Trump and Xi’s deadly game of chess | If You're Listening

Geopolitics has been full of a lot of chess metaphors lately.It was like checkmate on the supreme leader.It was absolutely brilliant military strategy.So at the moment, it's kind of like a big game of aerial chess.

So it's really checkmate on not only Iran, but China as well.

We lost.We lost.Checkmate, right?

Now, I've played a fair bit of chess, and I've learned that people with different personalities play the game in different ways.I, for example, do not have the patience to learn how to play the game properly, so my go -to move is an opening known as the Scholar's Mate.It involves starting the game with an explosive attack using my Bishop and then my Queen.If it all goes to plan and your opponent is caught off guard, you can win the game in four moves.That's checkmate.If your opponent realizes what you're doing, which if they're any good at chess, they probably will, then you can find yourself in quite a bit of trouble.

If it doesn't work, your queen gets trapped out in the open and there's no real good moves to get yourself back into safety.When it comes to geopolitical chess, I think the scholars mate is how US President Donald Trump approaches foreign policy.

Covert units go after the main prize, Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores, who are now in custody in New York.

Sometimes the move works and he's won the game almost before it starts.

President Trump made it clear who was now in charge.

We're going to be running it with a group and we're going to make sure it's run properly.

But other times his opponent recognises his plan and it doesn't work at all.

More than a week after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was assassinated.His son, Mujtaba Khamenei, has been chosen as his successor.The 56 -year -old hardliner is expected to carry on his father's legacy.

Trump went all the wayis very difficult.

The new opinion poll shows that most Americans actually think this war is a mistake.It's extremely unpopular.

President Xi Jinping is playing this game of chess too, but he's got a far more complex strategy than Trump.

Xi Jinping's rise to unrivaled power in modern Chinese history has exceeded all expectations.

Xi is playing positional chess, spending literally years organising his pieces, getting ready to claim the ultimate prize.

A major speech by President Xi Jinping that once again threatens the use of force in Taiwan.

For a lot of hard -nosed geopolitical commentators, this is the sign of a man with a plan.

Looking at the pictures from Beijing and the political propaganda, it's very clear this one man Donald Trump and Xi Jinping's different gameplay styles came to a head recently when Trump visited Beijing.

Much of the talk was about how much better prepared the Chinese seemed.than the Americans.

Donald Trump is certainly coming into this summit on the back foot, bogged down by the ongoing quagmire of the Iran war.

The thing is, though, despite the contrast between the two players, one impulsive, one highly prepared, I think they're both making massive fundamental mistakes.We've spent a lot of time exploring the flaws in Donald Trump's gameplay strategy.So for the next few episodes, I want to look at how Xi Jinping is operating.He's playing the very, very long game to take Taiwan.But at what cost?So, set up your pawns.

I'm mapping out.In November 2010, a big opening ceremony was held in Sri Lanka.There were dozens of drummers, dancers and government officials present.It was a real party atmosphere.Which was surprising, given where the event was being held.But despite very recent catastrophes, the folks there were clearly very excited about the future.

Not only was Sri Lanka spending billions of dollars on new infrastructure in this town, they were also bidding for it to host the 2018 Commonwealth Games.I'm afraid I've never heard of Hambantota, so I had to look it up on the map.It's not surprising the Australian officials who were also trying to bid for the Commonwealth Games hadn't heard of Hambantota.It was a city of only around 50 ,000 people, and yet there was this massive effort to put it on the map.primarily because it was the hometown of the sitting Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa.The president was dumping enormous funds into the city, building an international airport there and an enormous artificial shipping port, dug using enormous machinery out of a patch of coastal farmland.

That's what the big party was about.The inauguration of this new harbour on President Rajapaksa's 65th birthday.The thing is though, the harbour wasn't actually ready.There was an enormous rock sitting in the mouth of the port just beneath the surface of the water.Thankfully, they discovered the rock with an underwater survey before any large ships learnt about it the very, very hard way.But there was also another elephant in the room.

literally.Wild elephants, which had historically grazed in the area and were unperturbed by the large fences, regularly trampled through the port area looking for food.

As in much of the world, an exploding population of humans has created a war with nature.

The biggest problem for the new port of Hambantota, however, was that even if they could get the underwater rocks and elephants under control, nobody actually wanted to use it, especially when Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo, which is just 260 kilometres away, had a very well -developed port that was more than capable of handling all of the country's trade requirements.The multi -billion dollar Mahinda Rajapaksa Port in Ambantota was a white elephant being periodically attacked by grey ones.The Sri Lankan government had taken out massive loans to build it, which they then struggled to pay back.But that was okay.because they quickly found a buyer.

China Merchants Port Holdings is taking charge of the commercial and administrative management operations of the Hambantota Port.

A Chinese government owned company bought a 99 year lease of the port, and it wasn't the only one they bought.

Recently, it's been expanding, snapping up ports in Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Djibouti in the Horn of Africa.

The company called China Merchants owns a lot of profitable ports, But in the last decade, it's been buying up ports like that one in Sri Lanka that make no financial sense at all.15 years after this port opened, most ships still just sail right past it on their way between Africa and Asia.So it doesn't make a lot of revenue.The only reason anyone would want to own itbecause one day in the future, you might want to exert some influence over the traffic going past you through the Indian Ocean.So Xi Jinping buys a port on a key global shipping route.

In other more Chessy words, Knight to B5.Seems to make sense, right?So what's his next move?

Well, let me take you to an exotic alien landscape, high on the rooftop of South America.

We're in Bolivia at the world's largest salt flat.

Beneath the salt pan surface, a vast buried treasure valued at more than one trillion US dollars.It's not gold.It's not silver.It's lithium.Lithium, the world's lightest metal, has a seemingly mystical range of applications.

Lithium could substitute oil in the future.

So Bolivia could become the Saudi Arabia of South America.Of the world.

Lithium ion batteries are playing an enormous role in the global transition to renewable energy and Bolivia's salt flats have the largest lithium deposits in the world.

The problem is, It's Bolivia.Bolivian President Evo Morales and his Mines Minister are resolute.They plan to harness lithium at their own pace.

The socialist Bolivian government won't just open up the salt flat for a foreign mining company to exploit and ship the profits overseas.And even if that wasn't the case, the flat is not exactly easy to access.

A freezing nowhere, 3 ,700 metres above sea level.

It's in the middle of the Andes, hundreds of kilometres from the coast.We know that it's incredibly difficult to access because many have tried.On the banks of the salt flat, there is a train graveyard.full of locomotives abandoned by failed mining ventures.This renders exporting the lithium or any resources over the Andes very expensive.Fortunately, other countries also have lithium, which is much more conveniently located.

While the landlocked Bolivians tried to figure out how to get their lithium to the coast, the famously sea -girt Australians did what they did best.digging up rocks and shipping them to China.In 2022, the price of lithium skyrocketed, largely because of a surge in demand for electric vehicles.So Australian miners began cashing in.This all could have been very simple for China.just buy lithium from established producers like Australia and Chile.

No worries, as we say in Australia.Yapo, as they say in Chile.But Xi Jinping had a more complex plan.

China is playing a very, very clever, long term strategic game.They are looking to dominate the world in industries of the future, and they see the low emissions profile sector as a opportunity to be the world leader.

And buying lithium from Australia and Chile, two strong allies of the United States, was, in their view, not ideal.So China started investing billions of dollars into developing lithium mining operations in Bolivia and scaling up its own domestic lithium mining capacity.Jiangxi province in eastern China has lithium mining.but they're low quality and very expensive to extract.But that didn't matter because China was determined not to buy from a US ally.Once they were up and running, Jiangshi's mines started flooding the market with cheap lithium, despite running at a massive loss.

That extra supply, combined with slower demand for batteries and EVs, sent prices tumbling.For Australian lithium miners like Minres boss Chris Ellison, the situation was dire.

It's not a fun time.I mean, this is the shittiest time to be the MD of a company.I mean, you've got to really carve the costs out of everything you're doing.You look at every single person.We're doing that.We're throwing everything off the deck just to make sure we conserve cash.

China's grip on the market meant many Australian mines were shut down as prices fell below the cost of production.This strategy by Xi Jinping isn't unique to lithium either.As we've discussed on this show before, China has managed to monopolize production of all sorts of critical minerals by running their mining and processing operations at a loss and ignoring environmental regulations.Ever since he was inaugurated as president in 2013, Xi Jinping has been spending literally trillions of dollars on global infrastructure projects that make little to no economic sense.Railway lines across Africa, pipelines across Pakistan and Myanmar, stadiums in Solomon Islands, ports scattered all around the world.He's been arranging his pawns, moving his knights and bishops and rooks into position.

Why?Well, Xi Jinping is rather taken by a concept called the Thucydides Trap.

The so -called Thucydides Trap.

Which is all about Thucydides Trap.Again, I don't want to fall into the Thucydides Trap.more than anyone else.

It's a bit of a favourite topic among a certain type of Australian Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister may yet again wheel out his Greek mythology lesson on the Thucydides Trap.This is the so -called Thucydides Trap.

So let's hear former PM Kevin Rudd's explanation for what it is.

This guy up here, he wrote the history of the Peloponnesian Wars and he made this extraordinary observation about Athens and Sparta.It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable, and hence a whole literature about something called the Thucydides Trap.

Now this idea wasn't popularised by slightly overconfident and mildly pretentious Australian Prime Ministers, however.It was popularised by historian Graham Allison.

When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, in general bad things happen.In the book, I look at the last 500 years.I find 16 cases.In 12 of the cases, the outcome was war.In four of the cases, not war.

So a rising power challenges a declining power, and that leads to war.Three quarters of the time, apparently, over the last 500 years.Xi Jinping is even more obsessed with this theory than Turnbull and Rudd.So much so that he brought it up in his recent summit with Donald Trump.

The world has reached a new crossroads.Can China and the United States move beyond the so -called Thucydides Trap?

For Xi Jinping, the theory of the Thucydides Trap has given him a to -do list.Conflict between the two powers is likely, so he wants to be prepared if it happens.The problem for Xi Jinping is the Thucydides Trap theory is based on conflicts between great powers over the last five centuries.But it's worth noting that since World War II, there have been no direct conflicts between great powers at all.The invention of nuclear weapons and a globalised economy means actually going to war directly is illogical.You can't attack the other superpower without destroying yourself too.

Mutually assured destruction has dismantled the Thucydides trap.But despite this, Xi Jinping keeps preparing for a conflict that he thinks is inevitable.So why?Well, unfortunately, pretty pleased with the chess metaphor running through this episode so far.And fortunately, there's a chess term for this strategy.It's called zugzwang.

It's basically a situation where one player forces the other into making a move that puts them in a worse position than before.Xi Jinping has spent his entire presidency preparing for this, trying to engineer a zugzwang so that the US can't do anything.to attack China without weakening its own position.Slowly but surely, over the years, Xi has been moving his pieces into the perfect position.His pawns are in a perfect wedge formation, almost impossible to breach.He's built his own supply chains and an economy that is large, powerful, and so integrated with the rest of the world, that if the US were to hit China with sanctions, it would be enormously costly to everyone.

He's inherited a large nuclear weapons program and military, both of which he's invested in to make China even more difficult to challenge.He's established relationships with maritime ports in key locations that could be used as military bases if the need arose.He's used Chinese funds to build diplomatic alliances all over the world from Hong Kong.to Russia, to Venezuela, to Iran, to Solomon Islands.The question is though, why?The U .

S.has been at Zouksvang for years.They were probably at Zouksvang before Xi Jinping even became the president.Now, if not for this very long list of things I've spent the last few minutes ticking through, Most countries around the world would be absolutely thrilled to trade and cooperate with China.It's a manufacturing powerhouse, it's invested incredible amounts in developing new technology and it's also very cheap.So why does China insist on doing all those things and jeopardizing potentially very lucrative trade deals?

Well, Chinese state media told us the answer to that question explicitly during the summit with Donald Trump.

Taiwan.China considers Taiwan its territory and any military effort to retake the island is a legitimate act of reunification.

Bringing Taiwan under Beijing's control has been an obsession of Xi Jinping for years.

As the wheels of history roll forward towards national reunification and the revival of the nation, the complete reunification of the motherland must be achieved and definitely can be achieved.

And Xi makes absolutely no secret of this desire.China has staged giant military exercises simulating the invasion of the island and ships have been built and modified specifically for that purpose.

The report prepared for the Pentagon claims China's commercial ferries have been reinforced to transport tanks.It claims more than 70 large ferries are being built and modified to work with specialised mobile harbours.

But all this preparation doesn't negate two facts.One is that modern advances in weaponry have meant that every attempted invasion of the 21st century has gone incredibly badly for the guy doing the invading.The other thing he's ignoring is that he's already at Zuxuan himself.Despite all of the preparation, his country's economy is still very fragile.The closure of the Strait of Hormuz in March has shown that even a small blockade can disrupt global supply chains enough to have serious effects on China's economy.But that's just the start of it.

Xi Jinping has got 99 problems and the Strait of Hormuz is just one of them.In fact, he's got more like 1 .4 billion and 99 problems.Ever since he took office in 2013, the spectacular economic growth that the Chinese Communist Party uses as justification for their authoritarianism has been in decline.And it's putting the Chinese people in financial distress.

Business is now very average.We're actually losing money.The employment environment is not that good.One in five young people can't find a job.

Education costs are very high.And China's patchy public health care system only provides basic care.A serious illness can wipe out a family's finances.So Chinese people tend to save their money rather than spend it.Most put that money in what they consider to be a safe investment, property.

The trouble is...

Massive dysfunction in the property and construction industries led to a financial meltdown.

Millions of everyday Chinese people who thought they were doing the smart thing have been left paying mortgages for homes that haven't been finished.

1 .4 billion and 99 problems.The trouble is not one of these problems is helped by buying elephant plagued ports in Sri Lanka or investing in train graveyard adjacent Bolivian lithium mines.And the economic effects of a war over Taiwan could make all of those problems exponentially worse.Now, this notion of spending enormous amounts of money on security and foreign adventurism while your domestic economy stagnates is not new.We all know that there's one particular country out there periodically spending billions of dollars bombing the Middle East while its own bridges fall down and citizens with full -time jobs go bankrupt paying for insulin.But that's just America being America, right?

We're familiar with the pathology of a US president launching a scholar's mate attack on a vastly less powerful country having done no preparation beforehand for what he'll do if it all goes wrong.But just because Xi Jinping has spent years meticulously preparing for a war rather than launching a high -speed attack does not mean he's in the right.That would imply that war is inevitable and leaders only have agency over the way they prepare for and engage in that war.The thing about this chess metaphor is it implies the game must go on.It doesn't have to go on.It's a game you don't actually have to play at all.

The better metaphor may not be two titans sitting down to play an epic chess match which will decide the fate of the world, but rather two dudes playing chess on their phones while bills pile up on their kitchen table.They could just put their phone down and start addressing that very long list of problems.But as we all know, mobile phone games can be very addictive.