00:00Here's my take. Regular viewers know that I have not been a fan of Donald Trump's foreign policy
00:06in his second term. From threatening to seize Greenland and annex Canada, unilaterally raising
00:12tariffs sky high, to the fiasco of the Iran war, Trump has been reckless, chaotic, and deeply
00:18destabilizing. But he might well turn out to have the right instincts and perhaps even the right
00:24policy in one crucial arena, the U.S.-China relationship. In Trump's recent interactions
00:31with Xi Jinping, we saw a version of him rarely on display. He was respectful, almost deferential,
00:39eager to emphasize their personal rapport. Xi, by contrast, remained formal, disciplined,
00:45and never especially warm. The asymmetry was revealing. Donald Trump is obsessed with power,
00:53more than ideology or values, of course. He thinks in terms of leverage and dominance.
01:00He insults European allies because he understands how dependent they remain
01:04on American military protection and access to U.S. markets. Trump senses weakness and exploits it.
01:12But with China, he has come to understand something that much of Washington still struggles to accept
01:19emotionally. Beijing has enormous strength of its own, economic, technological, industrial,
01:25even military, and can wield it effectively. So Trump has evolved from belligerence toward
01:32a more complicated mix of rivalry and cooperation. That may be what this relationship requires.
01:40Contrast Trump's visit with the first meeting of Biden officials with their Chinese counterparts
01:45in Anchorage in 2021. The Americans launched into a televised public scolding of China over human
01:53rights, cyberattacks, and the international order. China's diplomats responded angrily, in kind.
01:59It was less a serious diplomatic exchange than a cable news shouting match.
02:04Many centrist Democrats live in fear of being portrayed as soft on China.
02:09So they often overcompensate rhetorically, adopting maximalist language and escalating symbolic
02:16confrontations. After showing skepticism toward Trump's China tariffs during the campaign,
02:22Joe Biden kept nearly all of them in place. Biden never visited China as president, nor did he invite
02:28Xi Jinping to Washington. The Biden team endorsed the claim, leveled by the first Trump administration,
02:34that China's actions in Xinjiang constituted genocide, a term that evokes industrial-scale
02:41extermination campaigns like the Holocaust or Rwanda. China's prison and re-education
02:47camps in Xinjiang are brutal and horrific, and dozens of scholars have called its actions
02:52against the Uyghurs a genocide. But as the economist noted, it is not what most people think of when conjuring
02:58up the word genocide. Trump's superpower is that he cannot be attacked from the right.
03:04He came to power after the 2016 election, railing against Beijing, blaming it for lost manufacturing
03:11jobs, trade imbalances, and America's industrial decline. In a sense, the analogy is not Nixon going
03:19to China, but rather Ronald Reagan, the uber-hawk to the right of Nixon, going to the Soviet Union.
03:26Trump may be capable of a similar pivot precisely because his base will follow wherever he leads.
03:34One need only look at how quickly many MAGA figures reverse themselves on intervention in Iran
03:39once Trump signals support for military action. Why would a more cooperative approach toward China
03:47make sense? Because the truth is that China is not the Soviet Union. The Soviet economy was smaller
03:53than Italy's by the end of the Cold War, by one UN measure. China, by contrast, is the world's second
04:00largest economy, the leading trading partner for more than 120 countries, and a technological powerhouse
04:07in fields ranging from electric vehicles and batteries to drones, advanced manufacturing,
04:13and even artificial intelligence. It produces more manufacturing output than the United States,
04:19Japan, Japan, and Germany put together. Trying to launch a full-scale Cold War against such a country
04:26would not resemble the struggle against Moscow when the world was already divided. It would mean
04:31tearing apart the global economy itself. American consumers would face higher prices and supply shocks.
04:38U.S. companies would lose access to one of the world's largest markets. Universities would lose
04:42many top students. The danger would not simply be economic pain. It would be the creation of two
04:48hostile technological and geopolitical blocks spiraling toward increasing confrontation.
04:56Of course, the U.S. and China are rivals. That is unavoidable in a bipolar world. They will compete
05:03economically, militarily, and strategically for decades to come. But rivalry need not mean total rupture.
05:12In the weeks before he died, Henry Kissinger noted to me that leaders of both countries should keep in
05:18mind how, in 1914, nationalist competition, pursued with no concerns about its consequences,
05:27led to a world war that upended the entire global order. In an age of AI, cyber warfare, and nuclear
05:35weapons, maintaining channels of dialogue and cooperation is more important than ever. The two countries should
05:41compete fiercely while still trading, talking, and collaborating where possible on nuclear stability,
05:48AI safety, pandemics, and financial crises. During the Cold War, Washington and Moscow maintained arms
05:55control talks even at moments of intense hostility because both sides understood that unmanaged rivalry
06:02could end in catastrophe. That remains true today. And if Donald Trump, for reasons rooted less in
06:09philosophy than instinct, has come to recognize this basic reality, then on this issue at least,
06:16his pragmatism makes sense. Joining me now to discuss the summit are Matthew Pottinger, the former
06:22U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor and the Point Man on China in Donald Trump's first term,
06:29and Jessica Chen Weiss, Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
06:36Jessica, let me begin with you and ask you, what was notable to you about this summit? What did you
06:42see
06:42that that was, for you, striking? Well, I think contra expectations that, you know, Xi Jinping
06:48was going to eat Trump's lunch. I actually think that the summit showed that what China really wants
06:54is stability, not to bury the United States or race for hegemony. And that, in fact, the priority that
07:00Xi Jinping and his CCP leadership place on a stable external environment to continue to buy time for their
07:06own development amidst domestic economic challenges is, for me, the biggest takeaway that we should all
07:13be keeping in mind. Matt, you wrote an article in the Financial Times, I think it was saying,
07:19beware of the gifts that Xi Jinping might bestow on Trump as kind of Trojan horses, a deal on chips,
07:27a peace gesture on Taiwan, an investment in U.S. manufacturing. He didn't do any of those.
07:32Do you, why do you think and what do you, what did you, what's your read on the summit?
07:38Yeah, look, Freed, you said at the top that the Nixon moment in China is the wrong
07:45analogy. And I think you're right about that. But what I think the correct analogy is,
07:49is Nixon's policy towards the Soviet Union. That was the detente policy that was, you know,
07:57understandable at the time, why we pursued detente vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. We were
08:02stuck in a war that we were losing in Vietnam. He, President Nixon wanted to go into talks on
08:09strategic arms limitation with the Soviets. So he went towards a more accommodating sort of posture
08:14towards the Soviets. That, and, and I think this was, this is, was really a detente policy
08:21in both directions, from Beijing and from President Trump towards Beijing. The challenge,
08:27the challenge is to not let that policy become a parody of itself over time, which is what happened
08:35to the detente policy of the 1970s. The Soviet Union used that time to basically run buck wild around
08:42the world. They were launching insurgencies in the Horn of Africa and Angola and across Latin America and
08:49even trying to start a revolution in Portugal, you know. And so by the time the end of the 70s
08:55came
08:56around, the Carter administration, Brzezinski, saw the Soviets invade Afghanistan. He said that was the
09:02final nail in the coffin of, of detente. So detente became a parody of itself. And that's what we have
09:09to guard against this time.
09:11Jessica, what do you make of that argument that, you know, the Chinese are, as you put it, biding
09:16their time, building their strength, but they are continuing to build, you know, military facilities
09:22in the South China Seas. They are continuing to increase the number of overflights to Taiwan and
09:29demand unification there. They are continuing to steal American intellectual property. In other words,
09:35there is a kind of underneath the detente, there is a, there is a Chinese policy that is fairly
09:41aggressive. I mean, I think it's quite clear that what China wants is to protect their sovereignty,
09:46to preserve the security of the Chinese Communist Party leadership with Xi Jinping at the helm and to
09:52continue to develop into the sort of modern country that they have wanted. But I think the biggest threat
09:58here to detente is not that we actually get there, but that we fail to because of Trump's kind of
10:04volatile tendency to flip-flop, right? I mean, for example, at the, after the summit, he said he
10:10welcomed Chinese investment in up to 500,000 Chinese students. But his policies and the Republican Party's
10:15policies have been anything but welcoming. Trump has, you know, prioritized business deals over the kinds
10:21of economic gains that would make Americans' lives more affordable. And then, you know, on Taiwan,
10:27he's been highly erratic. And I think that the essence of preserving peace and stability is, you know,
10:33calm, incredible assurances, as well as threats. And he's, you know, not been calm or credible,
10:39I think, on either score. In fact, he shouldn't be telling reporters that U.S. arms to Taiwan
10:45are a bargaining chip for economic or trade concessions. So I have a lot of questions about
10:51this. And I think that we do need a growing effort to avoid war with China. But whether he can
10:56get us there, count me skeptical.
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