Obama and China
>>> president obama 's policy in china has been criticized by republicans, but has the president's position turned out to be more of a balanced approach? with me now is zachary ka a rar rary kar ebell. it was a big part of that cover story in the atlantic who at the time was the atlantic almost beijing bureau chief for a while, so he watched it up close. and he's said it was one of the big foreign policy successes. do you see it that way, as well?
>> i do. there's been kind of bipartisan reality approaches to china . and the last years of president bush 's administration were not markedly different in the way that the republicans dealt with china than obama. in a weird way, this was where official america has probably gotten it more right than american sentiment and attitudes. and clearly during the campaign, the republicans are going to try to paint this as a negative. and mitt romney had an editorial this morning in the " wall street journal " where he decries obama's policy toward china as one of being supine in the face of this rising tyrannical being. although, meanwhile as we know the new leader of china mr. xi has spent the night in iowa , which i find as a delightful irony.
>> well, and it's funny you bring up the romney op-ed. he writes this morning, unless china changes its ways on day one of my presidency, i'll designate it a currency manipulator and take a counter action. i cannot tolerate our current trade surrender. this is my sixth presidential election covering, and kand date candidates bash the heck out of candidates when they're not in the oval office . george w. bush did it in 2000 , barack obama did it in 2008 , and now we have -- and every one of them changes their tune whenever they actually get into the oval office .
>> you're exactly right. it's so easy to make these sort of intense statements on the campaign trail because as we know it really is just words. what a candidate says on the campaign trail has zero immediate policy implications. and you do have the latitude to make these statements and romney is trying to win in michigan and in ohio where the sentiment about china being a really negative force for u.s. manufacturing jobs. and i think, in fact, that too is the wrong optic. manufacturing has been declining in the united states for decades before china rose . but, you know, it's also complicated in the campaign trail because if you're in a state like iowa which has billions of dollars in agricultural exports to china , soybeans and the rest, corn. china 's not such a negative force. i don't think we can take what's said on the campaign as indicative of what will become policy.
>> you know, let me ask you about the new president coming in. what always struck me about jintao, he didn't make an effort to have "america get to know him." he didn't have a pr strategy, he didn't seem to care that he was a two-dimensional figure as far as americans were concerned. that is not the case here with xi, is it?
>> and look, i think -- granted these are all delightful preordained photo ops and there's not a lot of substance here, except for the fact that if you really believe the relationship between china and the united states is really advantageous for the united states and china is in the driver's seat, you have to ask, why does the incoming leader of china take a week of his time and go to iowa and the port of los angeles ? the fact is, china does need the united states . this is a reciprocal and interdependent relationship. and i think the fact that he's doing this is indicative of that from the chinese perspective and says something about the nature of this relationship much more than our american legitimate discomfort about what their place in the world, what's the nation of american power going forward and how does china play into that?
>> zachary karabell, thanks for coming on.
>> thanks, chuck.
