German Chancellor Scholz Visits Washington, China’s Congress Convenes, Cambodian Opposition Leader On Trial, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, Chancellor Olaf Scholz visits Washington. China holds its two sessions, the main political event of the year. And, a leading Cambodian opposition figure faces his trees in trial verdict. It's March 2nd, 2023 and time for The World Next Week. I'm Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Ann Robbins.

MCMAHON:
Carla, let's kick it off right here in Washington, DC where German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will meet with President Joe Biden at the White House. They are expected to discuss U.S.-German cooperation on a range of security issues. Front and center obviously is the Ukraine question, NATO support and German support among other things, as well as the shared challenges posed by China, which is increasingly entering the conversation between these two countries. What else should we be looking for?

ROBBINS:
So Bob, first of all, have you been invited? No, I'm kidding. This is the chancellor's second White House visit. He came to DC in early February of last year, soon after he was elected. And it was just two and a half weeks before the invasion of Ukraine began. And at the time there were a lot of questions about how reliable an ally Germany was really going to be if Russian tanks crossed the border. And since then, Scholz has defied the skeptics, even if it has taken some really serious care and feeding to get them there. 

The Germans have shown a remarkable willingness to accept economic pain. Scholz suspended the $11 billion Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project despite the warnings of disaster from his own business community. And while it was really hard for a lot of European countries to wean themselves from Russian energy, it's been particularly costly for Germany, which imported about 55 percent of its gas from Russia and more than a third of its oil. I remember we were talking about it, the Germans, it looked like they were going to have a very cold and dark winter and it was milder than everyone expected. But the government did an extraordinary job scrambling, including building a floating liquified national gas terminal for imports in just under ten months. 

German defense spending could be a very scratchy topic, although I don't expect any disagreements are going to take place in public. Until Ukraine, the Germans were the ultimate free riders, and Scholz started off really strong. This is your favorite word, Bob, I'm going to let you say it. Three days after the invasion, Scholz came out and said that Germany was at a ... Will you say the word Bob?

MCMAHON:
Zeitenwende.

ROBBINS:
Right, a turning point in German military and foreign policy. And he pledged to create a special fund of a hundred billion euros around double what Germany was spending on annual defense. His follow through has been a lot slower and I suspect this is going to come up, although Biden will do it very softly, and he's been frankly ambivalent. The government by its own account has committed about 30 billion of euros to defense spending, but it hasn't spent a Pfennig. Is that what they have instead of pennies? Actually they live with Euros.

MCMAHON:
They now live at Euros. So it's Euro cents now.

ROBBINS:
Right.

MCMAHON:
Yes.

ROBBINS:
Right. Defense procurement is a slow process and one doesn't expect them to spend all of that money very quickly. But there's been a lot of complaints on both sides of the Atlantic that he is moving very, very slowly on this. And even with the additional money, Germany is still going to come up short and below NATO's 2 percent of GDP military spending target, even though he committed to doing that.

And it's performance on arming Ukraine is certainly going to come up. He's been similarly ambivalent on that. Germany's been a major supplier of weapons. They've sent Howitzers, stingers, fighting vehicles, and an air defense system. But if Biden has been accused of gradualism, he's been far ahead of Scholz who's had to be cajoled, not bullied, but certainly shamed at times. You remember that social media campaign "Free the Leopards" to get him to send the tanks there. So it hasn't been an easy thing, but I think you will hear in public that Biden's very happy with Scholz and in private there's going to be more than a little bit of goading to keep moving ahead. 

On China, well, on China, while the Biden administration was issuing new rules barring the sale to Chinese companies of equipment that can make advanced semiconductors, Scholz was making his first trip to Beijing as chancellor with a large delegation of German business leaders. And the Chinese were so happy to see him there that they didn't even put him through a COVID quarantine. And there were a lot of people who were wondering the German should have learned their lessons about their overdependence on Russia. And they seem to not have learned that because they seem to be very happy to, shall we say, develop a very deep relationship with China. So I think all of those things are going to come up.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. Two huge questions and two big issues. And you're absolutely right. Germany is continuing to gradually move through its change. It is a change though. It's a clear perceptible one. And we should note also that Scholz has a coalition that's unlike any we'll certainly see in this country anytime soon, which involves Social Democrats, Greens, and basically the equivalent of libertarians, who are leading the country, that's what emerged from the last elections there. And the Greens have been out in front actually of any of them in terms of speaking out on why it's important and articulating why it's important to support Ukraine.

And I think you're going to continue to see this debate going on within Germany about the values, and it extends to China as well. Germany speaks out on human rights often even as it wrestles with, I'll use another German term, "Geschäft ist Geschäft," which is business is business, a cynical way of referencing that. Well, all these other things are important, but at the end of the day we've got to do business. Germany does business very well. It's a gigantic economy, extremely important not just to China but to Russia, to the U.S. And so I think we're going to be seeing the crux of that play out in this meeting between Biden and Scholz.

ROBBINS:
So we were talking a few weeks ago about when were they going to come out with their national security strategy. One of the reasons why it's been so delayed is precisely because he has this complex coalition and there's been a lot of turf war going on. Were they going to have a national security council? Was it going to sit in the chancellery under the SPD with Scholz? Was it going to be shared between that and the Greens who control the foreign ministry? But the delay over that has also delayed their China strategy and a debate over how far and how hard line they're going to go on China, which is certainly something they want to discuss.

And this business is business thing is certainly going to come up as well in his discussions with Biden because there's a considerable neuralgia between the Germans and more generally between the EU and the United States as what they see as us protectionism over these billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks in the Inflation Reduction Act and the climate thing. And they're particularly concerned about the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit, which in the legislation is limited to cars built in North America. And we know that Germans like to build their cars. So I'm sure that that too will come up. Whether that spills out in public, that's probably more likely to be discussed in public than any criticism of Germany on its Zeitenwende.

MCMAHON:
I'm really glad you brought that up, Carla, because it's actually been overlooked a little bit recently, but it's a very big issue. And yeah, the Germans build a lot of cars, they actually build a lot them in the United States. There's huge plants in places like South Carolina and I believe Alabama among others. And I think you're going to see some more discussion and maybe Scholz and his delegation taking the temperature of how Washington is right now because it is very much in a industrial policy mode of building here and shoring up the American manufacturing base and so forth. And Germany wants a piece of that and as a longtime ally, they don't want to be shunted aside. So it's going to be a very interesting dynamic as part of this meeting plays out.

ROBBINS:
Bob, let's delve more deeply into China. This weekend, China's National People's Congress will open with its annual plenary session. There are going to be 3000 members that are going to attend. And it was big news last October when China's twice a decade party congress ratified Xi Jinping's third term. What are we going to be watching for from this meeting?

MCMAHON:
So even though it's often branded the rubber stamp legislature, it is still significant in what it chooses to do. And it's important to point out that there's two aspects here. One is the ongoing consolidation of power by Xi Jinping and then what that power looks like in terms of how he's wielding it to change policy. And I think we've seen Xi himself pointing to areas of what he sees as consolidation that are needed for China. He's particularly laid out just a few days ago the strengthening of what he called unified leadership over scientific and technological institutions. And some of that is, I believe we'll see how this plays out, but I think some of this is a direct response to the U.S. move to remove certain technologies from availability for China. Really high-tech chips that China had been making use of and had been helping to drive China's innovation are now off limits and it really has rattled Chinese leadership and they want to show more of a homegrown capability in this area. So I think you're going to see some emphasis on that. 

It will be the ongoing movement of what are known as Xi loyalists. So people who are not just good at what they do and technocrat, but people who have overtly shown loyalty towards Xi taking over positions, which some people say could be hurting. China could be self-defeating because they aren't necessarily the most capable people. So we'll have to see what names officially emerge and then take stock at that point. But it's a reason why the China watchers often look to these meetings and especially now following the fall congress of the party that you mentioned, now we have the National People's Congress and the two sessions where there's a major policymaking body that gets together and sets the template for what we're going to see in the year ahead for China. So lots to watch and China is getting evermore attention certainly in the U.S.

ROBBINS:
So I'm glad you brought that up, because this past week the new bipartisan house Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, love the title held its first hearing in primetime. What did we learn from that meeting and how was that received in China and do you think we're going to hear some declarations about the United States from this meeting coming up?

MCMAHON:
Oh, I think we should expect that from China. We've already heard from China's foreign ministry among other places that they are getting increasingly alarmed at what they call us scaremongering. And we are seeing from the U.S. it has been pointed out, and it's true, a bipartisan effort to raise the spotlight on China's activities around the world and to provide countermeasures where necessary. I think what's also important to note though, at least at this point, is that the two main U.S. parties, the Republicans and Democrats are focusing on different things.

Yes, they are making common cause and serving in a bipartisan fashion on this new committee. Republicans are more about what they continue to cite as the existential threat posed by China, whether it's on security, whether it's on Chinese tech infiltrating U.S. smartphones through TikTok and other devices, whether it's its increasingly expansionist policy in its near neighborhood in South China Sea and so forth.

All of those things are seen as major grave threats by the Republican Party, and it would like to counter them with a rigor and an international rigor and calling out this Chinese behavior in a more consistent way. So much so that they would like U.S. businesses to curtail their business with China in a drastic way. Democrats are saying some similar things, but they're more like, "Let's get our own house in order here in terms of being more competitive and take on China as a competitor and let's also strengthen our democracy." Some pointed out that the January 6th events in which demonstrators rioted and attacked the U.S. capitol was a gift to China showing how unstable the U.S. is and why China's model is one that's more worthy of emulating. So within this common front, there is a bit of division on the U.S. side, but there is also this unity that China is now front and center and seen as a threat, even as the U.S. continues to spend a good amount of money on supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia.

ROBBINS:
So I was intrigued by the fact that they decided to do this as a primetime hearing, and I think in part because of the January 6th hearings, I suspect, I didn't see what the numbers were in primetime, I don't think it grabbed anywhere near the level of attention. But I have a certain concern that as much as I would love to see bipartisan action and foreign policy that there is this potential for stampede and for creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of conflict. Did you get that feeling from this hearing or do you think that there is a certain potential for moderation there in part because it was a bipartisan hearing?

MCMAHON:
Yeah, I think that is an area of concern. I think the value of having it as a bipartisan effort is that maybe you have somewhat of a middle ground strain that takes maybe the most relevant bits from both parties and uses it to push policy that maybe this would result in a way that the country can get behind some policy towards China. So maybe not some radical shifting of rhetoric and actions that take on China as a security threat and saber rattle, but maybe continue to support U.S. efforts to maintain the free navigation of seas in South China Sea to push back against Chinese propaganda and Chinese efforts at misinformation, to be a more potent player in the arena without being an aggressor necessarily.

Now some of that is what China is saying is going to be the result of this, but it is striking when you look at the rhetoric coming out of different members of the committee so far, what they're raising and how they're saying China is across the board a grave threat to the U.S., I think we're going to need to continue to maintain a dialogue approach with China and even maintain business with China while also challenging it in many more ways than we've seen before.

ROBBINS:
So finally, one of the things that they did do in the hearing having learned, I think from the January 6th hearing, they even had their own use of video, which one of the videos was about how dispelling the myths about China, the suggestion that the Chinese really weren't communist and they had all these quotes from Xi. We're moving into a new 21st century way of communicating with the American public, including they're getting better at primetime production in Congress. It's a far cry from the old days of single camera C-SPAN.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, no, as far as that goes, I think the extent to which Americans can get engaged and what their elected representatives are doing is all to the better. We've been too siphoned off and siloed off in the way we consume information over the last six to eight years. So if these primetime events where people who are watching them and watching speakers from both parties and being able to judge for themselves what the information is, that's to the better. It's just, let's see how far this goes and whether or not there is a response by the administration that is seen as proportionate to China's real threats, but also where China is engaged where it should be engaged.

Because I think at the end of the day, even in the worst of the Soviet days, there were still contact with the Soviets. Obviously a far cry between U.S.-Soviet relations and U.S.-China relations. Just look at the trade front where it's still an enormous relationship, but we're moving in a very Cold War direction, Carla. 

Carla, I want to stay in Asia and move south to Cambodia. We're taping this on Thursday. So tomorrow, former Cambodian opposition leader Kem Sokha is going to receive a verdict for his treason trial. He was accused of conspiring with foreign entities to overthrow the Hun Sen government. Prime Minister Hun Sen has been in power nearly four decades now. Cambodia's Justice Ministry said this trial is not politically motivated.

ROBBINS:
Of course they said.

MCMAHON:
So Carla, tell us about the signal this verdict is going to send for Cambodia.

ROBBINS:
So Kem Sokha may not be a household name for our listeners. He was the founder of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights and was the highest ranking opposition member of Cambodia's parliament and the head of the Cambodian National Rescue Party in June of 2017 when the party made major gains in local elections. And three months later he was arrested and charged with colluding with the United States to overthrow the government of strongman Hun Sen. Cambodia's Supreme Court then outlawed his party allowing Hun Sen's ruling party to take every seat in the National Assembly in the 2018 general election. And the country has been essentially a one party state since then. They proceeded to then wipe out the CNRP with many of its members thrown into jail or forced into exile. 

There was enough international pressure that Kem Sokha was released from jail and then house arrest. And if you look at his Twitter feed, he's been receiving a parade of international visitors from Senator Ed Markey, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, EU Foreign Policy Chief Borrell, Secretary of State Tony Blinken this past August. And tomorrow, 5.5 years after his arrest, they're finally going to issue a verdict in this trial. The betting at this point, and one of course can never predict these things is the main goal of this prosecution is not to put him into jail forever, but we don't know, but is to keep him from returning to politics.

Cambodia's next general election is in July and Hun Sen is laying the groundwork for his son, Hun Manet, who is the Deputy Commander in Chief of the Cambodian Army, to eventually succeed him. And they've been doing a lot of other things to get ready for this election. They're choking off all public debate. Just two weeks ago on February 13th, they shut down one of the last remaining online news sites, the Voice of Democracy. So this is all about choking off public debate and making sure that that family stays in power.

MCMAHON:
And it seems Carla, like it's another grim sign for democracy or the vestiges of democracy in South and Southeast Asia at this point. Because if you look in the neighborhood, you've got Myanmar with a raging civil war and a two-year-old junta now, since the two years since the coup, you've got Thailand with a military-led group there. And it's just in every direction, seemingly democracy is on the run. Do we expect any stirrings of daylight in Cambodia or is this pretty much set in stone what we're going to hear tomorrow?

ROBBINS:
There has no sign. I'm not an expert on Cambodia. There has been no sign of particular. They seem to have wiped out this party. What I think is particularly interesting though is been the rather ambivalent response from the United States and the European Union. They've responded to this systematic repression over the last decade with a mixture of public denunciation, sanctions on corrupt business leaders, limiting of trade preferences and the closer they've gotten to China, military sanctions.

But so the U.S. has also gotten nervous as Hun Sen has turned more and more to China, especially after 2019 when it became aware of a secret agreement to upgrade a naval base on the Gulf of Thailand adjacent to the South China Sea in exchange for exclusive access to part of the facility. Cambodia denies there's any deal here, but Radio Free Asia had a report last month with satellite images, commercial satellite images showing major new construction underway at the base.

The U.S. has continued pressure, but it's also been welcoming Hun Sen back into the fold. He was in Washington during the special ASEAN Summit. There was on the family photo on the White House lawn and President Biden went to the ASEAN Summit in Phnom Penh when Cambodia was there. So as much as there's a denunciation of this turn to autocracy, the fact that if they're so cozy with China means that the United States is willing to talk to this strong man and will probably continue to talk to them, even if there's a rather disturbing outcome for tomorrow in this treason trial.

MCMAHON:
As you we're speaking Carla, I was just thinking again, one of these challenges for U.S. statecraft is really when to push either publicly, let's say against obvious repressive and autocratic moves and when to be silent and perhaps try to use back channels to be persuasive. But I think as you say, they're deciding for the moment to stay publicly cordial and constructive and potentially see some hope down the road. I don't know. It is worth noting that this is the leader the country's had pretty much since the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge nightmare days in the country. Cambodia certainly has moved beyond that period, but as a Chinese satellite state that is snuffing out any form of opposition, it doesn't bode well for what it's going to become forward.

ROBBINS:
Well, if they weren't so cozy with China, I suspect that the denunciations would be a lot more full-throated. So Bob, let's circle back to a topic we discussed last week, the Nigerian presidential election. On Tuesday, Bola Ahmed Tinubu from the ruling party was declared the winner. However, the political parties of Mr. Tinubu's two major rivals are charging that the election was rigged and are demanding that the results be canceled and the election redone. Are the charges legitimate and do you think we're going to see a rerun of the election?

MCMAHON:
Hard to say whether there's going to be anything like a rerun, but there certainly have been plenty of reports of irregularities and downright flaws and including glitches admitted by the country's independent National Electoral Commission. It was supposed to publish results from all the polling units in real time through a new electronic transmission system. But that didn't work to plan. A commission said it had quote-unquote "technical glitches" and that it was going to investigate any discrepancies between results. But at this point it's saying that any discrepancies or any glitches did not affect the overall result. Again, as you said, Mr. Bola Tinubu was declared the winner. He had 37 percent of the vote. Atiku Abubakar of the opposition PDP party had 29 percent. And Peter Obi of the Labor Party, who had gotten a lot of attention as a rare, viable third party candidate, he got 25 percent.

Obi has come out a little bit before this podcast, there were reports that he's going to challenge it in court. He has said that his party has won the election and they're going to prove it according to Nigerian law. He has twenty-one days from the day the results were announced to challenge the result in the country's highest appeals court. So we'll see how that process goes forward and what is revealed. There are some who are saying, "Look, even though there are flaws, this was carried out by this commission under a notoriously unwieldy country and system in a decent enough fashion that we should just go ahead and move forward with a new government and see if we can forge a country based on a little bit more of a shared stake in their democracy and so forth. That all sounds good when you're the winner. But for Obi, who had actually again, had surprised with the vigor of his results, I think he wanted to stake a claim here. So it's not sure where this is going to go. 

We should also note there was a very low turnout and some people said it was a vicious circle of delays and problems at various polling stations feeding this sense of a poorly run and sketchy election. So people just decided their vote wasn't going to be worth anything. That's the sentiment in some areas. Others had said, "Look, at the end of the day there was a critical mass of people who voted and Tinubu had a margin of victory, something like 1.8 million votes. And so let's go ahead." And so will the country hold together? Will the institutions hold and treat these charges seriously? We're going to have to see, it's going to be a test for Nigeria's electoral watchdogs. It's going to be a test for its courts and for its main candidates.

We don't want to lump Nigeria together with any other country, but we certainly would not like it to play out like things did in Kenya and not too long ago where there were challenges to elections and then violence broke out and particularly lethal violence. So we're hoping that doesn't happen and we're hoping that the country can set its affairs in order. So we might be back here talking in a couple weeks, Carla, about how things have turned out in the electoral appeal process in Nigeria.

ROBBINS:
I think one of the things that I find so disturbing and concerning is that the third party candidate was a youngin comparatively and had raised the expectations and the hopes, and we did see it turn out of younger people. And if they are alienated by this process and lose hope, that would be very sad and not great for the future of Nigeria. So we will see, we'll probably be back talking about this soon. 

So Bob, another election story to talk about. I think it's a time to pivot and 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, "A hundred thousand in Mexico protest election law changes." What are they protesting and why are they wearing pink?

MCMAHON:
All right, well pink, let's start with the color scheme first. The protestors in the main square of Mexico City, which is called the Zocalo, and for anybody who hasn't been there, it is an enormous square and by most accounts was packed to overflowing with protestors this past weekend. Many of the marchers wore white and pink, which is the color of the independent National Electoral Institute. And this is a important body. This is a body that many see as having helped the country move its way out of the toper and the difficulties of decades of one party rule under the Institutional Revolution Party, the PRI. But this institute requires funding and the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, wants to take away some of that funding, says it's overfunded, said some of that money is better used in other areas where people who have real needs need to be given some assistance.

AMLO has been raising a lot of concern among democracy watchdogs in the country and elsewhere for not just his rhetoric, but his moves like this in recent months. He retains a popularity though of roughly 60 percent according to the most recent polls that I have seen in reports. So he also cannot run for reelection in the 2024 national elections, so some see this as a move for him to put his followers in his faction into a driver's seat as new elections are set up. It's not clear whether or not these protests are going to continue, whether they're going to have legs and continue not only in Mexico City but elsewhere, but it is raising a lot of concern and Mexico's democracy should not be taken for granted. And as the country on Mexico's northern border, this is consequential for many, many reasons in the U.S.

ROBBINS:
Well, Mexicans have seen this movie before. They watch the PRI for decade after decade steal elections. I'm not saying that that's what AMLO is up to, but it's certainly doesn't smell real good.

MCMAHON:
No, and we mentioned the high court in Nigeria, Mexico's Supreme Court is being looked to potentially overturn the charges. I think the case is being brought to them. AMLO has, I believe, spoken out on occasion against the Supreme Court as well. We'll see how Mexico's institutions maintain independence and viability, not only the electoral body, but also the Supreme Court and how its own set of checks and balances are able to weather this. AMLO is a populist, he's popular and he tends to have a very good touch in terms of seizing on issues that he can get traction from. So it must be said, he has definitely played against leadership changes in the United States. He was effective in dealing with Donald Trump who had very strong both rhetoric and policies about the U.S.-Mexico border. And he has seemed to have handled relations with the Biden administration effectively so far. But we'll see how this plays out.

ROBBINS:
So the pro-worker AMLO wants to eliminate the majority of workers on the electoral board. I think that's one of the things they could be pushing back at.

MCMAHON:
That sounds like a tweet or something that would work nicely on social media, Carla. Well, that's our look at the ever turbulent world next week. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on. Millions celebrate Holi, the Indian Festival of Colors, International Women's Day is marked, and Estonians vote in a parliamentary election.

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. The publications mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on cfr.org. Please 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 adios.

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying auf wiedersehen.