Mel Goodman, a former CIA analyst and author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA, discusses the issues raised in his recent Counterpunch piece, “Sino-American Relations and the ‘Thucydides Trap.’”
SCOTT HARRIS: Right now, I’m very happy to welcome back to our program our good friend Mel Goodman, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. Mel is a former CIA analyst and author of several books, including Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA. Mel is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org where he’s written some recent articles including this one, “Sino-American Relations and the ‘Thucydides Trap,'” which we’re going to be talking about tonight. Mel, appreciate you making time to join us on this holiday Memorial Day 2026.
MEL GOODMAN: Thank you. My pleasure, Scott. It’s always good to be with you. It’s a great show.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, it’s always great when you’re on, anyway. Thank you. In your recent commentary, you discussed the significance of Trump’s recent state visit to China in meeting with China’s leader, Xi Jinping. You observed that this visit to Beijing confirmed China’s ascendancy in America’s decline in many ways. Hastened, of course, by Donald Trump’s erratic foreign policy blunders, not the least of which is what’s going on in Iran right now. Yeah. Tell us about the significance of this trip and the symbolism of Trump going hat in hand to ask for China’s assistance to get him out of this reckless war he started with Israel.
MEL GOODMAN: Well, there’s some interesting aspects to all of this. One, the relationship with China is the most important bilateral relationship that the United States has to conduct. And then I would go further than that and say the Sino-American relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the global community. And then when you figure that Xi Jinping was host to Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin within a short period of time, you realize that both Putin and Trump were coming to China hat in hand looking for favors from the Chinese leader. Putin needs China’s help to build a pipeline, Siberian pipeline to move gas and oil into China. China’s very dependent on oil and gas, but the Russians need the Chinese to pay for this pipeline. And we’re incredibly dependent on China for rare earth minerals that I think few people really are knowledgeable about that are needed to build all of our strategic weapon systems, whether we’re talking about fighter jets or destroyers, submarines, our missiles.
You can’t build them without a huge number of pounds of rare earth minerals where China has cornered the market and we sort of moved out of this field 20 years ago just as China was moving in and they’ve had a lot of success, particularly in Africa, in addition to their own deposits of these rare earth minerals. So Xi is in a commanding position.
When you look at the trade figures for China, last year they had a $1.2 trillion surplus. We had a $1.2 trillion deficit. Russia’s involved in a war that they can’t seem to win. They won’t lose it, but they can’t seem to win it. It’s gone on longer than their war with Germany in World War II and it’s now in its fifth year.
And the United States is in a war with Iran that it can’t seem to control despite the power preponderance over this smaller country of Iran. And even today, you don’t know what is going on with the US-Iranian talks. Is there going to be an interim agreement? Is there going to be a ceasefire? Is there going to be an opening of the Straits? Is the blockade of Iranian ports going to open? Iran says that nothing has been agreed to. And Trump says, well, he says one thing, then another. And he just goes back and forth. I don’t know if anyone in the United States understands who they’re dealing with or what the terms of the agreement are, but Xi is in this commanding position. And part of the problem is too many U.S. politicians and pundits and policymakers believe that we can repeat containment. The policy that we thought should take credit for the end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union in the 1980s and ’90s and that we can contain China.
The Soviet Union was a very weak country. They were a nuclear power, but they were like Upper Volta with nuclear weapons and that’s how a Russian leader described the Soviet situation to me when I was there with the National War College in the 1990s.
You can’t say that about China. They have a huge economic power. They manufacture more than all of Germany, Japan and the United States manufacturers. By 2030, they’ll be manufacturing 45 percent of all goods that are manufactured in the world. And they’ve been very smart in how they’ve used their resources. And here we’re obsessed with this idea that they’re going to invade Taiwan. They don’t need to invade Taiwan. They have a very preponderant position in the Indo-Pacific right now that’s growing in terms of their bilateral relations with all the major Indo-Pacific powers. A military invasion would upset this and they would have to see that what lesser powers are doing against so-called superpowers, what Hamas has done to Israel, what Iran is doing to the United States, what Ukraine is doing to Russia.
So we’re at a very important juncture in global politics and we’re led by a group of people in this country who have no understanding of what they’re doing. And the best example of that is the idea that Marco Rubio can be the secretary of state and the national security advisor and watch these two institutions, these important institutions really be weakened to the point where they virtually don’t exist. The State Department doesn’t play any real role. The National Security Council doesn’t meet. I’m told there was no national intelligence estimate done before the invasion of Iran and I don’t know what the intelligence community would have said, but I know some people who knew that Iran had certain resources that it could use, including shutting down the Strait of Hormuz. I wonder if that message ever got to Donald Trump who doesn’t like intelligence briefings and who doesn’t read.
So it’s really unbelievable what we’re doing to ourselves in this situation, no matter where you look.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. That’s pretty bleak. We’re speaking with Mel Goodman, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and former CIA analyst. Mel, in your recent commentary, “Sino-American relations in the ‘Thucydides Trap,’ you mentioned that in 2015, Xi Jinping made this historical reference to the Thucydides Trap. I wonder if you’d explain that to our listeners and its significance in the current state of history that we’re living through. But I just need to remind our listeners, this is WPKN in Bridgeport, listener-community radio and my name is Scott Harris. This is Counterpoint. And Mel, go ahead on that.
MEL GOODMAN: Yeah. About 11, 12 years ago, there was a Harvard professor, Graham Allison, who wrote widely on the Cuban missile crisis at an earlier time, wrote a book called The Thucydides Trap. And his argument was that if you look at the Peloponnesian War, which in many ways was the first forever war, I think it went on for about 27 years. It was caused by a rival power threatening the predominant position of Sparta. And of course the rival power was Athens. And so, Allison’s point was you have a similar situation now with China and the United States. The United States has been a dominant power for years and years and here’s China emerging and the United States, like Sparta ,not recognizing Athens’ role, we’re unwilling to recognize the increased power of China.
And then in my piece, I also extended this to the European rivalry that was taking place in the years running up to World War I. And that was, of course, Britain dominating the seas at this time and being the dominant international power and worried about the emergence of Germany and the rise of Germany threatening that standing, which I think led to in part to World War I, a war that I don’t think anyone won it. World War II, we know why we were fighting and we knew how the war started. World War I is still a puzzle in terms of who was responsible for that war, but surely this rivalry between Germany and Britain had a lot to do it. Now I’m not predicting that China and the United States will go to war. China would do anything virtually to avoid such a war. I assume the United States is not looking for a war with China. In fact, they’re signaling that they’re not even prepared to defend Taiwan, which is why a lot of people think China will take advantage of this opportunity to use military force.
I’m not one of those people, as I mentioned, but you could stumble into war just as the powers stumbled into war in World War I. All it takes is an incident that can’t be controlled. World War I, it was the assassination of the archduke.
Here, you could have a military confrontation that no one really wanted. Remember in George W. Bush’s first administration, actually the first months of his administration in 2001 there was a forced landing of a United States intelligence plane because of the actions of sort of a renegade Chinese pilot who was not conforming to Chinese strategy in the Pacific, but forced the hand of the United States. We were lucky to have Colin Powell, secretary of state then who stepped in because there were a lot of people giving George W. Bush advice that we should be very militant in fighting what China had done in this situation. Colin Powell had led diplomacy do its bidding and Colin Powell led the way.
And that’s an example for where we are now. United States and Iran, that can only be sort of mollified and ended I think with diplomacy. All of these threats, the use of military force is not really getting us anywhere in this what is really an illegal, unlawful, unjustified, unnecessary war that’s being fought at great costs now to the entire international community.
So there’s so much to think about these particular times. Maybe Memorial Day is the right day to be thinking about it.
SCOTT HARRIS: Absolutely, yes. Because the use of military force is not just a problem of Donald Trump, although he professed during his two campaigns to be some kind of passivist, which we know is totally not true. But yeah, in the time right now we’re living through where the Trump regime has proposed, what, $1.5 trillion record-breaking Pentagon budget.
MEL GOODMAN: A number that’s obscene, by the way. When the budget reached $1 trillion, that meant we were spending as much for defense as the rest of the world combined. What the Pentagon is going to do with $1.5 trillion is totally unknown to me, but they’ll probably want to build a lot of legacy systems that are now outmoded. Aircraft carriers I think don’t have a role to play now in the current international environment.
SCOTT HARRIS: That’s right. With drone warfare.
MEL GOODMAN: Drones and unmanned aircraft. And the same goes for Trump’s golden battleship. I thought we learned after World War II that there’s no longer any need for these battleships and we have an F-35 that’s so technologically sophisticated that only a certain percentage of them can get into the air at any particular time. We’ve built systems that we need contractors and civilians to maintain, to conduct maintenance. We’re just building with no understanding of what strategic purpose is involved. I think Xi Jinping knows what his interests are and he’s built an army and placed it on the coastline of China opposite Taiwan so he can threaten Taiwan and he can certainly use military force if he decides to.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, you have a group of defense contractors that have so much influence in Congress to get these huge military budgets passed so that they can cash in. But I wanted to get to one last question before we run out of time, Mel, and that is I know you had some thoughts on the resignation of Tulsi Gabbard that’ now announced … Well, she was the director of national intelligence. She’s leaving the post, I think, at the end of June to care for her husband who’s suffering cancer and Aaron Lukas has been named as acting DNI. I believe that’s Tulsi Gabbard’s deputy there. But what are your thoughts on Tulsi and this replacement in Aaron Lukas?
MEL GOODMAN: Well, Tulsi Gabbard was never qualified to be the director of national intelligence. That was an absurd appointment, but there’s so many appointments that make no sense in the Trump administration in his second term that she really doesn’t even stand out when you think of people like Kash Patel and Marco Rubio and John Ratcliffe for that matter. But she clearly was not qualified and she never really worked her way into the Trump administration. She was never part of the national security debate. She was never at the White House when key decisions were being made and you needed an intelligence input from the director of national intelligence. And it’s I guess a terrible personal tragedy that is leading her to resign now, but she had no role to play and I think she was destined to be removed like three other women in the Cabinet forced out or resigned for various reasons.
My concern now is that you have an acting director of national intelligence and we’re talking about 17 or 18 intelligence agencies. His name is Aaron Lukas and he is not qualified either. He has a very limited background. He’s clearly a Trumpian in that he’s anti-woke. He’s anti-DEI. He doesn’t believe that Russia had any role to play in the 2016 elections. He’s been praising Trump over the years for ending the toxic DEI environment in the intelligence community. He was a chief of staff to Richard Grennell and Grennell was the acting DNI in the first term and he served on the NSC (National Security Council) also in Trump’s first term and he doesn’t really have the background or the stature. And maybe it doesn’t matter because John Ratcliffe has assumed the authority over the intelligence community, which (was) the traditional role for the Central Intelligence Agency until the DNI was created after 9/11. I was opposed to the creation of the DNI because it never made any sense that this small organization when it was first named would exercise control over so many intelligence agencies.
Now we have more intelligence agencies and the DNI is not a small operation, it’s a large operation that wastes a lot of money. So when you look at the entire national security community, it’s alarming. When you think about the leaders of the State Department, the NSC, the CIA, the director of national intelligence, this is a weak group of individuals and it’s not clear that Trump pays any attention to them in the first place.
So when you look at American national security, we’re at a very dangerous juncture. We’re in a war that we don’t know how to end. Russia is in a war that could lead to a greater threat against Europe. I think that’s exaggerated. It’s part of the threat exaggeration that the United States has been doing ever since the end of World War II, for that matter. And my 25 years of experience at the CIA convinces me that this exaggeration of the Soviet threat was terribly overdone even in the 1980s when the Soviet Union was coming apart at the seams and now I think we’re exaggerating the China threat to Taiwan to justify a $1.5 trillion defense budget money that we need for domestic purposes. There’s no question of that.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Mel, we’ll have to leave it there. Thank you so much for your insights into U.S. foreign policy, China in particular this evening and the discussion about U.S. military budgets and the threats we’re told are on the horizon, which may be exaggerated for other purposes. Always appreciate you spending time with us, Mel. Thank you so much.
MEL GOODMAN: Thank you, Scott. Pleasure was all mine.
SCOTT HARRIS: You take care. Bye-bye.
