This, from Ioffe's report at Puck yesterday. It certainly shows the deep chumminess between the policymakers and the alleged "journalist" who're part of the Blob... (Of note: one of the biggest backers of the ASC was for a long time-- may still be-- Tom Friedman's very wealthy father-in-law.)
What a difference a year makes. At last summer’s Aspen Security Forum, Chinese ambassador Qin Gang lit up the conference with a steely and vicious performance, blaming the U.S. for spreading a “Cold War mentality,” for escalating tensions with China, and hollowing out the One China policy. He weaponized the most sacred of American cows, Abraham Lincoln, to insist that America was backing secessionist “radicals” in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. He shocked and horrified the foreign policy establishment that had gathered in this mountain resort for the ultra-wealthy, represented in Congress, hilariously, by Lauren Boebert.
At this annual gathering where the national-security set decamps from Washington to escape the swampy summer and to catch up with old friends—and network to make new ones—Qin had disrupted the chummy atmosphere, terrifying them with ominous warnings, and, exactly one year later, he was gone without a trace. In December 2022, Qin was promoted to foreign minister and was replaced in May 2023 by Xie Feng, who sat across from Semafor’s Steve Clemons last week for a fireless fireside chat and had to punt, awkwardly, on the question of what happened to his predecessor, who had vanished from public view a month ago.
There were rumors that an affair triggered his downfall, while others whispered that he fell victim to infighting in the Chinese elite. Regardless, few believed Beijing’s official explanation—“a physical condition”—and Qin’s ghost haunted the forum this year. Every American official, from C.I.A. chief Bill Burns to national security advisor Jake Sullivan, was asked about Qin’s whereabouts and none of them had any clarity to offer. “We don’t know,” Sullivan said when asked if expected to ever meet Qin again. “We genuinely don’t know.”
Into the breach stepped Xie, who offered essentially the same message (that the deterioration of U.S.-China relations was all America’s fault), but in different words. He smiled, he encouraged everyone to hold hands and come together for peace, he made the audience laugh with a joke about Speedos, and then made them scratch their heads with a metaphor of China as the peony and America as the rose. And where Qin had gotten stunned silence, Xie got a big round of applause. To be fair, I cracked up when Xie was asked what redeeming qualities Beijing saw in Vladimir Putin, and he responded that, well, George W. Bush had looked into his eyes and seen his soul, and determined that “he’s dependable!” And then Xie couldn’t stop laughing at his own words.
This, it was obvious, was the better line to take with earnest Americans: a charm offensive. In the meantime, it seemed to go unnoticed that Xie’s floral formula for U.S.-China cooperation consisted only of a list of demands for the U.S. side; that he said Chinese democracy was more authentic because the Beijing government regularly gets 90-plus percent approval ratings; and that Clemons completely let him off the hook with his wildly contradictory answer about why China doesn’t condemn Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That said, one participant told me she worked in the nuclear industry and knew exactly what the Chinese government was up to, installing all kinds of sneaky, intelligence-gathering capacities into hardware. “It was all bullshit,” she said of the ambassador’s dulcet performance, “like a guy sweet-talking you in a bar.”
By Tuesday, the Chinese government issued a terse statement: Qin Gang was officially out. No reason was given.
“I Wouldn’t Fire My Food Taster”
The other man who haunted the Forum this year was Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin. On the eve of the conference, MI6 head Richard Moore told an audience in Prague that Prigozhin’s mutiny exposed “deep fractures” in the Russian elite. “I don’t think it needs all the resources of MI6 to conclude that there are deep fractures within the Russian elite around Putin,” he said. “If you have an invading army coming up the road at you, that indicates there has been a falling out.”
This provided the perfect opening question for the generalists interviewing the principals, who all led with the same vague, open-ended question about the deep fractures before settling for vague answers: Putin is obviously weaker, Prigozhin said out loud that the war was based on a false premise, and his mutiny showed, in the words of C.I.A. Director Burns, “does the emperor have no clothes or… why is he taking so long to get dressed?’”
Burns, a career diplomat, is skilled at saying nothing while talking plenty. But he was once ambassador to Russia and is one of the foremost experts on the place, and just hearing his insights on Putin and what he thinks is happening inside Russia was fascinating. As Prigozhin marched on Moscow, Burns said, the security services seemed “adrift,” while the elites wondered if Putin was no longer the arbiter—or their protector from each other. As for why Prigozhin is still alive and getting meetings in Moscow, Burns said, “Putin hates, in my experience anyway, the image that he’s overreacting to things.” Putin, Burns said, “is trying to buy time as he considers what to do with Wagner and Prigozhin himself.”
While he does that, he “is trying to settle things as much as he can” and that he’s going to “separate Prigozhin from what’s of value in Wagner.” Prigozhin has been to Belarus in the meantime, Burns continued, but, as he told the forum, “I’m not sure he has any plans to retire in the suburbs of Minsk.” Burns also had a warning: “Putin is someone who generally thinks that revenge is a dish best served cold, so he’s going to try to settle the situation to the extent he can. But, again, in my experience, Putin is the ultimate apostle of payback… so if I were Prigozhin, I wouldn’t fire my food taster.”
NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly also managed to ask Burns a more specific question: Where is General Sergey Surovikin, who hasn’t been seen or heard from since June 24, the day of Prigozhin’s mutiny? “I don’t think he enjoys a lot of freedom right now,” Burns said, shrugging and laughing as Kelly tried to press him for more. Later, standing by the cooling breakfast burritos, Colin Kahl, who just stepped down as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and who was effectively in charge of getting weapons to Ukraine, told me of Surovikin, “I think he’s handcuffed to a desk somewhere.”
I later caught Burns as he stood in the shade and asked him why he thought Prigozhin choked and turned back. “Some of his men started getting cold feet,” he explained. “This wasn’t what they had signed up for.” Prigozhin, Burns had said in his panel, was “making it up as he went along” on June 24. But, as he told me, he only had 5,000 men marching toward Moscow, not nearly enough to take a city with mined bridges and armed with Putin’s praetorian guard.
Did he see Putin as a procrastinator, who just needs to get through one more week, one more month, one more year, I asked? Burns agreed with that characterization: “He will dither and stall as long as possible,” he said, hoping for something to come along and save him. “He’s not a master strategist,” Burns added as a nervous press officer started creeping closer. “But he’s lost some of his tactical finesse.”
Aspen Civility Forum
The Security Forum has always been about Blobby chumminess, but this year, when the ranks of corporate sponsors—and attendees—ballooned and when the organizers made a concerted effort at bipartisanship, it seemed, at times, to go a little too far. The British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, a Tory, was interviewed by Fox News’s Martha MacCallum—as I heard, on the embassy’s insistence.
It made for quite the bizarre conversation, with MacCallum asking Cleverly about sources of disinformation and, later, Cleverly waxing philosophical about why more Americans don’t support Ukraine, as if a representative of one of the main outlets undermining that support—and sowing disinformation—weren’t sitting right next to him. (“There’s something very special about not just hearing not just from U.S. officials, but also our friends and competitors, and to do so in a calmer, less stressful environment that lends itself to real convo rather than posturing,” said Anja Manuel, executive director of the forum, when I asked her about the effort at bipartisanship.) Republican Senator John Cornyn, for what it’s worth, told me that he didn’t see support for Ukraine slipping among his constituents. “Texans support it,” he said, “but there’s a lot of crazy people out there, like Tucker Carlson, who’s just dangerous.”
Former Defense Secretary Mike Esper was stalking the grounds with a sour _expression_ and his own praetorian guard, but participated in a panel on new technology as if he were a totally normal former defense secretary, one who hadn’t posed with Donald Trump at Lafayette Square or overseen the military’s use of combat helicopters hovering low on the streets of D.C. to scatter peaceful protestors. Mike Pompeo spoke on a panel about rare earth minerals and their implications for national security (the panel was called “Between a Rock and a Hard Place”). Unmentioned was the fact that he was on this panel because he is on the board of USA Rare Earth, which was a financial sponsor of the forum.
And then there were the interviews, which could be so friendly as to be pointless. How, when you have the director of the C.I.A. on stage with you at a foreign policy conference for a very limited amount of time, do you ask him, “Is there any aspect of your job that’s fun?” How do you have the Secretary of State for a one-on-one interview, and with all that’s going on in the world, ask him extensively what he thinks about women’s soccer? Then again, it’s how you demonstrate to the principals that they will be treated well here, like the humans that they are, nothing too mean or challenging, and that they should come back next year. Which, given the Aspen Security Forum’s aspirations to become the American version of the Munich Security Conference, would make sense.
But beneath this thick schmear of civility, there was, of course, drama. Susan Glasser tore out of a journalists’ meeting with Cleverly (on the indoor basketball court) to take an urgent call with shaking hands: the Stanford president was resigning, thanks to a series of investigative pieces written in The Stanford Daily by Theo Baker, her and Peter Baker’s 18-year-old son.
After the meeting, when it became clear that the New York Times and Wall Street Journal had broken the story before the Stanford paper, David Sanger tried to make her feel better by repeating his now oft-used joke: in a household with Baker, Glasser, and Theo, only one of them had won a Polk Prize—and it wasn’t either of the adults. (Then Sanger, the unofficial mayor of this conference and a man who doesn’t blush at repeating stories, told us about the time a bear went into the Aspen Meadows gym while Michael Chertoff was on the treadmill and blocked the only exit. What did he do? “He kept running!”)
Just outside, NBC colleagues were hugging a furious Andrea Mitchell. (Mitchell, who is 76, is a kind of doyenne of foreign policy journalists—in part because, despite her stature, she still acts like a hungry cub reporter one-third her age—and conducts most of the highest profile interviews at Aspen.) A minute earlier, having absolutely no idea what was going on and just saying hihowyadoin to her, Mitchell frowned deeply and said, “bad” and gestured to all this. Right at that moment, newly minted NBC natsec editor David Rohde stepped in with comfort. “I’ve never been angrier in my 45 years” in the business, Mitchell fumed.
The reason for her fury, it turned out, was that she was supposed to conduct the interview with Volodymyr Zelensky, billed as a special anonymous guest, on the conference’s last day. But Zelensky’s people insisted on having CNN’s Fareed Zakaria do the interview and the Aspen people didn’t back Mitchell up, even though NBC was an official partner of the forum—and CNN wasn’t. Said one fellow journalist, shaking their head, “You just don’t do that to Andrea Mitchell.”
This article has been updated.