Edward Fishman
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
I came up with this notion that I call the impossible trinity, where economic interdependence, economic security and geopolitical competition of those three factors, only two of them can coexist at a time. So if you look at the Cold War era, we had obviously very fierce geopolitical competition between the US and the Soviet Union. But we didn't have any economic interdependence.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
The US and Soviet Union barely had any trade with each other. And so we were still able to have economic security. After the Cold War, this sort of hyper globalization period, we didn't think we had any geopolitical competition. We saw Russia and China more as budding friends than ominous rivals. And so we embraced economic interdependence without losing our sense of economic security.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
I think what's happened, John, unfortunately, is that neither China nor Russia evolved in the way that we hoped and neither moved in a democratic direction. They both became increasingly authoritarian, increasingly aggressive, imperialistic in their objectives. And so what happened was in the 2010s, we saw
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
a situation in which we still had economic interdependence and geopolitical competition had come roaring back. So we lost our sense of economic security. And so the way I view that is we obviously, as the American people, want economic security. We don't want to feel like our livelihoods are dependent on the whims of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And so the accumulation of restrictions like tariffs and sanctions and export controls is just a natural outgrowth of that, where the U.S. is trying to restore a sense of economic security that we've lost. And by the way, other countries are doing this too. The European Union has been imposing more tariffs and sanctions. China has. Japan has.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
Japan even has a cabinet minister for economic security now. And Russia has too. So I think this is a global phenomenon we're seeing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
Yeah, John, on that point, I can relate to it. One of the ironies about my own trajectory is I grew up loving Russian history and Russian literature and actually spent time in college living in Russia. And I've had friends there and felt very comfortable living there. I never felt threatened. I myself now am sanctioned by the Russian government.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
So similar to you, I can never travel there, at least not for a very long time. So it's remarkable how much can change in a short period of time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
I think the most remarkable figure in my book is a person by the name of Stuart Levy. He's really the founding father of American modern financial warfare. The reason I think he's such an interesting guy is if you look at his trajectory, he was a young lawyer at the Justice Department on 9-11. He was working on immigration law. He had nothing to do with national security.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And almost by accident, he becomes the head of this new division of the Treasury Department in 2004 called the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. And this office is really created to try to fight terrorist financing to stop Al Qaeda from getting money. Levy takes the job in the summer of 2004, right before Bush and Kerry are running in that election.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And he basically takes it as a flyer on a startup because he's like, Bush might lose reelections, but at least I'll do this new job for a few months and see how it goes. And throughout that experience, Levy finds that even though he doesn't have a huge experience in national security, that his knowledge of how
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
companies and how businesses, how CEOs view regulatory and reputational risk could be used as a weapon to basically isolate America's adversaries. So historically, if you wanted to get other countries on board for something like sanctions, you would send out diplomats to talk to their foreign ministry and try to negotiate sanctions like a diplomatic agreement. What Levy realized is he could take
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
declassified intelligence that showed how Iran was using the international financial system to support its nuclear program, support terrorist proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah, go to bank CEOs in places like Frankfurt or London or Hong Kong or Dubai, and basically persuade them not to do business with Iran for fear of that information becoming public and them suffering the reputational harm.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
Of course, he also had a pretty powerful weapon in his back pocket, which was being able to cut off these banks from access to the US dollar, which for any sort of global bank is effectively a death sentence. I think Levy did his sort of diplomacy with CEOs in the most gentlemanly way possible, but he did have a pretty powerful card to play if he had to.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
I think the thing that's also remarkable about Levy is that he winds up being so successful at what he does that Barack Obama retains him in that role. And he's one of, I think, only two senior officials in the Bush administration who are kept on by Obama. The other is Bob Gates, the former Secretary of Defense.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And Levy, I think, would have been an amazing character in my story, even if his career had ended there when he left the Treasury Department in 2011. But he keeps playing, he keeps coming back. He winds up becoming the chief legal officer of HSBC, which is the largest bank in the United Kingdom, and winds up playing a really important role uncovering the plot that Huawei had used to evade U.S.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
sanctions that winds up getting Huawei's CFO arrested in a very famous way. And Huawei ultimately cut off from American technology, which is the starting shot of what has now become the U.S.-China tech war.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And then even later in the story, he becomes the CEO of the Diem Association, which was the Facebook-led cryptocurrency project that had previously been called Libra, that is couched as this way to create an alternative to the dollar that's even more effective.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
The thing that's remarkable about Levy is he's playing this almost Zelig-like role in the age of economic warfare, both inside the US government, in the financial sector, and in tech companies.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
Well, John, I'm realizing I also didn't answer the second part of your question, which is about ethical dilemmas, because I do think that this is something that you always have to be cognizant about when you're thinking about economic warfare. A lot of the reasons that people like Stuart Levy become interested in this is because it's a non-military way to exert leverage, right? It's a way to...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
potentially advance American goals without costing American lives or the lives of people in other countries. At the same time, throughout history, if you have really significant economic embargoes on foreign countries, it can cause humanitarian harm. And generally speaking, sanctions affect civilian populations more than they affect foreign leaders.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
You can't be in this line of work without thinking about the ethical dilemmas and thinking about the harm that you may be imposing. And I think what most people would say, and I'm sure Stuart Levy, were he on this podcast with us, would agree with me, is it creates a high threshold for when you want to use these weapons.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And even though they're relatively easy to deploy, you're signing documents in Washington instead of sending sailors and airmen and Marines into combat. You have to be thoughtful and only do it when there's a real serious national interest at stake.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And I think with Levy and the campaign against Iran, there was, in that you had an adversary of the United States who had financed and bankrolled and supported terrorist groups around the world that had killed Americans who was actively pursuing nuclear weapons. So I do think Levy was justified.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
You did, yeah. And I think one of the ironies that I draw in the book is this really pivotal moment in 1971 when Richard Nixon unilaterally takes the U.S. off the gold standard and says, you know what, the gold is no longer redeemable for, the dollar is no longer redeemable for gold at $35 an ounce. It's seen at the time as like the end of American economic dominance and the dollar is dead.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
It's like the end of hegemony in a way. And of course, we look in retrospect, this is just the beginning of dollar dominance, because what winds up happening is when the dollar becomes untethered to gold and when you have the capital controls that had been so important for the Bretton Woods system breakdown, we have a global economy that becomes almost entirely dollarized.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
So you get to a point where Even if it's two countries trading with each other, if it's India and Saudi Arabia trading with each other, they're almost certainly clearing that transaction in U.S. dollars, not in their home currency. And that's something that is enabled by the Nixon shock and by the fiat standard that you mentioned, John.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
I think what's happening now is you do see a very significant challenge to American economic dominance by China. China is in GDP terms, so in terms of just the size of its economy, it is the closest we've ever had a peer competitor be in terms of being almost as big as the US economy, about 70%, 75% as large as the US economy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
China, theoretically, you think could have a currency that competed directly with the dollar. After all, China is the world's leading or is a leading trading partner for 120 of the world's countries. So about two thirds of every country of all the world's countries say count China as their top trading partner.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
So you'd think that if they're buying so much from China, Chinese companies could say, OK, we'll just pay us in our own currency. The problem is that the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, wants to keep a really tight control on the way money flows in and out of China. They don't allow you to bring money across borders. They have very strict capital controls.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
They don't have liquid financial markets like we have in the United States. And so I think the CP's authoritarian control has really been the main impediment to the RMB.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
The thing I worry about is if we get to the point where we overly politicize the dollar, not just through things like sanctions, but let's say if the Fed's independence were undermined or if the rule of law in the US were jeopardized, I think Over time, you would see the RMB be more of a credible threat to the dollar.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
So I think it's not just dependent on China's actions and are they willing to liberalize their financial sector, but also US actions, which are we willing to do the things that are necessary to be a responsible steward of the international financial system.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
Look, I think that I mentioned earlier that a big factor that has led to the rise of economic warfare and U.S. foreign policy was the fact that military force became politically toxic after Afghanistan and Iraq. I think what we've seen is when we had sanctions on Iran, for instance, there was really no blowback at home because we didn't have any trade with Iran.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And Iran, it's not a small country. It's got 80 million people and they've got some of the world's largest oil and gas reserves, but not so big that they're really going to affect our livelihood at home. With Russia, that was a Rubicon that was crossed in 2014 when we started doing sanctions on Russia because they were a big economy, the world's largest exporter of fossil fuels.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And there was a real risk of economic blowback, both in Europe and the United States. And I think because of that risk of blowback, the sanctions were crafted in a relatively modest and mild way. which I think constrain the blowback, but at the same time also constrain the impact.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And in some ways you may have emboldened Putin to do things like the 2022 invasion that he did after eight years after the original annexation of Crimea. Then of course, John, when you talk about China, which is every year, one of our top three trading partners, we've got 600 billion plus of bilateral trade with the Chinese every year. You're really talking about
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
You possibly endangering people's livelihoods in the United States where you'd have an unconstrained economic war with China. And so I think that so far, the US government has been pretty cautious about deploying really aggressive economic weapons against China or Russia. And even with Russia, there's been, I think, maybe too much caution, frankly, when it comes to the oil sector in particular.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
But look, I think if we keep on this secular trend that I mentioned earlier, eventually we're going to get to really aggressive stuff with the Chinese and the Russians. And I think American people will feel it and we'll see if there's support for those types of actions at that time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
I'm glad you brought this up because just to loop back to the very beginning of our conversation about choke points. So I think the dollar and the US financial system is the most potent choke point in the global economy today that Washington controls. The second most potent, at least that we've thought, is the technology that goes into advanced microchips.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
I'm most concerned about, and I cover quite a bit in the book, is the way in which China has its finger on global telecom networks. And this was really the reason why the first Trump administration started trying to bring Huawei down to size because Huawei was a Chinese company quickly dominating global 5G networks.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
This is manufacturing equipment from places like firms like Applied Materials and Lam Research or EUV machines from the Dutch company ASML. And the theory had been that without access to those tools, China would always stay very far behind the U.S. in semiconductors. And as a result, without that computing power, they'd never be able to match the leading U.S.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
AI labs in terms of how sophisticated their models are. What happened a few weeks ago, as you mentioned, is we saw a model out of China by a company called DeepSeq, a relatively small company. That seems to be at least in the same ballpark as the OpenAI models and anthropic models. Probably not quite as good, but in the same ballpark.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And they did have access to some NVIDIA, quite a few NVIDIA chips, high-end chips, because they bought these chips before the export controls went into effect. But certainly not as many, not to the same magnitude that the US labs have.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
So there's a question, does this mean that the export controls are counterproductive because they've incentivized China to create basically a different way to advance through algorithmic innovation as opposed to hardware innovation? I think the answer to that is certainly this incentive has been created.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
But you got to ask yourself, would DeepSeq's model be worse if they had unfettered access to NVIDIA chips? No, it would be a lot better, right? My own takeaway, and frankly, it's the takeaway of Dario Amodai, the CEO of Anthropic, who's come out very powerfully in favor of more export controls, is that
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
It's not the case that these export controls are going to keep us 10 years ahead of China, but they will give us a significant unfair advantage that if the American people use our ingenuity, use our entrepreneurial spirit, we should be able to keep a lead of a year or two over China. That doesn't guarantee anything, right? They still could leapfrog us through other means.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
But the idea that these export controls are counterproductive, I'm not so convinced of. But at the same time, I don't think they're a magic bullet. And it's not the only thing that we can rely on if we want to win the AI race with China.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
I'm really glad you brought this up because there's something I see in the media that I always find to be illogical. So take a chance now to correct it, which is you hear of Trump imposing new tariffs on China and everyone's like, okay, well maybe China retaliate with tariffs.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And actually Trump himself has said that because the US runs trade deficits, we import more from a place like China than we export. that trade wars are, quote, good and easy to win because we can always tariff more of their imports than they can tariff on us because we import more from China than China imports from the US.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
My own view, and frankly, what has been borne out in terms of China's retaliation against Trump's tariffs, is that you don't have to retaliate symmetrically. You can retaliate asymmetrically. And so it's not just tariffs that China is putting on the US.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
It's also putting on export controls and banning the export of things like gallium and germanium and antimony, which are really important minerals, and most recently tungsten, which is a critical military additive to the US. You mentioned finished goods like batteries.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
In November of last year, November of 2024, China cut off the leading US drone company, Skydio, from battery supplies and the company fell into crisis. All of a sudden they had to ration batteries. They said each drone could only have one battery, which of course isn't great if you're relying on a drone to fly extended missions in a place like Ukraine.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And the Ukrainian military does rely on Skydio drones to collect battlefield intelligence and document war crimes. And this just shows that China does have significant power to impose export controls, to withhold important goods that they produce to the United States and other countries. And I think what the imperative is for the United States is economic warfare is not just an offensive game.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
There's also defense. And the way you play defense is through things like industrial policy, the CHIPS Act, building our own domestic manufacturing capability in chips, the Inflation Reduction Act, building our own domestic production capacity in clean energy technologies like batteries, rare earth facilities in the US. We need to do these things.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
But I also think it's not just autarky that we can rely on. We can't make everything in the US. And so we need to strengthen supply chain partnerships with our close allies, with the Europeans, with the Japanese, with our North American neighbors, Canada and Mexico, and build secure supply chains that are still internationalized. They're not only in the US, but don't rely on China.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
Even to this day, there's a lot of our telecom networks that are dependent on Chinese base stations and routers. I am concerned about China's ability to shut down our communications in a true break glass conflict scenario.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
Well, I think your personal experience is actually, I think, relevant because I think we are seeing a similar phenomenon play out. in the global economy. The way I view it, John, is I think we really have three possible futures. And I'll handicap our odds of which one is most likely versus least.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
So one is maybe we return the unfettered globalization of the 1990s, where we feel like we can have free and open trade with the China's and Russia's of the world, and it doesn't endanger our national security. I don't think this is particularly likely, frankly, because I think we have the great power competition trend I don't see abating anytime soon.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And so then there are two more likely features, and honestly, I'm not sure which one we're going down. One is something similar to what you mentioned, where we go into a global economy defined by blocks. But maybe there's only two major blocks. One, that's the US and other democratic allies, like the European Union, like Japan, South Korea, Australia, United Kingdom, Canada, Mexico.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And we have a lot less trade with the China's and Russia's in the world, but maybe even more trade and more integration with our allies. This is a notion that some people have called friend shoring, where we're not on shoring production, but we're friend shoring production.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
But then the third possible future is one I think that sounds a little bit more similar to what you experienced at Dell, which is just a more chaotic breakdown of the global economy, where every single country is in it for themselves. We don't have any long-term trusted economic relationships.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And what the incentive is then for a US company is to try to onshore everything, basically to try to go for autarky, to try to make every single thing in the United States. And I worry about that future for a few reasons. One is it'd be incredibly costly for the US consumer. I think it'll be costly for businesses and there won't be very much upside to it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
But I think I worry about even more is that in such a scenario in which it's really every country for themselves, What history has shown is if countries can't secure key markets and resources through trade, the temptation of imperialism and conquest rises.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And the reason why countries throughout history have tried to seize other countries to take their land is because sometimes they've wanted those mineral resources. You hear it and echoes have it in some of Trump's comments about Greenland, for instance.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And I worry about that future because that's a future where we're no longer worried about economic warfare, but we're worried about military warfare, worried about the types of things that our grandparents were dealing with in the first part of the 20th century.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
Yeah, it's a powerful concept, John. And I do think that's a real risk that we have today. And even in a place like Iran, where I think there has been a justifiable use of economic warfare against Iran. you see a lot of hopelessness in the population.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
The regime in Iran basically has no legitimacy, no support, but they're willing to use for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, to basically squash any protests or any democratic change. I think you're seeing Russia move in that direction. And I think that
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
One of the tragic side effects of economic wars is that even when they're justified, you wind up strengthening oftentimes the role of the authoritarian leader and weakening the role of everyday people. And so I do think you're creating political apathy in some of these countries and economic hardship.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
The other thing though, John, that I want to mention, and this ties back to the somewhat frightening future I laid out a few minutes ago, is in this world where every country is for themselves, the only countries that matter are the great powers, right? It's really Washington and Beijing and Moscow are setting the terms for everybody else, and everybody else is a bystander.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And that's something I really worry about. I worry about that today with respect to Ukraine, a country that has been invaded, that has seen untold atrocities committed against them, their people. And there's a real concern, I think, that Ukrainian people have now that a peace deal might be struck above their heads between Moscow and Washington.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
I personally don't, I'm not quite yet as worried, I think, as Ukrainian people are, but that's easy for me to say. I live in the United States. I'm not there.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
But that's a fear, a fear that you could have if you have this chaotic breakdown of the global economy, where it's only a couple of people in the world, the American president, the Chinese, Chinese president and the Russian president who set the terms for everybody else. And the rest of us are living in a mattering desert.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
So look, Russia is certainly headed for a significant demographic breakdown. You've long seen very low life expectancy, particularly among Russian males, low birth rates. So I do think that there's something to the fact that Putin perhaps had these imperialistic dreams for Russia, realized that his best chance of achieving them would be now.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And if anything, five, 10 years from now, assuming he's still alive and in power, Russia would be even weaker. I think there's something to be said about that. And I think it's an important lesson for anyone following geopolitics, which is it's not just rising powers that necessarily act out and take aggressive action.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And in some cases, if you truly believe time is on your side, your incentive is to wait and just allow yourself to overtake everyone else. In some cases, it's actually countries that are declining, where their self-perception is that they should be number one, but the reality is pointing in the opposite direction that try to take really drastic means like Russia did.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
So I do think that could have played into Russia's Putin psychology. I also think Putin does view the breakdown of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. He said that. And so he views Ukraine as a vassal that should be dominated by Moscow. And I don't think it's limited to Ukraine.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
I think he has the same perspective on Belarus, which he's effectively occupied. He has the same perspective on the Baltic states, probably Poland.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
which is why these countries, the ones that haven't yet been occupied by Russia, are extremely nervous about Russian aggression and doing everything they possibly can, not only to arm themselves against potential Russian invasion, but to make themselves less vulnerable to Russian economic coercion.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And a big headline that you may have seen recently, John, is the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, have now fully disconnected themselves from reliance on Russian energy and Russian electricity.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And that's a huge development because these are three countries, small countries that, you know, Russia, even if they didn't invade, Russia didn't invade them, potentially could bring them to heel just for basically turning the lights off and choking off their access to power. And I think that you are seeing this play out not just through military means, but also economic warfare.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
I'm glad you brought that up because one of my main goals in writing this book, John, was to really demystify economic warfare, make it easy to understand, and also show people how this is done, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
There are plenty of books you can read about how generals and admirals are making decisions in wartime, but there are very few books, and frankly, I don't know any other book that really does that for modern economic warfare.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
John, thanks so much for having me on. I'm doing great.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
Look, I think that just going back to a concrete example, February 14, when we start seeing Putin's little green men showing up in Crimea, and within two weeks, he annexes the Crimean Peninsula. That's the type of thing where it takes the US government completely by surprise. And so you have officials scramble to the Situation Room trying to figure out what to do.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And in some ways, it's almost easier to figure out what you don't want to do. And in that scenario, President Obama and really all the top advisors in the Obama administration
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
uh realized we didn't want to fight a war with russia right we didn't want to we didn't want to get in a in a war with a fellow nuclear superpower that could lead to nuclear holocaust and so very quickly it became okay well if not that what
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And oftentimes, as I'm sure you're familiar with, John, just personal psychology, people are very influenced by their own personal experience and what they have recently gone through oftentimes. There's a recency bias. And at the time, it was right after the US had gotten the interim deal to freeze Iran's nuclear program, about two months after that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And so we're fresh off this incredible success of using sanctions to get Iran to basically stop developing its nuclear program. So the officials are like, well, these sanctions worked against Iran, maybe we should try them against Russia. And so then you wind up having scrambling to do analysis, try to figure out, Where's Russia's economy interlinked with American banks, European banks?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
If we sanction this company, what's the fallout going to be not only in Russia, but potentially into the European financial system and maybe even into the US financial system? If we sanction this Russian oil company, is that going to lead to a reduction in supply that then spikes prices and winds up hurting Americans at the gas pump?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
There's so many different dependencies, so many different interlinkages. And unfortunately, despite the fact with how frequently we use these tools like sanctions or export controls or tariffs, we don't have the equivalent of the Pentagon for economic warfare.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
These are officials scattered across different agencies, the Treasury Department, the Commerce Department, the State Department, who oftentimes have to build these, build basically processes on the fly in an ad hoc way.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And so one of the parting points I make in the book and something I really believe firmly is that we need to create a government that's purpose built to fight and win economic wars. We are living in this age of economic warfare. And if America wants to stay on top, we have to take this stuff more seriously. We can't depend on The luck of having a Stuart Levy in the right seat at the right time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
We need to foster, train people in our schools that understand finance, technology, law, all the sort of components you need for economic warfare. I'm going to empower them and put them in the right sort of chains of command where they actually can make a difference.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
Thank you. I know it's an experience you've had, but it's surreal to work on a book for several years and actually hold it in your hand.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
Certainly would make economic warfare more precise and effective. I think one of the big challenges about economic warfare is that the actual frontline soldiers aren't US officials. They're actually executives, bank CEOs, bank compliance officers.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
They are compliance officers at tech companies who are actually taking the regulations that come out of Washington and Brussels and Tokyo and figuring out how to implement them. And a big challenge that you might imagine for the US government is tracking all that information. How do we know what companies everywhere in the world are doing?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
I think the US is better at it than any other country is, but there's still a lot that we miss. There's a ton of economic activity that happens outside of our ability to detect it. Certainly, I think if you had an AI capable sanctions program that was tracking economic activity, you would even have a more fearsome power that would be at the hands of Washington.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
So I think the sanctions would be more impactful. Would there be unforeseen consequences? Almost certainly, yes, because there's probably some level of sanctions evasion that occurs, let's say, in developing countries that, in my view, shouldn't even be under sanctions. We've got plenty of sanctions programs on small countries that I think should be lifted.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And I think that if those regimes were implemented incredibly aggressively, I think it would do more harm than good. Right now, they're not implemented that aggressively because we're limited by manpower. And most of the people who are working in these agencies in the US government are devoted to Iran, as opposed to some of these legacy sanction programs that no one thinks about.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
But I think if you had AI doing it, you'd start seeing that the benefits of having sanctions on small countries in Africa and Latin America is probably outweighed by the drawbacks.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
So I would look at this through two lenses. I think from a non-kinetic lens, so from a non-military lens, I think the thing that I'm most concerned about, and I cover quite a bit in the book, is the way in which China has its finger on global telecom networks.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And this was really the reason why the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, started trying to bring Huawei down to size because Huawei was very quickly, a big Chinese company, quickly dominating global 5G networks. And I think even to this day, there's a lot of our telecom networks that are dependent on Chinese base stations and routers.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
I can attest to it. I feel very grateful to have it out there and hope other people enjoy reading it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And I am concerned about China's ability to shut down our communications in a true break glass conflict scenario. Because of course, what enables us to not just fight wars, but even just do strategic planning is being able to talk to each other. And if China can stop that from happening, which I think is not completely out of the realm of possibility, it's a real problem for the US.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
I think the second thing I'd be worried about, this is more in the kinetic realm, And this takes us back to pre-globalization economic warfare, back when the Athenian Navy would worry about getting cut off from the Bosphorus by a foreign Navy. I worry about a Chinese naval quarantine of Taiwan. And there's a lot of talk about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
The thing I think is more likely and frankly just as worrisome is if you have the Chinese Navy encircle the island and basically prevent ships from coming and going, trade ships that are carrying 90% of the world's supply of advanced semiconductors, which I think would very rapidly sow chaos, not just on the US economy, but definitely on the US economy quite a bit.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
It would dramatically undermine American financial power. And this is something I bring up in the book, too, because I'm very worried about it, because in some ways in the US, we've come to rest on our laurels because we have had this dollar dominance now for however long, 70 plus years. But in digital currency, as you say, John, China's got the lead.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
The digital RMB, which is their central bank digital currency, is the world's leading state-backed digital currency. And we don't even have a competitor in the US. We don't have a digital dollar. It's been talked about, but it's never been advanced. And Trump himself has been actually quite hostile to the idea. So I'm not confident that's going to happen anytime soon. unless he changes his mind.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
But yes, I think in a scenario in which you had a digital RMB that was even more convenient and stable for clearing international transactions than the dollar, it's not necessarily that it would replace the dollar and we'd move it to an RMB standard. It's just that in the scenario we just talked about where the US and China are at war,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
Very quickly, China would be able to make itself resilient to American financial sanctions. And I think it'd be able to persuade many of its trading partners to move over to the digital RMB. Because as I mentioned earlier, you got two thirds of the world's countries who have China as their top trading partner. So they got to figure out a way to pay China.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And if they can't do it through dollars, I think the digital RMB will become quite appealing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
That's a great question. Before I answer it, I will say one thing, which is that there's nothing immutable about these economic choke points, right? They come and go. Some choke points that exist today that seem all powerful tomorrow might be not such a big lever that states can use, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And I think a classic example here is the US believed that the global oil tanker fleet would be a significant choke point that it could use against Russia, which it was. But Russia found ways to evade it over time by buying up its own oil tankers. So what are we going to be talking about in 2040?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
I think almost certainly we're going to be talking about digital currencies as a significant choke point. And just to tie this back to my last answer, we've seen how powerful financial networks can be in particular for economic warfare. And if it's a Chinese digital currency that is the kingpin digital currency of the year 2040,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
We might not be calling the second edition American power in the age of economic warfare. We might be calling it Chinese power in the age of economic warfare. That's the thing that keeps me up at night.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
Oh, man. Well, I'm very blessed to be a senior research scholar at Columbia University's School of International Public Affairs and Center on Global Energy Policy. So you can check me out at the Columbia website. You can also follow me on Twitter at Edward Fishman. And usually I post my articles there.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
But otherwise, I hope to see you guys at one of my book talks around the country in the next few months.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
Sure. Thanks, John. And I think especially grateful to have this conversation today because someone who's served in the Navy understands choke points in a visceral sense, I think. So throughout history, when you've talked about choke points, you're usually thinking about geographic features. So a strait is the classic example of a choke point.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
It's a narrow waterway through which very significant trade flows depend. So for instance, when we're talking about the Bosphorus, which is the exit way from the Black Sea onward to the Mediterranean. Every single day, you've got 3 million barrels of oil that are going through that choke point. And it's very narrow. Anyone who's been in Istanbul can attest to it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
You also have a very significant part of the world's food supply that's going through that choke point every day. So throughout history, these choke points have really been thought of as geographic features.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
But as you say, John, in the book, the choke points I'm talking about are really novel choke points and choke points that have developed only in the last 20 years or so in the wake of the hyper globalization of the 1990s. And these are economic choke points. These are parts of the global economy where one country has a dominant role and there's very little, if any, redundancy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And so typically, if you go back even 20, 30 years and even thousands of years, the way that you would block a choke point like the Bosphorus was to take a Navy ship and park it right in front of it. You would need basically to use military force to stop ships from going through that choke point.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
The novelty that we have today is a situation where the US and other countries, primarily the United States, can use these economic choke points in global supply chains and financial flows to cut off these physical trade flows just by using the stroke of a pen. So in that scene that you mentioned, in December of 2022, The U.S.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
government, in addition to several allies in Europe and the Japanese government, imposed a price cap on Russian oil. And this all it really was a regulation issued by Washington, Brussels and a few other capitals. And overnight it blocked the Bosphorus.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
So something that, you know, for thousands of years would have required the actual use of naval force to do today can be done by an official sitting behind her desk in Washington, D.C.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
That's a great question. And the main thesis of my book, John, is that we're living in an age of economic warfare. Sanctions, tariffs, export controls, they have become the primary way that great powers like the United States and China compete with one another. And I think there are really three factors that led to this.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
The first is something I mentioned just a few moments ago, which is economics. In the 1990s, with hyperglobalization, the integration of supply chains that previously had not been, like the United States and China and the former Soviet Union breaking up and the US trying to bring Russia into the WTO and other international economic structures.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
You've seen these development of these choke points where every trade that happens in the world basically depends on the use of the dollar or every major piece of personal communication device or even any electronic device, even automobiles, depends on computer chips that rely on U.S. technology.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
So this is really an economic factor that led to the rise of these choke points that then could be weaponized by governments like the U.S. government. Then there are other factors, too. There's a political factor. I think that's really important, which is if you go back to the 90s, the US actually was pretty comfortable deploying military force.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
The 90s, we had a number of small sort of short military campaigns that we fought in places like the Balkans and Africa. And that was something that America had become accustomed to and comfortable with.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
But then, of course, after 9-11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq wind up eroding political support for military force in the United States, not just on one side of the aisle, but really on both sides of the aisle. So you get to a point where in the mid 2000s, it's become politically toxic to try to say that the U.S. should be bombing another country or invading another country.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And in some ways, economic warfare became appealing for that reason, because the other tool, military force, had become less appealing. Then the final factor is a geopolitical factor. And it's really the rise of Russia and China and the return of great power competition.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And in the 90s, we had this situation where we didn't think we were going to have great power competition, and that's part of the reason we went for things like hyperglobalization.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
Then all of a sudden, it becomes quite clear in the latter part of the aughts, after Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008, after Xi Jinping becomes the head of China in early 2010s and starts militarizing the South China Sea, it becomes clear that great power competition is very much alive again.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And yet the US, China, Russia are pretty constrained in fighting one another by the specter of nuclear annihilation. You still do have nuclear deterrence. And so it means that this competition is channeled primarily through the economic arena. So I think those three factors are really what created this age of economic warfare we're living in today.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
It's a great question. Obviously, you have to go through a number of different hypotheticals and counterfactuals, but let's assume that Al Gore is elected and you still have 9-11, because obviously 9-11 is the precipitating event that causes those wars. Because obviously, if you don't have 9-11, you wouldn't have those wars. So let's just assume you have Gore as president and you have 9-11.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
My guess is you still have significant military action against Afghanistan because it was very clear that the Taliban were harboring al-Qaeda. They played a direct facilitating role in the 9-11 attacks. So I'm relatively confident you would have seen some sort of military campaign there. Whether it would have turned into a protracted 20-year nation-building exercise, harder to say.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
The war in Iraq, I think, is a different story. And I do think that the war in Iraq, the historical record shows it was very much a war of choice. There were specific officials in the George W. Bush administration who thought that basically George H.W. Bush hadn't finished the job and basically shouldn't have allowed Saddam to stay in power after the Gulf War in the early 90s.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
They thought that the sanctions that were in place in the 90s on Iraq were not working. These are people like Donald Rumsfeld. And I think they were pretty excited about the idea of invading Iraq, overthrowing Saddam, and trying to usher in regime change across the Middle East. I think that is a fairly unique historical circumstance.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
I don't think if Al Gore were president, you would have had the same types of people in power around him. So I would say you probably still have a war in Afghanistan, unclear what it would look like, but almost certainly you wouldn't have had the type of invasion of Iraq we had in 2003.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
Yeah, look, John, if you might not mind, because I think this is something, there's an interesting thread here, which is Colin Powell is the Secretary of State at the time, right? He's a career military officer. He'd been the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff previously. And his whole thing that he was pressing early in the Bush administration was smart sanctions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
So he was very in favor of actually using economic warfare instead of military warfare. And ironically, it's people who didn't have as long military careers like him, like Donald Rumsfeld, that wind up having more influence in the administration.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
That's a great question because there's some belief, there's some people who say that it is actually the use of tools like sanctions that has undermined globalization. And if only the US weren't using sanctions and export controls and tariffs, we would still be happily in the kind of halcyon 1990s. My own view is that's not right.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
And there's actually an underlying structural factor that has led to the rise of the age of economic warfare. The reason I feel confident about this is, John, you mentioned how you vacillated between Democratic and Republican presidents. But one thing is state constant.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Edward Fishman on Economic Warfare: The New Age of Power Dynamics | EP 577
If you look from George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Donald Trump to Joe Biden, each of those presidents effectively doubled the number of sanctions that their predecessor had imposed in their tenure in the White House. So this has been a secular trend. So for someone like me, I start looking for what's going on underneath the hood. Why is this the case?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
I'm most concerned about, and I cover quite a bit in the book, is the way in which China has its finger on global telecom networks. And this was really the reason why the first Trump administration started trying to bring Huawei down to size, because Huawei was a Chinese company quickly dominating global 5G networks.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Scott Sherr on GABA: The Unsung Hero of Brain Health and Stress Resilience | EP 575
Even to this day, there's a lot of our telecom networks that are dependent on Chinese base stations and routers. I am concerned about China's ability to shut down our communications in a true break glass conflict scenario.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Mattering in Love: Stop Settling—Choose Love That Sees You (Part 1) EP 576
I'm most concerned about, and I cover quite a bit in the book, is the way in which China has its finger on global telecom networks. And this was really the reason why the first Trump administration started trying to bring Huawei down to size, because Huawei was a Chinese company quickly dominating global 5G networks.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Mattering in Love: Stop Settling—Choose Love That Sees You (Part 1) EP 576
Even to this day, there's a lot of our telecom networks that are dependent on Chinese base stations and routers. I am concerned about China's ability to shut down our communications in a true break glass conflict scenario.