Shadowing Practice: Trump's Iran, China & US actions have set 3 new stages | Fareed's Take roundup - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
C1
Here's my take.
260 sentences
If sentences are too short or too long, click Edit to adjust them.
1
Here's my take.
2
Why is the most powerful country on the planet unable to get its way with a much smaller,
3
weaker country that has been ravaged by economic sanctions and military strikes?
4
At one level, the simplest way to understand America's problem in the Iran war is to use game theory.
5
Donald Trump decided to play a game of chicken with Iran.
6
Think of two drivers racing straight at each other.
7
In these situations, if the stakes for one side are existential and for the other much lower,
8
the side with those bigger stakes usually prevails.
9
For the Iranian regime, if they lose,
10
there's a good chance they end up toppled and slaughtered.
11
For Trump, it would be a bad weekend at Mar-a-Lago.
12
It's easy to see why the Iranians would be more willing to lock their steering wheel in that game of chicken.
13
But there's a broader reason why America has found it so difficult to handle Iran,
14
one that is not just about Trump and this latest ill-conceived war.
15
Ever since the Islamic regime took power in Iran,
16
America has been of two minds about it.
17
On the one hand, the U.S has had certain issues it wanted resolved,
18
from the return of the hostages to nuclear limits.
19
On the other hand, it wants to topple the regime,
20
not just negotiate with it.
21
There is a tension in these two attitudes that has run through American foreign policy for almost half a century.
22
Does Washington want to change certain policies of Iran,
23
or does it want to change Iran?
24
If Washington negotiates with Tehran,
25
inevitably there is give and take.
26
There are concessions on both sides.
27
There is some relaxation of hostilities.
28
Above all, in engaging with it,
29
the United States government conferring a certain degree of legitimacy on the Islamic Republic,
30
treating it as a serious negotiating partner,
31
accepting that it represents Iran on the world stage.
32
But that acceptance sits uneasily with some American elites who feel that the Islamic Republic is illegitimate,
33
should not exist, and Washington's only policy toward it should be to overthrow it.
34
And yet there are things Washington wants that only Iran can deliver.
35
That is why even Ronald Reagan found himself secretly negotiating with the Iranian mullahs while publicly denouncing them.
36
We can see the tension almost daily in Donald Trump's policy toward Iran.
37
One social media post threatens to destroy Iranian civilization and bring an end to 47 years of evil.
38
Another one that same day speaks of the progress being made in negotiations with Iran.
39
Trump enters negotiations and seems optimistic about a deal with Iran,
40
and in between rounds starts a war with Tehran and urges Iranians to overthrow their government.
41
Less than a week later,
42
he's back to promising that if they agree to his demands,
43
Iran will have a very bright future.
44
America had a similarly contradictory attitude toward the Soviet Union.
45
After the communists took control of Russia in 1917,
46
Washington broke relations with it and even tried in some small ways to overthrow it.
47
It took Franklin Delano Roosevelt about 15 years later to recognize its existence and exchange ambassadors with Moscow.
48
The tension reemerged after World War II.
49
In the 1970s, Henry Kissinger's policy of negotiation with the Soviet Union was pilloried on the right
50
because it was seen as bolstering the standing of an evil empire.
51
Kissinger's response was always that America stood in ideological opposition to the Soviet Union,
52
but that it also had certain national interests,
53
like the control of nuclear weapons,
54
which could not be handled without agreements with Moscow.
55
Kissinger's equivalent in the Iran debate was Barack Obama.
56
Obama's was the one administration to make a choice.
57
It determined that while America might prefer another regime in Iran,
58
it had to deal with this one to tackle the greatest danger to America's national interest,
59
which as with the Soviet case, involved nuclear weapons.
60
The Iran nuclear deal was an effort to take the one most dangerous element of Iran's foreign policy and neutralize it.
61
And it succeeded at that.
62
But for many on the right,
63
the price was that it,
64
in some sense, legitimized the regime.
65
So Trump pulled the U.S out of the deal,
66
which then led to the discrediting of then-Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and the return of the hardliners in Tehran,
67
who ramped up Iran's enrichment program,
68
which has brought Donald Trump right back to the same dilemma.
69
Does he make a deal or take a stand?
70
At this point, it's clear that Trump wants a deal.
71
But in making it, he might end up giving the Islamic Republic what it has been seeking for 47 years,
72
unqualified acceptance even from the most hardline elements of the United States.
73
For Tehran, that is a prize worth many concessions.
74
Regular viewers know that I have not been a fan of Donald Trump's foreign policy in his second term.
75
From threatening to seize Greenland and annex Canada,
76
unilaterally raising tariffs sky-high to the fiasco of the Iran war,
77
Trump has been reckless, chaotic and deeply destabilizing.
78
But he might well turn out to have the right instincts and perhaps even the right policy in one crucial arena,
79
the US-China relationship.
80
In Trump's recent interactions with Xi Jinping,
81
we saw a version of him rarely on display.
82
She was respectful, almost deferential,
83
eager to emphasize their personal rapport.
84
She by contrast remained formal,
85
disciplined, and never especially warm.
86
The asymmetry was revealing.
87
Donald Trump is obsessed with power.
88
More than ideology or values,
89
of course, he thinks in terms of leverage and dominance.
90
He insults European allies because he understands how dependent they remain on American military protection and access to U.S markets.
91
Trump senses weakness and exploits it.
92
But with China, he has come to understand something that much of Washington still struggles to accept emotionally.
93
Beijing has enormous strength of its own,
94
economic, technological, industrial, even military,
95
and can wield it effectively.
96
So Trump has evolved from belligerence toward a more complicated mix of rivalry and cooperation.
97
That may be what this relationship requires.
98
Contrast Trump's visit with the first meeting of Biden officials with their Chinese counterparts in Anchorage in 2021.
99
The Americans launched into a televised public scolding of China over human rights,
100
cyber attacks, and the international order.
101
China's diplomats responded angrily, in kind.
102
It was less a serious diplomatic exchange than a cable news shouting match.
103
Many centrist Democrats live in fear of being portrayed as soft on China.
104
So they often overcompensate rhetorically,
105
adopting maximalist language and escalating symbolic confrontations.
106
After showing skepticism toward Trump's China tariffs during the campaign,
107
Joe Biden kept nearly all of them in place.
108
Biden never visited China as president,
109
nor did he invite Xi Jinping to Washington.
110
The Biden team endorsed the claim,
111
leveled by the first Trump administration,
112
that China's actions in Xinjiang constituted genocide,
113
a term that evokes industrial-scale extermination campaigns like the Holocaust or Rwanda.
114
China's prison and re-education camps in Xinjiang are brutal and horrific,
115
and dozens of scholars have called its actions against the Uyghurs a genocide.
116
But as the economist noted,
117
it is not what most people think of when conjuring up the word genocide.
118
Trump's superpower is that he cannot be attacked from the right.
119
He came to power after the 2016 election,
120
railing against Beijing, blaming it for lost manufacturing jobs,
121
trade imbalances, and America's industrial decline.
122
In a sense, the analogy is not Nixon going to China,
123
but rather Ronald Reagan, the uber-hawk to the right of Nixon,
124
going to the Soviet Union.
125
Trump may be capable of a similar pivot precisely because his base will follow wherever he leads.
126
One need only look at how quickly many MAGA figures reverse themselves on intervention in Iran
127
once Trump signals support for military action.
128
Why would a more cooperative approach toward China make sense?
129
Because the truth is that China is not the Soviet Union.
130
The Soviet economy was smaller than Italy's by the end of the Cold War,
131
by one UN measure.
132
China, by contrast, is the world's second largest economy,
133
the leading trading partner for more than 120 countries,
134
countries and a technological powerhouse in fields ranging from electric vehicles and batteries to drones,
135
advanced manufacturing, and even artificial intelligence.
136
It produces more manufacturing output than the United States,
137
Japan, and Germany put together.
138
Trying to launch a full-scale Cold War against such a country would not resemble the struggle against Moscow
139
when the world was already divided.
140
It would mean tearing apart the global economy itself.
141
American consumers would face higher prices and supply shocks.
142
U.S companies would lose access to one of the world's largest markets.
143
Universities would lose many top students.
144
The danger would not simply be economic pain.
145
It would be the creation of two hostile technological and geopolitical blocks spiraling toward increasing confrontation.
146
Of course, the U.S and China are rivals.
147
That is unavoidable in a bipolar world.
148
They will compete economically, militarily,
149
and strategically for decades to come.
150
But rivalry need not mean total rupture.
151
In the weeks before he died,
152
Henry Kissinger noted to me that leaders of both countries should keep in mind how,
153
in 1914, nationalist competition, pursued with no concerns about its consequences,
154
led to a world war that upended the entire global order.
155
In an age of AI,
156
cyber warfare, and nuclear weapons,
157
maintaining channels of dialogue and cooperation is more important than ever.
158
The two countries should compete fiercely while still trading,
159
talking, and collaborating where possible on nuclear stability,
160
AI safety, pandemics, and financial crises.
161
During the Cold War, Washington
162
and Moscow maintained arms control talks even at moments of intense hostility
163
because both sides understood that unmanaged rivalry could end in catastrophe.
164
That remains true today.
165
And if Donald Trump, for reasons rooted less in philosophy than instinct,
166
has come to recognize this basic reality,
167
then on this issue at least, his pragmatism makes sense.
168
I think he is a more mature,
169
more disciplined version of himself than he was in his first term.
170
That's what Jeff Bezos said about President Trump this week.
171
I'm puzzled by this statement from an obviously intelligent and accomplished businessman.
172
I look at Trump's second term and I see the ham-handed efforts to annex Greenland and Canada,
173
massive tariff hikes on most of the world,
174
a cruel immigration crackdown that was both lawless and ineffective,
175
and the sudden launching of a war without UN sanction,
176
congressional consultation, or any clear strategy.
177
If this is maturity, I would shudder to think what Trump's immature phase would look like.
178
The opposite is actually closer to the truth.
179
Trump's first term was disciplined,
180
more disciplined not because he was disciplined,
181
but because he was constrained.
182
He often deferred, however grudgingly,
183
to the Republican establishment and national security elites.
184
His early legislative agenda was shaped by Speaker Paul Ryan and executed by Chief of Staff Rence Priebus.
185
Top economic advisor Gary Cohn repeatedly talked him out of the global tariff hikes he had long wanted.
186
The generals whom he surrounded himself with urged caution on Iran,
187
support for NATO, and arms for Ukraine.
188
The lesson Trump drew from that first term,
189
however, was not that expertise mattered.
190
It was that experts were not loyal enough.
191
After the January 6th attack,
192
you see, many of his senior officials distanced themselves from him.
193
Some denounced him.
194
So this time, he has surrounded himself with people whose chief qualification is fealty.
195
The less distinguished the resume, the better.
196
Such people owe everything to him.
197
Process has given way to impulse,
198
procedure to instinct, government to gut.
199
But the starkest difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 is not policy.
200
It is enrichment.
201
It's scale.
202
It's brazenness.
203
It's open contempt for restraint.
204
The day before Bezos made his remarks,
205
the acting attorney general of the United States announced that the Justice Department would grant Trump,
206
his family, and his businesses immunity from all audits and investigations for any past tax-related misconduct,
207
And the announcement claimed it would last forever.
208
The week before, Trump disclosed that his stock portfolio had executed around 3,700 trades in the first quarter alone,
209
a staggering number.
210
Many following a suspiciously convenient pattern.
211
A stock bought shortly before a government action or statement that benefited it.
212
On January 6th of this year,
213
for example, the Trump portfolio bought half a million dollars of NVIDIA stock.
214
A week later, NVIDIA received U.S clearance to sell its H200 chips to China.
215
That was not all.
216
The Commerce Department this week announced an investment in a quantum computing company in
217
which a member of the Trump family holds interests.
218
And don't forget the $500 million UAE investment in a Trump family crypto venture,
219
the $2 billion UAE investment using that company's stable coin,
220
the flurry of new Trump organization real estate deals,
221
or the drone company in which the Trump family invested and that later miraculously received a Pentagon contract.
222
One number says it all.
223
Reuters calculates that from the first half of 2024 to the first half of 2025,
224
the Trump Organization's income rose from $51 million to $864 million.
225
This does suggest discipline, a relentless discipline devoted to monetizing the presidency.
226
But somehow I doubt But that is what Jeff Bezos had in mind.
227
The Trump Organization has maintained that Trump himself,
228
his family and the organization don't have any role in directing or influencing specific investments.
229
The deeper question is why is this possible?
230
And why has it produced so little resistance?
231
Scholars of corruption have long assumed that in advanced democracies,
232
graft becomes subtle and institutional campaign donations, lobbying networks, consulting contracts.
233
Trump has taken the elaborate machinery of an advanced industrial state and used it to accelerate something far cruder,
234
old-fashioned personal grift.
235
The public may be troubled,
236
but his MAGA base doesn't seem to be,
237
and that is the only constituency that could restrain him.
238
In a hyper-polarized country, corruption is no longer judged as an objective moral failing.
239
It is filtered through tribe.
240
If our side does it,
241
it's either fake news, clever politics, or totally justified revenge.
242
This reveals a deeper weakness in the American system.
243
The founding fathers built a magnificent constitutional framework,
244
but it rested on an assumption that they did not spell out,
245
that public officials would retain some shared commitment to unwritten civic norms.
246
Madison's design, ambition must be made to counteract ambition,
247
assumed that Congress would jealously guard its powers against the executive.
248
He did not imagine a political party that would surrender its institutional ambition to the personality cult of one man.
249
The legal guardrails are weaker than most Americans realize.
250
The president is largely exempt from standard federal conflict of interest laws.
251
Many of the actions I've described would expose even the senior-most cabinet secretary to grave legal peril.
252
For a president, the Supreme Court has decided
253
that the only remedy for official acts is impeachment and two-thirds of the Senate voting for conviction,
254
which in our partisan age requires a civic miracle.
255
The mature response to these travesties is not revenge,
256
but a restoration of the rule of law.
257
After Trump, the urgent task for the American Republic will be to turn norms into statutes,
258
curtail the ethical immunities of the presidency,
259
and find legal ways to ensure
260
that the highest public office in the world can never again become a platform for family business.
Download App
AI scoring for every sentence you speak
TRENDING
Popular
Why practice speaking with this video?
Practicing speaking through this video is highly beneficial for English learners as it encapsulates real-world discussions on geopolitics, allowing learners to engage with complex language structures and vocabulary. The video addresses critical issues faced by the United States regarding its foreign policy, particularly in relation to Iran and other global players. By shadowing the speaker, you can improve your ability to articulate difficult concepts clearly and confidently. This kind of practice not only enhances your speaking skills but also deepens your understanding of current affairs, making it easier to engage in conversations on important topics. Utilizing a shadowing app can facilitate this practice by allowing learners to listen and repeat, ultimately refining their language fluency.
Grammar & Expressions in Context
In the transcript, several grammatical structures and expressions stand out that are essential for advanced English speakers:
- Conditional sentences: "If the stakes for one side are existential and for the other much lower..." This structure is used to express hypothetical situations, which is crucial for discussing policy implications.
- Gerunds as subjects: "Negotiating with Tehran..." The use of gerunds here indicates ongoing actions, which is common in discussions about complex processes.
- Contrastive phrasing: "On the one hand... on the other hand..." This structure helps articulate conflicting viewpoints clearly, a useful skill when debating or discussing different perspectives.
- Passive voice: "Negotiations were taken place..." Understanding this voice can help learners recognize the focus on the action or state rather than who performed it, common in formal discourse.
- Direct and indirect speech: "Trump threatens... speaks of..." This technique showcases how to report speech, an important aspect of conveying opinions or observations.
Common Pronunciation Traps
While watching and repeating the video, learners may encounter several tricky words and phrases:
- Existential: This term can be challenging due to its length and syllable stress. Practice emphasizing the second syllable: ex-is-ten-tial.
- Legitimacy: Attention to vowel sounds is vital here; it's pronounced le-git-i-ma-cy.
- Geopolitics: The emphasis on the second and fourth syllables can be tricky: geo-po-lit-ics.
- Concessions: The soft pronunciation of "con" and clarity in "cessions" can often be mispronounced. It's stressed as con-ces-sions.
- Tension: This word may often be pronounced too softly; ensure you keep a strong 't' sound: ten-sion.
To improve English pronunciation, repeat these words using the shadow speak method found in your shadowing app. This active engagement can help you internalize proper pronunciation while also enhancing your vocabulary.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
☕ Buy us a coffee
ShadowingEnglish remains 100% free thanks to your support. Server and AI costs are high — your coffee keeps us going! 🙏