ChinaTalk18 Dec 2025

Rahm Returns to Chat Trump and China: “He is the worst negotiator.”

Rahm Emanuel returns to ChinaTalk with a characteristically blunt assessment of U.S.-China relations, delivering an unsparing verdict on the first year of Donald Trump’s second term. We discuss: The “Fear Factor” in Asia: Why Japan and South Korea are ramping up defense spending not because of Trump’s strength, but because his unpredictability and isolationism have forced them to buy “insurance policies” against a U.S. exit, Corruption and “Own Goals”: How “draining the swamp” has turned into institutional degradation — and why the Trump family’s entanglement of personal business interests with foreign policy damages U.S. credibility and strategic leverage, Adversary, Not Competitor: Why the U.S. needs to stop viewing China as a strategic competitor and start treating it as a strategic adversary — one whose win-lose economic model is designed to hollow out global industrial bases, Education as National Security: Why tariffs are a distraction and the only real way to beat China is a massive domestic push for workforce training, AI and Inequality: Rahm’s evolving thinking on artificial intelligence — why he’s still learning and why a technology that boosts productivity but widens inequality is a political and social risk. Plus: prescient observations on Iran, why Ari Emanuel’s robot UFC idea might actually be sound policy, Rahm’s case that he’s now the real free-market capitalist in the room, and rapid-fire takes on J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and the 2028 Republican field. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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AGI Believers: Kevin Roose on the Race

Kevin Roose, formerly of the New York Times and Hard Fork, joins ChinaTalk to discuss AGI Chronicles, his new history of OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, and the people who believed in AGI long before it ...

8 Okt 1h 10min

Data is the Hard Part | Building AI Tools for the Military

Everyone wants AI that wins wars. Very few people want to collect, label, store, and test the data it runs on. Bharat Patel is currently Accenture’s AI and data lead for its defense portfolio, a form...

6 Okt 42min

WarTalk: AutoWarCom + Project Meridian

It's a new fiscal year with no new budget, and the Pentagon has a fresh batch of proposals. Two stand out: a four-star Autonomous Warfare Command, built to buy and field autonomous weapons fast, and P...

5 Okt 55min

Section 301 and the Spice Man who Sued Trump Over Them

In February, the Supreme Court ruled Trump's IEEPA tariffs illegal. So why is everyone still paying them? Because the administration rebuilt them: first under Section 122, then under Section 301, and ...

2 Okt 1h 5min

China's Economy is Broken | Logan Wright

After the global financial crisis, China added a third of global GDP to its bank assets in just eight years... the largest single-country credit expansion in at least a century. Today investment is ...

29 Sep 1h 28min

WarTalk: Potemkin Pacific, Midterm Budget Woes

WarTalk regulars Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute, Justin McIntosh, and Tony Stark join Jordan. We discuss… The Potemkin Pacific — why Paparo has half the planet on his map and nothing to figh...

25 Sep 1h 12min

Julian Gewirtz on Trump-Xi Summit, AI, and Mao Dead Fifty Years Ago!

Julian Gewirtz, author and former Biden NSC China director, joins ChinaTalk days before Xi Jinping’s first White House visit since 2015. With little substantive agenda on the table, what is the US get...

22 Sep 1h 6min

Can AI Beat the Pentagon’s Bureaucracy?

Garrett Berntsen was last seen on ChinaTalk in his role as Deputy CDAO at the State Department. He then went to the Department of Defense for a little bit, and now makes a return in his new role as Ch...

22 Sep 49min