NYT's Dangerous Distortion of the Trump-XI Summit

Plus: Smart-bed bedlam! Job-killing AI! Sleazy Google! Sleazy Amazon! NZN book club launch!

This week, right before his summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, President Trump issued two social media posts. One was classic Trump—ignorant and incendiary—and got tons of publicity. The other was also classic Trump—streetwise and pragmatic in a way that actually held promise—and got virtually no publicity. In keeping with mainstream media tradition, Trump had gotten positive reinforcement—which is to say, he got to see his name in the headlines—for his least constructive behavior.

The headline-getting post (on his Truth Social platform) declared, “Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.” Well, if he really tests nuclear weapons on an “equal basis,” he won’t be testing any nuclear weapons. North Korea hasn’t tested a nuclear weapon since 2017, and it’s been decades since any other country tested one.

Presumably Trump had misunderstood the significance of reports that Russia had tested a nuclear-powered missile. That amounted to “testing a nuclear weapon” in roughly the sense that, whenever one of America’s many nuclear-powered submarines goes anywhere, the US is “using a nuclear weapon.” In any event, the New York Times, among other MSM outlets, decided that, even after the results of the Trump-Xi summit were announced, the nuclear testing story was the story to lead with:

Trump’s other pre-summit social media post said simply, “the g2 will be convening shortly.” This was a reference to groups of nations (the G-7 beginning in the 1970s, the G-20 beginning more recently) that represent much of the world’s economic power and gather regularly to discuss important international issues and sometimes make important decisions. Trump seems to have been saying—accurately—that the world’s two great economic powers, the US and China, were about to hold a summit where important things would happen.

If US foreign policy were conducted rationally, the G-2 would be an actual thing. China and the US, which together command tremendous power, would get together regularly and work things out between themselves and talk about how to bring calm and stability to the planet—how to create a world that, in addition to being a better place to live than the current world, would be a durable platform for the pursuit of the two countries’ most important interests, certainly including economic ones.

I’m not saying that this vision is exactly what Trump had in mind with his G-2 post. Like much of what Trump does, the post was largely ego-driven. Trump likes to think of himself as one of the planet’s titans—as someone worthy of rubbing shoulders with the Vladimir Putins and Xi Jinpings of the world. Saying that the G-2 was about to convene was a way of saying he’s one of the two biggest kids on the block.

Still, this schoolyard mentality goes hand in hand with a pragmatic sensibility—an affinity for realpolitik—that naturally opens him up to the prospect of systematic collaboration with China, whereas some presidents would be too moralistic, or too subservient to America’s moralistic foreign policy establishment, to contemplate such a thing. (The Biden administration, for example, inaugurated its relationship with China by sanctioning and hectoring Beijing about human rights even though there was no chance of that doing anything to improve human rights in China—and two years later we were still wondering whether Biden would ever steer the US-China relationship toward a “thaw.”)

But any hopes of the US and China collaborating to build a better world are complicated by the way mainstream media covers Trump—or, to put a finer point on it, how media outlets that (naturally enough) want to attract lots of readers and viewers harness Trump’s behavior to that end. I’m not just talking about the disproportionate coverage of Trump’s dopey post about nuclear testing, or of his various other bursts of sound and fury that signify nothing. (If I were a betting man, I’d give 100-to-1 odds on a bet that no American nuclear weapon gets tested during Trump’s tenure.) There’s also the constant MSM vigilance for anything that can be depicted as Trump’s caving in to a foreign adversary, ideally Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. A good example is the story that the The New York Times gave the number two slot on its home page (above) after Trump and Xi announced that both countries were suspending recent measures that the other country had found deeply problematic.

The story depicted the deal as something that should alarm Americans. The headline read: “With China Truce, US Security Controls Appear Up for Negotiation.” Reporting this story involved, first of all, calling up a couple of Trump critics and recording their complaints that Trump had agreed to suspend for a year a new US rule that expanded the number of Chinese companies facing restricted access to advanced US technology. The critic who provided the basis for the Times headline was quoted as saying that, by making a “national security issue” part of a “trade negotiation,” Trump had “discarded decades of precedent.”

The first problem with this criticism is that the summit hadn’t, in fact, been just a “trade negotiation.” The concession Trump got in exchange for his one-year pause was China’s one-year pause of rare-earth mineral restrictions that had been, among other things, a big national security problem for the United States. In fact, they’d been a national security problem in exactly the sense that the rule Trump paused had been a national security problem for Beijing: Both of these now-suspended provisions had significantly complicated the other country’s procurement of technologies considered vital to national security.

What’s more, the provisions Trump suspended—the provisions that had triggered the retaliatory rare-earth restrictions that China has now suspended—were almost an accident, a result of the Trump administration’s routinely chaotic operation. As China tech expert Paul Triolo explained to me on a recent episode of the NonZero podcast, they had been issued by the Commerce Department without passing through the national security review process that in other administrations is normal. In fact, they may not have even been approved by Trump himself, said Triolo—and Trump certainly did grasp their sweeping implications. By Triolo’s estimate, these provisions would have imposed new burdens on more than 10,000 Chinese companies and could have done grave damage to an untold number of those. That’s why China retaliated so harshly, with the sweeping rare earth mineral restrictions that would have been seriously dislocating for much of the world but are now suspended.

If you read far enough in the New York Times piece, you’ll see some quotes from people who essentially agree with Triolo’s assessment that the Trump administration’s initial provocation was a product of Commerce Department freelancing and had blindsided people in other parts of the administration. So the real story—the story that even the New York Times acknowledged, if under its breath—would seem to be this: Trump administration blunders into pointless provocation of China, China retaliates, and then sanity prevails and both sides agree to return to the status quo ante, stepping back from the brink.

You’d think that story would reflect negatively enough on the Trump administration to satisfy the MSM’s preference for unflattering framings of Trump. On the other hand, the angle the Times chose—Trump sacrifices national security on the altar of commerce—had the added attraction of geopolitical threat inflation. What’s more, it was threat inflation that is in harmony with the foreign policy establishment’s mindless China hawkism. Win-win-win.

God knows Trump is a reliable source of legitimately unflattering and scary headlines. He is a narcissistic authoritarian—and probably a psychopath in the clinical sense of the term—who poses a genuine threat to American democracy. And even when he’s just trolling us—as he may have been with that nuclear testing post—the media shouldn’t ignore that entirely. Still, the more prominence the MSM gives to Trump’s outrageous but probably meaningless behavior—the more gratuitously negative Trump headlines it features—the less attention will be paid to his genuinely dangerous behavior (like, for example, the many abuses of executive power he’s justifying by declaring fake emergencies).

And the worst kind of gratuitously negative headline is the kind that makes it harder for Trump to do what good he may be inclined to do—like, say, forge a more constructive relationship with China than his predecessor forged. This week Trump and Xi each made concessions that put the world in a much better place than it was before. That’s what good journalism would have conveyed. And if that story had been accompanied by a speculative piece about the possibility that G-2 might become an actual thing, so much the better.

—RW

Save the date: On Saturday Nov. 15th, at 1 PM US Eastern Time, we’ll be kicking off our NonZero Reading Club. The discussion will focus on Chapter 5 of Gods & Golem, Inc., a 1964 book by the mathematician Norbert Wiener, who, among other things, coined the term “cybernetics”. You can read the chapter here. It lays out the dangers Wiener foresaw in creating human-like thinking machines. More than 60 years later, how well do his concerns hold up?

The discussion will be led by the NonZero community member who nominated this reading—muchcharles, as he’s known in the NonZero Discord, where his nomination surfaced—and by NZN team member Danny Fenster. We encourage you to check out our Discord, where lots of discussions (some of which feature concord!) are happening. If you want to recommend a future book club topic, you can go straight to the Discord’s readings channel.

This week, after Amazon announced 14,000 corporate job cuts and UPS said it had cut that many jobs in its management ranks over the past 22 months, the Wall Street Journal made it official: “AI starts to bite,” declared the headline over its story about these and other signs of a “leaner new normal” for America’s white-collar workers. The Journal cites inflation and political uncertainty among the other causes of the belt tightening.

Meanwhile, the Understanding AI newsletter posted an intriguing graph:

Graph via Understanding AI. Adapted by Clark McGillis.

It would be a mistake to put much emphasis on the symmetry between the growing construction of data centers and the declining construction of offices. Presumably the first couple of years of that decline are due largely to the Covid pandemic. But it’s possible that some of the subsequent decline reflects growing AI-inspired uncertainty about the wisdom of investing in offices for flesh-and-blood human beings. In any event, stay tuned: Those two lines look as if they’ll cross before long.

If by any chance you’ve been keeping track of which US tech companies are most willing to help countries do sketchy things in exchange for lots of money, this week brought some fresh data for your scorecard, thanks to investigative journalism conducted by The Guardian and the Israeli media outlets +792 and Local Call. In 2021 Google and Amazon signed a seven-year $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with Israel that, according to the Guardian, obliged both companies to secretly notify the Israeli government if legal authorities in another country asked them for data about possible Israeli wrongdoing. Microsoft bid on the contract but, according to the Guardian’s sources, declined to comply fully with Israel’s demands and was unsuccessful in its bid.

The contract for the cloud computing project (“Project Nimbus”) details a “winking mechanism” by which the companies, even when under court gag orders, could signal to Israel that something was afoot, the Guardian reports: They would send payments to Israel’s finance ministry in amounts matching the national telephone calling code of the legal authority that had requested the data. A 3,900-shekel deposit, for instance, would convey that Israeli data had been handed over to officials in Italy, where the international calling code is +39. If a gag order was so broadly worded as to cover even such implicit forms of communication, the companies were still obliged to signal, via a 100,000 shekel deposit, that some country had been given data. Both companies deny any wrongdoing.

The agreement also barred the two companies from restricting Israeli access to their products even if, say, Israel was found to be using them commit to commit human rights abuses. According to reporting by +972, the AI and data storage services provided by Project Nimbus, as well as services provided by Microsoft, played an important role in Israel’s conduct of the Gaza War.

Ever wonder what kinds of things could go awry as our lives come more and more under the sway of AI algorithms floating out there somewhere in the cloud? During last week’s global Amazon Web Services outage, some owners of Eight Sleep’s $2,000 “smart” beds—which change their temperature and inclination during the night in accordance with real-time feedback from sensors—got what may be a preview. They woke to find themselves trapped in sauna mode. When the beds lost contact with Eight Sleep’s cloud servers, they began to heat uncontrollably, and some got stuck in upright positions.

Eight Sleep calls its mattress systems “pods.” If you buy one, we would advise you not to think about the pods in which immobile humans are stored in the movie The Matrix and not to think about the astronaut-containing life-support pods unplugged by HAL in the movie 2001.

Eight Sleep’s CEO apologized for the calamity, and by Tuesday the company had added an “Outage Mode” that lets its app connect to beds locally over Bluetooth—so that owners can once again control their sleep environment without relying on the cloud. For now, at least, the beds obey.

Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.