During an interview aired on Friday’s edition of Bloomberg’s “Wall Street Week,” Harvard Professor, economist, Director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama, and Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton Larry Summers stated that while he views the meeting earlier in the week between President Joe Biden and China’s Xi Jinping as a good thing, he’s concerned that China’s economic challenges will push them towards greater aggressiveness the same way it pushed the Soviet Union towards more aggressive action like the Cuban Missile Crisis and the construction of the Berlin Wall in the 1960s.
Summers said, “I’m glad to see the meeting, but I’m concerned, and I’m particularly concerned, in light of the gravity of the economic challenges that China is facing. And my concern is that, as with the Soviet Union in the 1960s, a sense of very serious economic challenges is going to drive a felt need for increasing assertiveness in the international arena, as we saw with Khrushchev’s moves on Berlin, as we saw with the placement of missiles in Cuba. And while I don’t see anything concrete like that that’s happening right now, I think the economic distress and the link to nationalism, given some of the very strong positions that Xi has taken, is something that is going to require the United States and the West to be on their guard going forward.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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