in which they agree to disagree on a whole host of fronts. Human rights is another area where there's just going to be, no, I don't think any shared sort of language between the two sides. The U.S. is very concerned about ongoing crackdown in Xinjiang. China is pursuing its crackdown against democracy forces in Hong Kong and so forth. A lot on the table. I think while the bar might have been low in the Biden-Xi meeting in Bali about what could be judged success, I think it's still fairly low in this meeting too.

ROBBINS:
I mean there are two ways I suppose of looking at this. One is in the wake of the Pelosi visit to Taiwan, there was just complete cutoff of contacts and even before that, very limited military to military contact, which is a very dangerous thing because there's always the potential, even if you don't want to have a conflict, of misreading signals. I'm a real believer that the more you're talking to each other, even if you're not agreeing and the more you have the potential for communication, the less chance at least for an unintentional conflict. That said, it always sounded really pollyannish to me when Tony Blinken goes around saying, "Well, we can really compete with the Chinese and even cut and choke them off on technology transfer issues on this, but we can still work with them on climate change." I don't think the Chinese see it that way.

I see the Chinese and I blame the Chinese for a lot and I understand why the administration sees them as shall we say, not particularly a force for good, but particularly this order that came out in October, which was banning the export of technology to make really advanced chips, that seems like a really major, major squeeze on the Chinese economy as well as the Chinese military. I was very skeptical, unilateral sanctions don't work. I was very skeptical that the administration could rally other countries to play. The Times reported several days ago that the Netherlands and Japan, major makers of technology that's essential for the production of advanced chips that they're going to sign on too. This is a massive squeeze on the Chinese economy and the future of the Chinese military. Hard to imagine that they're going to be feeling pretty good about this.

MCMAHON:
No, I think you've seized on one of the issues of really certainly from the Chinese perspective of central importance and it's interesting to watch the trajectory of China's international relations and global messaging since that announcement was made in October certainly would be overstating to say direct cause and effect because there were a lot of other things going on and China was grappling with its own really serious domestic COVID challenge. 

However, as we've talked about on this podcast before China's changed its messaging, it's wolf warrior diplomacy seems to have been suppressed and they're sending out a little bit more of a charm offensive in terms of their international messaging. In terms of their meetings. Xi Jinping himself has traveled to a number of places, a high level economic official traveled to Davos to deliver messages that China was back. There have been softer messages delivered even in Washington.

I think China wants to get back into a place where it can somehow navigate some sort of constructive relationship with the U.S. that they hope I would think would soften the tech restrictions that you mentioned because they are a great deal of concern even while they are going to try to ramp up their own ability to develop such technology and work around the restrictions, whether it's finding other countries that could help in the making of these chips or not. It's not clear Carla, but that is going to be an area of central concern. I think it's going to be an area to watch really closely in terms of what's said in public on that in the meetings that Blinken has and then what is said in the kind of official readouts.

The only thing I would mention is you mentioned the Nancy Pelosi visit to Taiwan, which was a very extremely tense moment last year between the two countries. Another thing to watch this year are a couple of other potential visits. One is Speaker McCarthy could be expected to go to Taiwan in the spring and the Republican led House has already signaled it's going to continue really tough language on China. The degree to which China recognizes the house and Congress being separate from the Biden administration is going to be very interesting. Then also Xi himself is due to have a visit with Vladimir Putin sometime this Spring. That is also going to be very worth watching. Two big visits and then the CHIPS Act and tech controls are I think really central.

ROBBINS:
Well, McCarthy couldn't possibly pass up the chance to be as... Nancy did it, he's going to have to do it.

MCMAHON:
Again the rhetoric that we saw coming into this new Congress, it is actually an area in which in terms of China policy, which you have a lot of crossover support between Republicans and Democrats. Yeah, it's that question of whether or not the U.S. is a monolith on China, whether there can be nuances. Carla, I'm going to shift to another important player in world politics, which is the European Union. On Sunday, the EU's ban on all Russian petroleum product is supposed to take effect. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the EU and other Western allies have carried out sanctions on a number of fronts against the Kremlin. President Vladimir Putin has not given up his campaign in Ukraine in fact has doubled down in some areas including attacks on civilian infrastructure and as well as in some cases as we've seen, civilian housing. Will this new EU ban curb Russia's attacks or change its tact?

ROBBINS:
We don't know the politics inside the Russian security services, but odds are Putin has decided that not giving in on Ukraine is far less costly for him than showing any weakness and giving in. No, I do not expect these sanctions to have any effect on him at all, unfortunately. He still appears persuaded that he can either freeze or starve the Ukrainians or batter them into submission even though there is certainly no sign of that. These people are incredibly brave and he seems persuaded that Ukraine's backers in the U.S. and Europe will waiver in their support. We talked about that. There's no sign so far of that from the American public. It's true that we in the West have a notoriously short attention span but so far the alliance is holding together and the most recent test of that was the way the U.S. and Poland and Spain and others overcame German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's resistance to providing Leopard 2 tanks. Of course, Biden had to overcome his own resistance, which he does again and again and ante up thirty-one Abrams tanks, which may or may not eventually get there. 

It's extraordinary the way NATO is holding together on this. For that, you got to give a lot of credit to Putin's, as you said, his own barbarism for keeping Europe focused on what really matters along with the courage of the Ukrainians and some deft alliance management by the Americans. As for the oil sanctions themself, the most recent EU sanctions include a prohibition on the purchase of seaborne crude oil and diesel products. The restrictions on crude went into effect in the beginning of December. Next week, the restrictions on diesel and other petroleum products go into effect and I think they're going to cover nearly 90 percent of Russian oil imports to Europe. There's a few countries that are let off the hook here.

We also have to keep in mind that there's the G7 seven oil price cap, which is going into effect the reason they put the cap into place. I think unfortunately this is going to, we're going to find this out for the rest of us, it quickly became clear that Russia had no problem finding other purchasers for its oil. Even with discount prices and the Indians and Chinese were very good at bargaining, Moscow was still making a very tidy bundle as global oil prices spiraled. The idea of the price cap, which I think in many ways is supposed to be significant, allows Russia to sell its oil using Western shipping, insurance, and financing if the price does not go over $60 a barrel. 

We have seen Bob, that Russian oil is selling about nearly 40 percent less on the international market than other oil. But that's the reported price. There's a lot of suggestions that the Indians and Chinese aren't telling the truth about what they're paying for it and what we know more than anything else up until now that all of the squeeze that has taken place on paper isn't having much of an effect on the Russian economy. The economy shrunk by 3.5 percent last year and right now the IMF is predicting a 0.3 percent growth for this year. And we're also seeing that Russia's smuggling in consumer goods through compliant neighbors. In the longer run, their economy's going to unravel because they are going to struggle to have access to high-tech goods. A lot of very sophisticated people are leaving the country, but Putin doesn't seem to care about the long run he seems focused on right now. Right now they are not suffering anywhere near as much as they should be given what's happening.

MCMAHON:
We're looking at, as you indicate Carla, more of a symbolic gesture from the EU then in terms of the impact, although it's still, when you think about even a year ago how much petroleum type products the EU was getting from Russia was quite a bit, it's still a big step.

ROBBINS:
Well, I don't think it's symbolic because I mean they really have cut themselves off and they, it's certainly not symbolic for them. I mean they've had to weather... They're really decoupling their energy sources from Russia and that's going to change things in the long run in an enormous way. They managed to get through the winter or are getting through the winter in a pretty extraordinary way without the Russians. That's a massive change in their whole energy. It's just that oil is fungible and there's a global oil market and the Indians in the Chinese are major consumers and they've been perfectly willing to have play with the Russians and they're going to continue to play and the Russians are getting by just fine. The other thing about sanctioning a country that's an autocracy is that even if people in Russia feel the squeeze and there are complaints that the goods that they're getting are not as good as the goods that they had before, is that Putin still eating steak. And I'm sure that Putin still has really nice electronics and that's always been a limitation of sanctions as well.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, it's a tool, but it's seldom the tool even as we've seen with North Korea as well, a country far lower down the rung of countries in terms of GDP and capabilities than Russia is. And yet North Korea plows ahead with its nuclear program and so forth. It's a good point, Carla.

ROBBINS:
The thing I'm worried about with this, Bob, is that in many ways I think the Europeans are experiencing the oil squeeze more than the Russians are so far, which makes it once again extraordinary how much the alliance is holding together. If this conflict stretches on, the Russians will feel it a lot more than they have so far, but right now they're doing a lot better than we expected.

MCMAHON:
And we're also seeing a scramble on the European side to really ramp up a program EU wide program for alternative energy and their... that's an area where they've actually have some bit of tensions with the U.S. over the Inflation Reduction Act and its support for alternative energies. It does seem like it's propelled Europe into focusing on alternatives a lot quicker than they were even planning to.

ROBBINS:
One salutary development from a very sad, sad, tragic situation. 

More tragedy, Bob. I think it's time to discuss our audience figure of the week which listeners can vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at CFR_org's Instagram story. This week, Bob, our audience selected an especially grim one, "Death Toll At Ninety-Five in Pakistan Suicide Bombing." Can you explain more?

MCMAHON:
Yes, Carla and yes, sadly first of all, the death toll has exceeded ninety-five and is over 100 now. The number injured is over 200. It has been widely reported this is the worst attack of its type in Pakistan in about a decade, in Peshawar, an area that has known its share of violence and going back to the period when it was a staging ground for forces going into to fight in Afghanistan, in those days the anti-Soviet effort in Afghanistan. Now it's of a different sort and it's yet another blow for Pakistan, a country that has been facing body blows left and right. We had just featured Pakistan as a figure the week in terms of its massive electricity outage, which was a sign of its crumbling infrastructure and other problems. Now, some are suspecting that the country has, because of its major economic problems, has kept its eye a little bit less focused and it should be on the terror threats.

In this case it was a mosque that was actually located in a police compound. The people in the mosque were primarily police in some cases with family. It's a highly fortified zone and yet someone disguised with some sort of a police disguise was able to infiltrate that, a suicide bomber. Detonated an enormous amount of explosives. The aftermath photos or just show the scale of and the power of the explosion. It really traumatized a city that thought had moved on a little bit from that type of violence. Certainly not moving on from its kind of rough and tumble nature, but it's fresh worries. Now, there have been reports that the sort of official Pakistani Taliban, which by the way is separate from the Afghan Taliban now leading that country, that the official Pakistan Taliban had disavowed any kind of connection with this attack, although there were also reports that there was a subsection of that some sort of splinter group from the Pakistan Taliban did claim a responsibility. It's not clear yet whether those lines are ever going to be clarified. 

It does raise this specter that again though of this militant group that is very potent. And then in an irony is just like the Afghan Taliban was able to endure for years based in Pakistan and launch attacks into Afghanistan at the time occupied by U.S. forces. Now you have the Pakistani Taliban based largely in Afghanistan plotting attacks and launching them into Pakistan. And it also points out that there are still kind of rough relations between the Pakistani government and the new Taliban leadership in Afghanistan. That's certainly something that is going to get new attention. We'll see how productive that can be. Again, it points to the real difficulties in just governance in parts of Pakistan and it's northwestern and western region is particularly has been a tough area to govern in previous decades. Now it just shine's light again on this and whether or not there will be a major security crackdown and what that might spur in terms of further reprisals.

ROBBINS:
This is a country with nuclear weapons.

MCMAHON:
On top of it, there is the abiding concern that somehow its nuclear weapons might slip into the wrong hands and groups that would not have any kind of hesitancy to use them. That raises all sorts of serious concerns. Although Pakistani officials and officials in charge of the nuclear program insist that they are under control, it's hard not to sort of draw those connections and raise concerns as well in that area.

ROBBINS:
Well I think one of the lessons here, the Pakistani always thought that they were being very clever because they were refocusing, focusing their terrorists on Afghanistan and playing all sides and getting money from us and all of that. These things always come back to bite you, which is really terrifying. There's been reporting that they've been reaching out to the Taliban government and hoping that they can get things under control, but also reporting that the Taliban doesn't seem particularly interested in helping the Pakistanis.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, exactly. This Taliban government in Afghanistan has been confounding and frustrating for so many reasons, for its own kind of ignorance of the needs of its own people, especially its women and girls. This is just an indication of how this has regional implications as well. Certainly Pakistan is going to be bearing a lot of this instability. It's a border that's, again, these are largely Pashtun tribal lands that straddle the border on both sides of the country. These are porous borders. It's a question of whether or not Pakistan has the ability to control that in any way, whether or not it enlists any sort of other outside aid to help in that regard because a broader, unstable region is going to be trouble for not just Pakistan and Afghanistan, but other countries too. 

That's our look at the turbulent world next week. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on. German Chancellor Scholz meets with Italian Prime Minister Meloni in Berlin. Ecuador votes on a constitutional referendum.  And, UN Secretary-General Guterres outlines his priorities for 2023 to the UN General Assembly.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast and leave us a review while you're at it. We appreciate the feedback. Certainly I need the feedback since I'm new to this game. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation is listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on cfr.org. Please also note that opinions expressed on the world next week are solely those of the hosts or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

Today's program was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks to Sinet Adous for her research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Miguel Herrero and licensed under Creative Commons. This is Carla Robbins saying, so long.

MCMAHON:
This is Bob McMahon saying goodbye and be careful out there.