"המלחמה הקרה מעולם לא הסתיימה"

Bradley, in your book you present a view that the Cold War against communism never actually ended, it just transformed from the Soviet Union in the lead to now the Chinese regime, and that point first needs to be understood to frame how to properly then engage China. So what do you mean by that? Well, great to see you, good morning, a great pleasure to be on. What I mean by that is the following. We defeated the Soviet Union when it imploded in 1991, but we didn't defeat the Soviet Union's ideology of communism, which was birthed with the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. So thanks to the Bolsheviks' efforts, communism was spread worldwide, including to states in Central and Eastern Europe, and most importantly to China, where it still exists, of course, with the activities of the Chinese Communist Party. It is the ideology, of course, of the Chinese Communist Party. It also exists in the United States with, for example, Mayor Mandami in New York City, who proudly remains a member of Democratic Socialists of America. So the ideology is not defeated. Unlike, for example, Italian fascism or Japanese militarism, other big ideologies with which the US clashed in the 20th century, communism has not been defeated. And I'm sad to say it's alive and well in the United States and in, of course, communist China. Yeah, and the thread across all of those different ideologies that you mentioned, the Italian and the Japanese version and the fascist version, of course, of the Third Reich, is this idea of centralized control, and the rest of it is just sort of how you implement it. Trump has inherited a different world, of course, than Reagan did against the Soviet Union. Since admitting China to the WTO under the Clinton administration, our economies are now very closely intertwined. And yet Reagan did engage with Gorbachev. So how should Trump be approaching engagement with Xi, in your view? Indeed, Reagan did meet with Gorbachev many times, actually, after 1985, the first meeting in Geneva. I think Trump will take a page out of Reagan's book. And Reagan was quite clear about the ideological nature of communism. Reagan had fought communists when he was a labor union in Hollywood, for example. So he had an acute understanding of the ideology of communism. I think Trump does as well. And that will be the page he lifts from Reagan's book when he's meeting with Xi Jinping. Despite efforts to progress in areas where there's mutual interest, I believe fundamentally President Trump does see the true nature of the Chinese Communist Party as, to borrow again from Reagan in March of 1983, the center of evil in the modern world. Yeah, indeed. That understanding of what its nature is, I think that's the underlying point there, the nature of the communist ideology, one that doesn't embrace freedom. And of course, President Trump keeps that portrait of Reagan right there in the oval. So he gets this daily reminder. Now, let's talk about things like AI, rare earths and other hot button issues. How should the president be navigating these thorny topics, which we are reliant on? AI has its existential potential outcomes. And of course, we need those rare earths. They were promised and they're not being delivered. So how should he handle the negotiations on those types of topics? Well, one thing Reagan also did was linkage. That was to link Soviet behavior and human rights to what the Soviets wanted from the United States, whether that was in the economic realm or in the security realm. So I would, again, President Trump might take another page from Reagan's book by linking Chinese communist behavior to what the United States wants to see. So, for example, if they're not coming forward on the rare earths processing, as they have promised, the Chinese Communist Party has promised, they've failed to deliver, as we should expect, of course, by definition, the CCP is untrustworthy. President Trump should link that to, for example, what the Chinese want with respect to chips from NVIDIA, or Chinese graduate students in the United States, or trade issues, for example, tariffs, which, of course, is a hot button issue, very much so, and will be discussed at length, I'm sure, at this meeting. So linkage might be a very good way of dealing with the Chinese Communist Party.