Rahm Emanuel

Rahm Emanuel’s core China play is a bloc, not tariffs: aggregate Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the EU and friends in Latin America to “isolate the isolator,” then use that shelter to rebuild what the US let atrophy. His premise: Xi’s “win-win” pitch “was never a win-win” — China wants everyone dependent on it while staying independent of everyone (cut off US soybeans, buy from Brazil and Argentina) — and its biggest export is “the domestic economic dysfunction of China,” dumping overcapacity worldwide while its auto industry exports more cars even as profits fall 20%.

Research funding is national security, and Washington is unilaterally disarming. His COVID case study: Operation Warp Speed produced a 90%+-efficacy vaccine in roughly twelve months versus China’s ~60% in eighteen to nineteen; Xi answered by massively investing until China was “pari passu” in life sciences within five years — while Trump proposes a 40% NIH cut in every budget. Rahm would double NIH/NSF/DARPA research dollars, funded by a 10% levy on all predictive markets and online sports gaming.

Defense is a five-year rebuild story for the entrepreneur-VC-DARPA complex — if incumbents don’t strangle it. “You give us five years” of new technology, entrepreneurs, venture capital and DARPA research, “as long as we don’t let Lockheed, Raytheon, and General Dynamics kill it, and the Pentagon nurture it.”

Taiwan risk is three scenarios, not one — economic quarantine, a 96-hour invasion, or seizing three small offshore islands — and China has historically used all three strategies with different countries. The Iran war has made the White House “a one-ball juggler” while Chinese aggression rises now (Philippines, the Senkakus, a live missile fired near Australia); Rahm says the South China Sea must be defended now rather than waiting for a Taiwan scenario, and “our deterrence piece is very weakened right now.” Japan is the “long pole,” and even the yen backstop is partly “self-interest” given pressure on US Treasuries from the debt load.

The Merkel exchange is the episode’s best fight: Friedberg blames Europe’s “suicide” on leftist policy; Rahm counters that the open border and nuclear shutdown were decisions of the conservative CDU. “Don’t tell me this is from the left. You’re wrong.” His alternative diagnosis: “people don’t like disorder,” Brussels regulation “suffocated innovation,” and Germany losing 5-10,000 manufacturing jobs a month to Chinese pressure should be a US recruiting opportunity that Trump squanders by meeting the AfD and attacking Meloni.

On immigration he endorses the Dignity Act — 23 Republicans, 23 Democrats — as the compromise nobody else will touch, plus Canada/Denmark-style lessons and up to 20% full-fare foreign students to subsidize three-year BAs. He hits both sides: Trump reneged on “green card on every diploma” and the Dreamers, while his own party’s 2020 hand-raising on free healthcare for illegal crossers was “foolish… Forget the immigration policy. The value system.”

Friedberg’s fiscal frame — $7T spend against $5T revenue, $40T debt, roughly $2T a year in interest — forces revenue onto the table, and Rahm targets the step-up basis and a code that “rewards wealth preservation” over wealth creation. Fighting two wars with two tax cuts was “never been done in American history, and it proved to be stupid”; he’d cap overall spending for five years and shift $8B of the $38B detention-center budget into 1,200 community colleges.

He rejects the DSA’s separate-party strategy. “You’re not Democrats. You’re a separate party. I’ll see you in November.” Trump is the “existential crisis,” not Obama, Pelosi or Jeffries; the man who flipped 31 districts is “not into turning a blue district midnight blue.”

🔗 Original source & video: Rahm Emanuel: Trump’s Foreign Policy, China, Europe’s Decline, Immigration & DSA vs Democrats