Ben Harnwell and Michael Sobolik join us in the War Room to talk about artificial intelligence, the CCP, and geopolitics with a special guest. This episode is brought to you by Sacred Human Health and JustGiving.
00:08:30.360That DOJ announcement was saying in loud, bright technicolor that there are smuggling attempts from Chinese agents
00:08:39.660to get these highly advanced AI chips that are controlled and banned from being exported to China.
00:08:48.000And it underscores, I think, some of the dishonesty coming from industry, from NVIDIA in particular,
00:08:55.720this is an issue that companies in China are trying to get the latest and the best technology that we have
00:09:04.140because they can't make it themselves.
00:09:07.020And whenever you – that side-by-side was so striking, Steve.
00:09:11.300It was striking because it was almost an indictment against the very decision that Trump got terrible advice on just a few minutes ago.
00:09:20.940And I think he should be really upset at the people around him because they are not guiding or directing the policy for the country well at the moment.
00:09:29.560How can you also argue both sides of this, that we need no restraints whatsoever, turn over the labs,
00:09:40.020you know, you've got more regulations if you want to open a nail salon on Capitol Hill than you have against the Frontier Labs.
00:09:47.960At the same time, we are providing the entire ecosystem, not just the chips but also training and capital
00:09:54.380and know-how for the Chinese Communist Party to be even close to being competitive on this, sir.
00:10:02.000Yeah, I think if you step back, there are two things with U.S. policy that matter at the same time.
00:10:08.040Number one, we want – we should want our companies and the American tech stack to dominate the world.
00:10:15.220That should be in America's interest because we would rather have American technology be dominant
00:10:21.500as opposed to technology that's controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
00:10:24.720However, there is another thing that matters equally as much, which is we need to make sure
00:10:30.320that only our friends, our allies, and aligned countries with the United States get this technology
00:10:38.280because this AI wave is going to crest across the whole world,
00:10:43.460and whoever has access to it will bend it to their interests.
00:10:48.080And we do not want a Leninist state like the Chinese Communist Party using American technology
00:13:32.340We needed a leader to get us out of that muck and stop engaging a Leninist regime economically because they were never going to change politically.
00:13:41.420But I think it is abundantly clear at this point that you have commercial interests in America that are doing what they, I guess, should be doing, which is maximize their revenue streams, profit margins, and their shareholder values.
00:13:59.280But it's the jobs of elected policymakers and their staff and their advisors to weigh those commercial concerns with security concerns.
00:14:09.100This is what it means to defend the national interest.
00:14:11.360And nothing should ever trump the safety and security of the American people.
00:14:16.360So when you have Jensen Huang making this case to members on Capitol Hill saying that that legislation from Senator Banks, Chairman Mast, and others was going to be a terrible thing for the United States economically or competitively, that's not really true.
00:14:33.180It would have been less than ideal for NVIDIA, but that's an entirely separate conversation.
00:14:38.820It's an America first proposal quintessentially to say that U.S. companies should get these critical chips before Chinese companies.
00:14:48.280And maybe for just a second, let's talk about why.
00:14:51.320When we talk about these chips, the best analogy that I've come across out there, think about these chips with the AI revolution as uranium with the nuclear revolution in the previous century.
00:15:02.500Just as uranium, plutonium and the ability to have nuclear power changed the game in every single way, these chips are the upstream component that are powering and enabling the AI revolution.
00:15:17.780If we allow NVIDIA to sell these very capable chips to a foreign adversary, chips that they themselves cannot design or build for the next two years or so, we're not only helping China run faster, that's essentially a redux of Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, the very deal that Trump got us out of because it was a bad deal.
00:15:41.560And this is what's so mind-boggling about this.
00:15:45.780Donald Trump hates weakness, as he should, but the people around him are pushing him into a weak policy.
00:15:57.640I want to go back for a second and put this – you framed it, I think, great, because we've had the framing of Graham Allison in the team about the Thucydides trap.
00:16:07.000When you wrote your book, you kind of turned on your head.
00:16:09.500The analogy we've got to look for is what happened between the Russian Empire and the British Empire in the 19th century, the great game, right, which was really about India and a warm water port.
00:16:19.540And you've got to look at it in the context of that.
00:16:22.060How does this rate – first of all, before we get to the specifics of what just happened in the last 72 hours, the whole fight for technological supremacy, right?
00:16:31.560Because the Chinese have had a history, like in 2019, when they tore up the two-year deal that Lighthizer and Navarro negotiated for President Trump, the big deal.
00:16:39.520They tore it up in our face and said – made a statement.
00:16:42.400We want to decouple from Western technology.
00:16:45.720We don't want the foreign devils to control us.
00:16:48.660Technology has been at the centerpiece of the new great game.
00:16:52.880Walk us through your framing of this and why it's important to understand it this way than to fall into kind of Graham Allison's Thucydides trap.
00:17:02.000The Thucydides trap framework is an enticing one because it makes everything very simple of a rising power, a declining power, and that makes the probability of war higher and more dangerous.
00:17:19.040Sure, that is true, but I think it misses the nuance of what the Chinese Communist Party as a regime is doing.
00:17:28.560So the reason I honed in on the great game, and I think it's apt and relevant, is because China is more than just this ascendant power that is getting wealthier and stronger.
00:17:40.440It is now leveraging that power all around the world as China did during its imperial era because it wants what the United States has right now.
00:17:51.560Xi Jinping wants the People's Republic of China to be the most powerful country on the face of the planet.
00:17:58.560And he wants this, not for the same reasons that Americans have accepted this position of power.
00:18:04.040Xi Jinping wants this because the Chinese Communist Party is a paranoid single-party dictatorship, and they cannot rest secure until every single square inch of the globe is something that they can control or channel for their own purposes.
00:18:21.480It's why they leverage TikTok inside of the United States.
00:18:25.960It's why they have secret police stations inside of the United States.
00:18:30.400It is why they cultivate friends and billionaires in high places throughout the United States to launder their own interests through.
00:18:37.280They are looking to weaken our own system of government and the system of governments of our allies and closest friends around the world because they are playing a global game.
00:18:47.020And technology helps them do this because it gives them eyes and ears everywhere.
00:18:52.500This is why you cannot separate technology from ideology.
00:18:57.760Who you are and what kind of regime you are is going to inform what you use technology for and what ends you try to bend it toward.
00:19:08.000And the Chinese Communist Party has been abundantly clear.
00:19:10.540They want DNA samples from every single human on the face of the planet.
00:19:15.680And we know that the People's Liberation Army is using biotechnology for bioengineered weapons along, among others, racial lines.
00:19:25.340This is very dangerous stuff that it is not clear to me that we're taking adequately seriously.
00:19:32.820And it's also why you cannot divorce the AI revolution from the next generation of warfare.
00:19:40.540This is going to be at the epicenter of great nation conflict.
00:19:45.220And if we unilaterally cede all of some of our best chips to an adversary, we are no better than Bill Clinton was in the 1990s when he pushed for permanent normal trade relations with China.
00:20:14.040And then Trump came in and corrected it.
00:20:15.640But now the people around him are pushing him to recreate and repeat the exact same mistake that Bill Clinton and many other politicians at that time made.
00:20:26.420And to believe this Pollyannish notion that there are no tradeoffs, that we can have it all, we can have our tech companies be wealthy and we can be secure and they can sell to whoever they want and maximize their own private interests, that is not how the world works.
00:20:41.280And if we don't accept that, we will be in for a rude awakening.
00:20:46.920You know, Pete Hex put this video out this morning about AI on the battlefield.
00:20:50.680I said, man, between the Justice Department announcing the industrial sabotage, industrial espionage to black market these chips out of here.
00:21:00.260And Pete saying, hey, we're turning the entire military over.
00:21:04.100Every military individual is going to have an AI agent on the battlefield.
00:21:39.920The Chinese Communist Party has been deceiving Americans for almost 100 years.
00:21:46.500If you go back to the 1930s and the 1940s when Mao was trying to make the CCP an actual thing and not just this ragtag party on the run,
00:21:57.120one of the reasons they won the Civil War in China after kicking Imperial Japan out was by convincing the Americans that they were a proto-democracy party.
00:22:08.060And they just needed resources and help to become stronger and then they would democratize.
00:22:14.660That this is the very thing that we assumed would happen at the turn of the 20th century with China was the same lie that Mao told us in the 30s.
00:22:27.040That we miss this continuously and still fall for the same trick over and over and over again not only speaks to how good the Chinese Communist Party is at disinformation and what they would call united front work,
00:22:42.880but I think it also speaks to this streak of idealism in American strategic culture.
00:22:50.680Now, idealism can be a good thing if it keeps you tethered to your core principles about who we are.
00:22:58.840But if the idealism becomes myopic and if it blinds you from seeing reality,
00:23:05.280then you are aiding and falling into the traps that your adversaries are laying for you.
00:23:12.880So when Jensen Huang says it does not matter who wins the AI race,
00:23:19.220that's a very convenient talking point for NVIDIA's bottom line,
00:23:23.900but it is completely divorced from reality because we're in a Cold War with Beijing
00:23:30.780and there's going to be a winner and there's going to be a loser.
00:33:20.120I give Ukraine a lot of, a lot of, I give the people of Ukraine and the military of Ukraine tremendous credit for the, you know, bravery and for the fighting and all of that.
00:33:29.060But, you know, at some point, a size will win generally.
00:36:46.400And she said, hey, I think that's optimistic.
00:36:48.900She wrote a book saying we got 10 years.
00:36:50.800The West, particularly Western Europe, has got 10 years.
00:36:53.840Harnwell, put in context of your reporting and coverage and observations and analytics what the president just said there vis-a-vis Europe overall, the future of it, the leaders of it, and how it particularly applies to this debacle in the Ukraine, sir.
00:37:09.960Well, it's vintage Donald Trump, right?
00:37:16.580This interview with Politico on the back of the national security strategy.
00:38:42.200Countries, for themselves, need to decide who comes in.
00:38:46.060And when they refuse entry, those people can't then just come in illegally and set themselves up with driving licenses, put their kids through school and all the rest of it.
00:38:56.840So that is a throwdown to the European Commission on the immigration point, which is so important.
00:39:04.880Look, I've got something, I sent it through to Denver.
00:39:07.740If they have it, I'd be very grateful if they just pushed this up.
00:39:11.640This was from the newspapers yesterday.
00:39:15.820No, it's the Daily Telegraph thing I'm going to go for.
00:39:18.760Just to give an illustration of how bad things are, there was a primary school teacher who was sacked, fired, that is to say, to use the US vernacular.
00:39:31.580He was fired because he told a school, a child, that this was a Christian country.
00:39:39.680The police were called in and opened up an investigation on the basis of it being hate crime, right?
00:39:51.860I put out on Getter yesterday this story about a former Royal Marine who was banned from working with children and prohibited from coaching his daughter's football team
00:40:04.920because a couple of years ago he put out on Facebook a rather spicy video against the invasion.
00:40:15.320And that again opened up a police inquiry with the potential, the police said that that was child abuse, so he's not allowed to work with children.
00:40:26.480That is what's going on on the front line of the UK.
00:40:29.460And America has an extremely, especially uniquely under this administration, under President Trump's leadership, America has a role it can play.
00:40:41.820If there is one thing our sociopathic overlords hate, Steve, it's being called out on these things.
00:40:50.360And the reason they hate being called out on these things, and I cite, for example, because it was pretty good, was J.D. Vance's speech to the Munich Security Conference,
00:41:03.160when he actually cited these specific types of things, mentioned names, mentioned the countries.
00:41:09.220The reason why that really doesn't go down well here in the European capitals is because our elites here, our sociopathic overlords,
00:41:19.480they know they don't have the people with them, right?
00:41:22.160They know that they are hated and detested by the people, right?
00:41:26.480They can see the demographic electoral changes at work,
00:41:30.680and they see the whole swathe of people leaving the centre ground of political politics and moving in two directions.
00:41:40.300Some to the far left, many, many more to what was traditionally called the far right,
00:41:45.340which is now becoming a mainstream proposition.
00:41:49.520Our leaders here in Europe, Steve, they see this taking place.
00:41:53.080And when they imprison people for their spicy social media posts,
00:41:59.660they know the anger that is rippling across the country,
00:42:02.840and they know that pretty soon they're not going to be able to keep it under control.
00:42:08.600And they're one salvation, Steve, they're one remaining shtick,
00:42:13.240because the whole inevitability of their movement basically exploded definitively
00:42:19.660when President Trump descended the golden escalator.
00:42:24.420And the inevitability of their regime and their various structures blew up that,
00:42:31.960and they've never been able to hold that together.
00:42:33.920You know, this idea that the liberal progressive superstructure was inevitable.