Blinken Visits China, May Day Stirs Workers’ Rights Concerns, the U.S. Resumes Ukraine Aid, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, Secretary of State Blinken wraps his second visit to China, International Workers' Day comes at a time of renewed labor ferment, and the U.S. resumes military aid to Ukraine. It's April 25th, 2024 and time for The World Next Week. I'm Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
I'm Carla Anne Robbins.

MCMAHON:
So Carla, Secretary of State Blinken, as we speak, is wrapping up, I think, a first day of a multi-day trip to China. There is an enormous amount on the agenda, but let's kick off with one of the areas of great concern. The Biden administration has voiced a lot of concern about the role of China in the support of Russia and its war with Ukraine. At the same time, there are tensions mounting over surging Chinese exports, not just with the U.S. but Europe in particular, and there are concerns about provocations that China has been making in the South China Sea, especially towards the Philippines, all of which could pose security risks that echo and reverberate beyond the region. So Carla, what should we be looking for in this quick, packed set of meetings?

ROBBINS:
Listen, they're just trying to make sure things don't spin out of control on both sides. After some very tense months of no contact following, you remember, Nancy Pelosi's August 22 trip to Taiwan and then there was the February 23 spy balloon shoot down over the U.S., Washington, and Beijing have been determined that at least they're going to have regular communications, which doesn't guarantee that they're going to be nice communications, but at least they're talking. This is a three-day visit. It's Tony Blinken's second since June. President Biden spoke with China's President Xi by phone earlier this month. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was there a couple of weeks ago. That was her second trip since last summer, and last week, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had a video conference with his counterpart, and that was a meeting that the Chinese had long resisted. So as they like to say, at least they're talking.
Even then reality and politics on both sides keep getting in the way, and after Yellen's generally feel good visit, you remember the press, "Look, she drinks beer. Look, she eats things." Blinken's there on more of a bad cop mission. They rolled out this human rights report before he left. The U.S. isn't pulling any punches before this one. U.S. officials said all the things you listed, Bob. Top of his agenda is calling out China for its increasing support for Russia's defense industries. Beijing has not sent weapons, U.S. officials said. If you recall, Blinken made a very big deal about this a few months ago, warning that the Chinese were about to do it, but it is sending an awful lot at sending chips, machine tools, other dual use industrial goods, and U.S. officials are warning that if China doesn't back off it's going to start sanctioning Chinese companies and possibly even Chinese banks. That's a pretty tough warning and it's got the G7 to issue a warning as well.
Blinken's also expected to, as they say, raise concerns about Chinese ships harassing neighboring vessels in the South China Sea. The Philippines, in particular, is really complaining a lot that their ships are getting water cannoned and lasered and all of that. He's going to reinforce Janet Yellen's and the European concerns that the Chinese are basically rebuilding their very, what had been a very slowing economy by flooding the world markets with cheap exports, solar panels, electric vehicles. This is a campaign season in the U.S. and protectionism are us. Biden talked about raising tariffs on U.S. steel imports from China last week during a campaign rally. This is a favorite topic of former President Trump, so this may only go downhill on both sides, so Tony Blinken may warn of this and the Chinese may push back pretty hard on it.
For the Chinese, top of mind is likely going to be that foreign aid supplemental that Biden signed into law just as Blinken was about to arrive. We've all been so focused on the Ukraine aid, and we're going to talk about that, but there's $8.1 billion in that package for Indo-Pacific and about a quarter of that is for military hardware for Taiwan. And this is a particular irritant right now because Taiwan is due to get a new president that Beijing sees as a supporter of independence, so this is not a great time for them. It's never a great time to talk about military aid to Taiwan, but it's a particularly neuralgic time for the Chinese.
As part of the political deal to get the Ukraine aid through, Congress also passed legislation demanding TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance sell off the app or be banned from operating in the United States. President Biden said he's going to sign the legislation so that's another neuralgic issue for them. While the U.S. raises concerns about Chinese aggressive behavior on the South China Sea, the Chinese increasingly see the U.S. trying to encircle them. If you remember, Biden had that meeting with the Japanese and the Philippine president very recently at the White House, so the Chinese have a lot to complain about as well so I think it's meetings.

MCMAHON:
Carla in the midst of all of that, I'm also thinking back to what now seems like a very remote period, which is only late last fall, the Biden-Xi Summit. And one of the takeaways that people were touting as a positive was like, oh, we're ready to talk again and cooperate on potentially limiting the fentanyl supplies because China's a crucial supplier of the precursor chemicals for fentanyl, which is having an incredibly alarming lethal role right now and the death numbers continue to go up in the U.S. If all these other things weren't going on, one would say great, we can spend some time on an issue that could actually save some lives. But it just seems like an issue like that gets crowded out while you're talking about making sure there's signaling in place so that there's not a mishap in South China Sea, East China Sea, over Russia, Ukraine, as well as a trade war. It just seems like the issues are so epic. As you say, it's just maybe managing this as opposed to trying to solve anything at this point.

ROBBINS:
I think fentanyl has to come up, not least because it's so awful and so many people are dying of it. The U.S. says that the Chinese are trying to make progress on limiting the precursors, but at the same time the Congress of course has been making a very big deal about it and saying that the Chinese are doing absolutely no good at all. If Tony didn't mention it, you can imagine how nuts the House would go. Would this be front and center for them right now? Probably not because they have so much else on the list, but politically it's absolutely essential, and the number of deaths is obviously intolerable, so certainly it's going to come up and certainly will come up in the readouts.
It's quite interesting, they may have slightly more cordial conversations on one topic, which is the Middle East. Blinken and his counterpart, Wang Yi, have spoken six times since the outbreak of the Gaza war on the seventh of October about the situation in the region, certainly not on the same side when it comes to Israel. But both the U.S. and China urged restraint on the respective partners on the Israel and Iran back and forth because the Chinese certainly are very concerned about disrupting shipping in the region, keeping the world economy going itself, and so there was very interesting sense of fiduciary responsibility there, shared great power responsibility, so maybe they can find some shared areas to talk as well, urging the Chinese to become responsible stakeholders as a long time ago, we used to talk about the Chinese that way.

MCMAHON:
No, I'm glad you mentioned that actually because China had been playing kind of an intriguing role raising its profile there. They brokered that kind of a rapprocher between the Saudis and the Iranians not too long ago, but they're also a crucial now market for Iranian oil as the U.S. and as the Biden administration faces pressure to do more to try to block the Iranian regime from getting any revenues from being able to function. There's pressure to really close off the oil spigots, but it just seems like that's just a non-starter and China has a lot to say there.

ROBBINS:
And that's always the balancing issue here, which is if you want the Chinese to cooperate and you need the Chinese economy not to go south for the sake of the global economy, how much do you push them, whether it's on oil or sanctioning them on supporting the Russian defense industrial base. The U.S. investor NATO gave an interview saying that the Russian military wouldn't be in the condition that it's in right now if it weren't for the support of the Chinese and it's defense industrial base, and that's just utterly unacceptable what the Chinese are doing. They're not sending weapons, which was the ultimate of the red lines, but they're pretty close to the red line there. Russians would not be doing as well as they are in Ukraine if it weren't for the support of the Chinese, all the chips and everything else they're sending there. How they pressure them, we'll see. Will they make any progress there?

MCMAHON:
Really worth watching. Yeah.

ROBBINS:
Bob, May 1st, pretty much everywhere but in the U.S. is International Workers' Day, and last year's May Day saw workers in many countries protesting unfair conditions and low wages. In the U.S. we've seen a revival of union power most recently in a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee, and that's a right to work state, where almost three quarters of the 5,500 workers voted to join the UAW. What's the state of labor rights around the globe this year and are we going to see a lot of workers back in the streets?

MCMAHON:
Yeah, that's one of the things that makes this year's May Day particularly interesting to watch, given what 2023 was, not just in the U.S., but particularly in the U.S. in terms of labor rights, labor activity. Based on your starting comment, it's worth kind of noting the role of May Day. I mean interestingly enough it was kicked off by a major protest in the United States, the famous hay market rallies which were bloodily suppressed, and they were all about the eight-hour workday. Imagine that in the late 1800s. And that triggered a kind of global sense that there needs to be workers' rights and there was this sense of solidarity. These May Day holidays are in many, many places where there are working publics, not just democracies. You're going to see, a good number of rallies are expected in the Middle East, for example, from Israel to Morocco to Lebanon.
You might see, as you've seen in the past, an expansion of the workers' rights rallies to be kind of all-purpose rallies. In the case of the Middle East ones, you'll probably see demonstrations on behalf of Gazans victimized in the war between Israel and Hamas, for example. These May Day events have taken on a different sheen. People of a certain generation, let's say ours, would recall during the Cold War, the May Day demonstrations in Red Square and the parade of Soviet armaments, which took place on a yearly basis, that's really cooled off in Russia. The former Communist Bloc is now a place where May Day is also a holiday in many places, and yes, it'll be a sense of dealing with the inequality that seems to be virtually everywhere. We might see South Korea again, where they've had really severe problems with wages like in the healthcare sector for example. It's the recent elections there that was an issue that resonated.
It's always been a big holiday in Latin America, and in the U.S. you can still get events that crop up even though Labor Day in September is the official holiday for workers in the United States. There's all sorts of reasons why the U.S. did not adopt May Day, so I think we are going to see, certainly internationally, a robust sense of demonstrations. I think what transpired, especially in the U.S., you mentioned of the UAW successes, you had the Screen Guild work stoppage, you had a number of them actually. If you go down the list, it was one of the bigger years for labor activity and labor gains in the U.S. in terms of contracts that boosted salaries and pay and sort of standard of living adjustments. But it's also interesting to note that the actual numbers of labor union membership have not really changed much in the U.S. At the end of 2023, it remained at around 10 percent.
While there are more union members cropping up among the workforces, it's still, those who are actually represented by unions, it's not really moving. Public polling, whether it's Pew or Gallup, have shown popularity of unions as rising in the United States, but it's tempered by other issues. In the case of public sector unions, for example, public sector unions gaining wage increases also have a role on public budgets. We see certain states in the U.S. with severe problems in funding their pensions and in other areas, so there's a lot of balancing that has to go on. But I will say that we're entering into a highly charged political season in the U.S. where it's very interesting to see both, certainly President Biden, but also former President Trump are both making comments that cater to union workers in a number of ways, and that's something that's a little bit rare.

ROBBINS:
Yes, I know that President Trump during the UAW strike first said that he was going to go to Detroit, and then President Biden did something unprecedented, which is he went and walked the line. President Trump did of course go to Detroit, but he went to a non-union shop, which I think maybe sort of missed the point. But the UAWs actually, this is a big win for them. I think this is going to be the first unionized plant for Volkswagen in the United States, which is a pretty extraordinary thing. I didn't know those numbers, that the numbers hadn't changed, but certainly the perception that unions have in the United States have it.
Now, I will say that when Grover Cleveland, I went and looked up the history as well, when Grover Cleveland decided that we were not going to have our Labor Day on May 1st because it was too red, even though it started here, I don't think it really translated to Labor Day in the United States. I mean Labor Day in the United States is not like May 1st and other places. Labor Day is barbecues. Labor Day is you don't wear white after Labor Day. It's not the union will make us strong. Nobody's singing the Internationale here on Labor Day. It's basically a great day for a barbecue. Not that same sense, and that is probably because of the anti-Communist Cold War reaction here, although Grover Cleveland predates that.

MCMAHON:
I think that definitely had a role. It's also worth mentioning as we get into the popularity of unions versus the broader support for workers, who doesn't support workers at the end of the day, but the union part of it continues to be sometimes problematic. I mean, again, going back to the Cold War period, it was the famous campaigning that brought Margaret Thatcher to power in the UK, which was busting the miners, and the famous slogan, labor isn't working that really resonated with a lot of Brits and brought Thatcher in. She was the union buster. Ronald Reagan was a union buster ...

ROBBINS:
That's true.

MCMAHON:
... in the eighties as well.

ROBBINS:
Air traffic controllers.

MCMAHON:
There was public support for that at the time. You also have this phenomenon of certainly coming out of the COVID period where the labor supply was so sparse that actually wages were keeping up in some areas. Certainly in some of the basic service industries, restaurant workers and so forth, you saw wages going up because the scarcity of workers and it didn't require unionization necessarily. There's an interesting mix of factors going on, all of which is again, going to make this year's May Day I think pretty interesting not only for the fact of worker demonstrations, but also the extent to which other issues such as what's going on in the Middle East tend to seize the stage a little bit.

ROBBINS:
Middle East, that's certainly not a place I would be predicting there would be a lot of labor organizing.

MCMAHON:
There's a air of protest floating around Carla. Sometimes it gets infectious and spreads to other things, so we shall see. We touched on Ukraine aid a little bit. We touched on the Ukraine war a little bit, Carla. Let's go more front and center on this because it's been a big week in the U.S. President Biden has, I believe, just signed the $95 billion military assistance package for Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan after months, maybe up to six months of delays caused by pretty much inter-Republican squabbling in the House of Representatives. Now, $61 billion of that figure is to go to Ukraine's defense. It's supposed to help replenish Ukraine's desperately needed artillery supplies, short and medium range air defense systems. It said that some early shipments have already started to move towards Ukraine that were poised to go over there, and there were some reports today Carla, as we headed into the podcast about the U.S. had already been sending some of the longer range, what we call ATACMS to Ukraine as well. How do we see this renewal of U.S. aid changing the situation or maybe freezing the situation on the ground in Ukraine?

ROBBINS:
Well, the situation certainly was desperate and is desperate, and we should celebrate the Republican speaker finally doing the right thing. But while Congress has dithered, the situation on the ground in Ukraine has gotten worse and worse and the people in Ukraine have paid an enormous price for it. Since December when the U.S. had to cut off nearly all the aid, as you recall, they found because of accounting and shaking the sofa cushions, they did find some money. But in that time, Russia has captured more than 360 square kilometers or about 139 square miles of territory according to the Institute for the Study of War. And the Russians have also used that time to build up their stock of weapons, turning to Iran and North Korea for supplies and to rebuild their forces. The prediction is they're going to launch a major offensive sometime this spring or summer.
This aid really, really is desperately needed if Ukraine is going to survive. Ukraine's forces in this time, they're short of fighters, short of machines, short of ammunition, they've been seriously worn down and seriously worn down in morale as well, feeling completely abandoned by their main backer. And as he signed the bill into law, President Biden said the arms shipments would begin in a few hours, and the Pentagon said on Wednesday that they would immediately send a billion dollar package. I mean, they were just waiting for this, air defense munitions, stingers, 155 millimeter shells, javelin anti-tank missiles, longer range missiles were also going, although they didn't announce that and some of the stuff went before for this money that was found. The hope also is that the Europeans are not going to lose their own sense of urgency now that the Americans are back in the game and they're going to keep digging into their own arsenals and their pockets for more ammunition and weapons, including those Patriot batteries we were talking about last week.
$61 billion is a lot of money, but we have to keep in mind that more than 40 billion of that is going to go to replenish U.S. stockpiles that have been nearly emptied over the past two years and also go to build additional arms for Ukraine because let's face it, there's money. There's money from Europe, there's money from the U.S., but we've got to build up this capacity to keep supplying the Ukrainians and to keep supplying ourselves. It's not an enormous amount of money, even though it looks like it on paper, and the Europeans are going to have to keep staying in the game.
Now, will the balance of power change? Yes, they're not going to go under now, that's the betting, but it's unlikely to change definitively quickly. The goal at this point is to hold the line in '24, not lose any more territory, particularly on the Eastern front, shore up defenses around the second-largest city of Kharkiv, which we've talked about before. People were really afraid they were going to lose this and use the time for the Ukrainians to build back their depleted forces. They've lowered the draft age, they've increased penalties for draft dodging, and the U.S. and the Europeans build up their production capabilities. And then if things go well and there are absolutely no guarantees, but there is, I think the Ukrainians are going to be re-energized by this, go back on the offensive in 2025.

MCMAHON:
Yeah. I should note, we have a new piece up on our site, an expert brief from our colleague Max Boot that kind of compares in crucial areas what the Russians have versus what the Ukrainians have. In particular, he notes ammunition that the Russians just have soared ahead in just sheer volume. And part of that is, again, you have these western democracies kind of hemming and hawing over guns and butter issues still, and the Russians don't have that. The Russians basically have quotas now that they're going to produce a certain amount and then they're getting a big assist from North Korea in some respects, certainly ammunition, Iran, certainly in drones for example, and you still have some of the NATO countries struggling a bit. You mentioned Patriots, Carla, I saw an estimate somewhere that what Ukraine could really use is something like twenty-three Patriot systems, which is a lot.
But again, back to our previous discussion from a previous podcast, seeing what they saw happen when Iran sought to attack Israel, they would love to be able to envelop their skies with these systems that can really be effective. Then they have this summer coming online, supposedly some F-16s that might be able to intercept these so-called glide bombs that have become really devastating as well. There's just a lot going on and I tend to agree with you. I think that we're looking at just holding the line as opposed to momentum shift that sends the tide back the other way.

ROBBINS:
The Secretary General, NATO said that there will be some F-16s coming, not from the United States. Biden is still self deterring on that, but the U.S. will be training these pilots, but it's coming online really slowly for that. The ATACMS, which we had talked about months ago, Biden did secretly approve to send more than a hundred of these longer range missiles, and they're hitting inside Crimea. The Americans have been very clear, we don't want you hitting inside Russian territory, but Russian controlled territory. But I think when you talked about Iran, that was quite interesting as well. The equipment they're getting from North Korea, the equipment they're getting from Iran, we'll see how good this stuff is. I mean, there's certainly a superiority in what NATO has, and if the Ukrainians can be trained to use the superior, one would think they'd have a major leg up there. But right now the Russians are overwhelming, seven to ten times superiority and just dumb stuff they're throwing at them. They're going to have to push back really hard. They're going to have to get a lot more troops back into the Ukrainian forces, and the U.S. and the Europeans are going to have to stay the course. Then you've got the question of the American election, so no guarantees here, but they got another chance here and that's all we can say.

MCMAHON:
It is worth stressing the issue of the troops as well. You've had a Ukrainian force that is just exhausted and has not been replenished in great degree recently. Whereas Russia has now seemed to have developed the capability to bring on new recruits. They've still been sort of treating them as cannon fodder, but they have the potential to bring more into the arena of battle. One would be looking for this infusion of new certainly material and capability to maybe jazz up the Ukrainian side to bring more fighters into the fray, as dangerous as that's still going to be.

ROBBINS:
But at the end of the day, of course we've been reading story after story about how demoralized the Ukrainians are because they felt abandoned. One would hope that knowing that the Americans are back supporting them, they are fighting for their own country. Let us never underestimate the commitment that people feel when they're fighting for their own country, so let's hope that we stay with it.
Bob, it's time to discuss our audience figure of the week. This is the figure listeners vote on every Tuesday and Wednesday at CFR_orgs Instagram story. This week, Bob, another happy number, our audience selected global military spending increases by 7 percent. It's not a surprise that the war in Ukraine has led to a spike in defense budgets in Europe, in the United States, but I understand that for the first time since 2009, the numbers are up all over the globe. What's going on?

MCMAHON:
Yes. So first of all, we should note the source of this, which is the highly respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or the acronym SIPRI. They have a closely watched report they put out right around this time of year every year. These numbers have been ticking up every year, but they have not ticked up this amount, as you say, in fifteen years. The war in Ukraine definitely a role. In fact, the majority of the spending is coming from United States, Russia and China. United States and Russia for reasons that we've already touched on a bit. There's the background to those upticks, and that will continue based on the recent developments that we've just been talking about. China is continuing to ramp up its spending. It's spent almost $300 billion in 2023. That's up 6 percent from 2022, and according to SIPRI, the twenty-ninth straight year-on-year rise in China's military expenditures, so there's a trend line for you. That's very clear.
This is happening at a time for, again, what you cited earlier, for reasons where the neighborhood is getting testy. Japan is allocating a lot more. It's allocated $50 billion to its military in 2023. That's 11 percent more than 2022. Taiwan also increased its spending by 11 percent in 2023. It's at $16 billion. You have the Asia Theater and Ukraine and Eurasian landmass, shall we say, being chief areas, and then you have, there's fighting going on and there is supplying going on in various other places too. We can just tick it off, whether it's Africa or Myanmar or what have you, Carla. So, it is a sign of this state of the planet right now, and the question is, where is this money going and where can it be put the best to use deterrent and otherwise?

ROBBINS:
Not a happy figure. We would like to hope that it was deterrent and defensive. We always cheer when NATO spending goes up because we hope that it will be deterrent and defensive and given how destabilized things are since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But at the same time, we have to remember that there's certainly a lot better things we could be spending money on than weapons. All told, I don't think that's a happy 7 percent.

MCMAHON:
Well, that's our look at the militarized World Next Week, Carla. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on. This May also marks the thirtieth anniversary of the end of Apartheid in South Africa. Togo begins its parliamentary elections and the World Economic Forum holds a special meeting on global collaboration, growth and energy for development in Riyadh, so there's a happy story right there, Carla.

ROBBINS:
Although the end of Apartheid is a truly fabulous story.

MCMAHON:
Yes, it is a fabulous story.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review while you're at it. We really do appreciate the feedback. If you'd like to reach out, please email us at twnw@cfr.org. The publications mentioned in this episode as well as the transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on cfr.org. Please note that opinions expressed on the World Next Week are solely those of the host, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's program was produced by Molly McAnany, her boots are made for walking, Markus Zakaria, and Sinet Adous with Director of Podcasting, Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks to our intern Olivia Green for her research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Markus Zakaria. This is Carla Robbins saying so long.

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye and be careful out there.