berlin i'm going to start with the 1st obvious question tyson barker tensions between the u.s. and china over spying accusations are new so why the closure of houston's consulate now. it's a great question i think there are a couple of reasons some are diplomatic some a political we did hear probably department of justice the unsealing of indictments related to chinese hackers who were aggressively probing. research into vaccines for covert 19 this has been pretty systemic so that is kind of long that narrative clearly we have an escalation in and haha lynching tell as well but the big reason we have to say or one of the big reasons has to be political and the trumpet ministration is trying to draw a bright line between its. approach to china and the by the administration potential by administration's approach to try to saying that biden would be a last more conciliatory more combination of chinese authoritarianism. u.s. secretary of state might pump a you called for a joint reaction to act over what he calls the threat of a new tyranny from china does he expect support from th

now let's get more on that we are joined by tyson barker from the aspen institute in berlin tyson's thank you so much for joining us this morning what do you think we should expect to see this upcoming weekend. well i think it's going to be quite uncertain it's a specially in the in the sun dot states in the south where the numbers have been rising it is extremely hot actually there's a heat wave going on and it's like texas and oklahoma as we speak so what that tends to do of course when you're having family gathering barbecues is that drives people indoors that's where the air conditioning is one of the things that led to a big population migration to the south was the invention of air conditioning but that leads to a lot of air circulation and of course those are the right conditions for contamination so people are going to be getting together the spike that we're currently experiencing came up for the memorial day weekend a similar holiday that's when the bigger so it's quite worried come up with us a little bit more about the message that americans have been getting from the very top

that's bigger types of barker's on the truman national security project in berlin tyson what more do we know about why the u.s. has taken this step. well clearly this is an escalator tory step on the part of the u.s. and we don't exactly know the reasons they have not the us is not given exact reasons what we do know is the kind of atmosphere around this the u.s. has unsealed a an indictment the department of justice on tuesday involving 2 chinese hackers that have been infiltrating research centers looking into coke at 19 vaccines. the as you mentioned earlier my pump a.o. is doing a trip through europe it was just in the u.k. pushing for other countries to ban walkway so the relationship attention and ration ship is for a way where does this leave diplomatic ties between the 2 countries. there they're extremely fraught right now i think when you look at the kind of global landscape china and the united states are crisscrossing our allies partners pushing for partners to take a tougher stance visa be the other the chinese have become quite aggressive here in europe for example with