Filmed May 19, 2026
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi, Bill Kristol here. Welcome to Conversations. I’m very pleased to be joined again by my friend Aaron Friedberg, professor, or maybe just recently retired professor of international relations at Princeton. We’ve had several conversations over the years, all of them very good, I must say, but we had one just two months ago, and normally, we don’t bring people back quite as fast, but we discussed, I think, in anticipation of the summit that was then scheduled, what might happen, and what the general state of US-China relations was, and also implications for US foreign policy more broadly, and the world situation more broadly. But the summit happened. It was pretty interesting, I think. We both agree. And so, I thought it would be worth really getting you on here. What is it? May 19th, a Tuesday. Almost exactly two months from our last conversation. And I really would love to talk about the summit, but also the broader questions raised by it, and the implications of it. So Aaron, thanks for joining me again.
AARON FRIEDBERG:
Thank you for having me back.
BILL KRISTOL:
So the summit was late last week. President Trump there for a couple of days with Xi Jinping. What’s your main takeaway? And then, we’ll get into some of the details, and then some of the broader implications.
AARON FRIEDBERG:
My main takeaway, I suppose, is there was not much of a there there, certainly not in terms of deliverables. Really very little concrete that was accomplished. I don’t know that that’s a particular surprise. The thing that struck me was that Trump’s position seemed to be quite weak and he played a weak hand poorly, I think. The Chinese side got, I would imagine, most, if not everything, that they wanted out of it. And I’m not sure that we got much of anything, and we may have given up a bit, at least in terms of appearances and prestige. So it’s kind of discouraging, and that made even more the case by Trump’s remarks about Taiwan afterwards. It’s not good.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. Well, that’s a very good summary. We can click off now and just let people go away impressed.
AARON FRIEDBERG:
Not very eloquent.
BILL KRISTOL:
No, very eloquent. So let’s go through some of that. What do you think Trump thought he could get out of it? What was his plan going in? What was Xi Jinping’s plan going in? And then, how did they execute those plans?
AARON FRIEDBERG:
Well, actually, I’d like to start with that because that’s one of the things that really struck me about the meeting and about the two principles. It’s just the difference in approach. China, and this is not unique to Xi Jinping, but it’s certainly the case since he’s been in charge, has, I believe, a long-term strategy that consists of various elements, but the bottom line is they’re aiming to enhance their power with respect to the United States in particular, and I think eventually to emerge as the dominant player in the international system, and they’re working towards that goal. They know that it’s not going to be achieved overnight, but they’re working towards it across all domains, economic, technological, military, diplomatic, and so on. So they have a strategy, they have a goal. It is not clear to me at this point what our strategy is, or even if we have one at the moment. What is it exactly that we’re trying to accomplish?
Are we interested in stabilizing the relationship? Are we still intent on competing against China? And if so, for what, and how? And what are the near-term objectives? It’s just not clear what any of those things are. I guess with the partial exception of the typical Trump focus on the commercial bottom line. I think really, in the end, what he cares most about, and maybe all that he cares about at this point, is trade deals. So in particular, he wants to be able to say that he’s gotten the Chinese to buy more Boeing jets, or to start buying more soybeans, and so on, to be more open to American companies. He floated the idea that China might be investing more in the United States. As far as I know, nothing in particular came of that, although it may be discussed. I think that’s his focus.
It is as everyone says. It’s transactional, it’s short-term, it’s focused on the bottom line. And I don’t think there is, at least not in Trump’s mind, and therefore not in the overall policy of the United States government, anything much beyond that. I don’t think we currently have a strategy, or if we do, I could not tell you what it consists of. And that is a change. Even under Trump one, I think there was a strategy that emerged from the various things he did. I think it was in many respects continued, rationalized, extended in various ways by Biden. And it looked, initially, as if Trump was going to continue along that same line, but now it’s not apparent that that’s what he wants to do. So that’s the thing that struck me most, and that’s why I think, from a Chinese perspective, it was all fine.
It didn’t blow up. They weren’t expecting anything big out of it. They would’ve liked it if Trump had said various things about Taiwan. Maybe they would’ve liked it if somehow, we had agreed to relax some of our export controls, but I don’t think they were going into this expecting any of that. Whereas I think Trump went into it initially hoping that he could say that he had achieved these trade bargains. And they gave him a little bit on that, but really not very much. So it’s like people always talk about playing chess and playing checkers. I don’t know what the proper metaphor is, but they are playing a longer-term strategic game, and at this point, I don’t see that we are.
BILL KRISTOL:
So I guess one question about the US, one question about China. On the US, you said we sort of had a strategy under Trump one and Biden. Maybe it began a little before Trump one, I suppose. And certainly, people like you have been arguing for the strategy of treating China as a serious competitor and so forth. I’ll let you articulate the strategy. But I’m struck that you think that seems to have been abandoned, or at least put on hold for now. That was how it felt to me looking at it much more as an outsider.
And then, from China’s point of view, and these two obviously are related to one another, I guess they may want to be dominant in the world, but certainly they treated it as if this was a meeting of two peers, two equal countries of partners, I think is the word they used. A strategic partnership, was that the term they used? Which has a certain implication of equals, I would say, and also above everyone else. And so, I’m curious how much you think just the summit, including just the optics, really, conform to that Chinese hope and how important that is for them in terms of their ambitions, really. So one question on the US side, one question on the China side.
AARON FRIEDBERG:
Let me start with the China side because I do think the symbolism, the appearances, are very important to them. And this is not entirely new, but it has become apparent progressively. It has appeared more and more to be the case that China and the United States are on the same level, that they’re peers. And I think that’s the way the Chinese leadership wants to be viewed. Maybe that in truth, people in the United States have been seeing them that way for a while, but perhaps they weren’t entirely convinced that that was the case. And I do think they feel that we’re now giving them their due. Look at the, I don’t know, the subtext of a meeting like this. For one thing, it’s the American president coming to China, not the other way around, and being shown around, and being impressed by all that he sees.
It’s the American president who was coming requesting things, or seeking things, “Buy more soybeans, buy more jets, maybe help us with the situation in the Middle East,” whereas the Chinese side doesn’t really seem to have been asking for very much, or at least not anything different than the things they normally ask for, which are, “Respect our interests,” and so on. So from the Chinese perspective, it certainly looks like this is an occasion on which the United States appeared as an equal, and even in some respects, as being the weaker player, at least for the moment. And I’m really not much one for analyzing the CCTV official photographs, and footage, and so on, but I’ve seen a couple of places where people have been analyzing it. And of course, they have the opportunity to show Trump next to Xi. Xi is gesturing boldly off at something in the distance and Trump is hunched over and looking tired, or he’s standing behind Xi Jinping.
I don’t know what the images were that were shown to the Chinese people, but I’m sure it was that message repeated over and over again. So from the US side, again, what is it that we were after? I do think that the short-term trade deals are the thing that Trump cares most about. I guess if the signals had been more encouraging in some way, perhaps the United States would have pressed Xi Jinping to be more helpful in getting some resolution to the situation in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump went out of his way to say that he didn’t ask for help. He said something to the effect of, “Well, when you ask a favor of them, then you have to give something in return,” which is true, although why he would view it in that way isn’t completely clear, so I don’t think we asked because it was clear that we weren’t going to get anything from them.
Then actually, by the way, just a small note, that’s something of a relief to me because I’d been concerned, I still am somewhat, that China might try to do with this situation, what they did with North Korea back 20-some years ago where we were getting very concerned about the North Korean Nuclear Program and making noises about what we might do about it. And China stepped in and then hosted these so-called six-party talks that dragged on forever. And the Chinese inserted themselves into that situation and used that position to try to extract concessions from us, or at least to be able to say to us, “You don’t want to make trouble for us over Taiwan,” for example, “You really need our help in dealing with this North Korean nuclear issue.” And of course, at the same time as they’re doing that, they were doing things to help the North Koreans to alleviate some of the pressure we were trying to put on North Korea with sanctions and so on. So I’ve been a little worried that we might step into that trap again. It doesn’t appear, at least thus far, that that’s the case.
BILL KRISTOL:
Though on Iran, we’ll just take a minute on Iran because it is kind of important. When you and I talked two months ago, the war had begun, Trump had begun the war, and we were talking about what implications it might have for China policy, and how China might view this, and others might view this. But certainly, Trump indicated, he wanted to claim that Xi Jinping was in favor of opening the Strait, and the first readout from the US was vaguely positive, claiming that China was vaguely positive on our goals. That seems to have disappeared because China made pretty clear, I think presumably, that they were not helping out on anything.
And in fact, they explicitly said, I think at one point, the Chinese, that they were going to continue to buy oil from Iran if they chose to. And so, maybe that saved us, as you say, from a trap that we would’ve otherwise created of our own making and fallen into. But I guess my broader question is how much did the fact that we were in the war with Iran, and are, and that the Strait was open, and we were bogged down there, not being willing to do what we could to open it, if we can incidentally, and not being willing to give up on the notion that Iran would control it. How much did that affect the whole summit? I’m just curious. And again, going forward, how much has the war in Iran… How big a deal… China, US, that’s the big picture, or global, the confrontation. All the sophisticated foreign policy thinkers, “Don’t get bogged down in the… “.
Seems to me, a lot of people in the Trump administration were telling us just a year and a half ago, chastising people like us who were open to helping Ukraine, or doing things in the Middle East for that matter, “Don’t get bogged down in the Middle East. Don’t get bogged down in Europe. China, this is the issue.” Suddenly, you don’t hear that quite as much as Trump is fighting this war in Iran. But I am curious, from your point of view analytically, how big a deal is the Iran war in the context of overall international relations, and in the context of China as well?
AARON FRIEDBERG:
Well, I think to start with the second, I don’t think it’s decisive in any sense. I don’t think it’s changed the trajectory of US-China relations in any way. I think from a Chinese perspective, at this point at least, it’s a net positive because it has further antagonized our allies. It’s certainly preoccupied us and pulled attention and resources away from focus on the Indo-Pacific and on China, at least in the short term, and that’s a positive thing. I don’t think they’re sitting and counting the number of missile interceptors that we’ve expended and thinking that when it gets below a certain number, that’s the moment to attack Taiwan. But they certainly would rather us be occupied elsewhere and expending resources elsewhere. And I do think—and this is just speculation on my part—I have not seen anything that directly supports this. But they have to feel that Trump’s hands are somewhat tied, and so his position is somewhat weaker. He certainly appears to be concerned about what the economic effects are going to be, although he keeps saying that he’s not and has to be worried about where the US economy is going with elections coming up. All of that it would seem to me, again, from a Chinese perspective, would suggest that the US was not in any mood to push anything with China to ratchet up sanctions beyond the sanctions that have already been imposed, for example, on some Chinese energy companies that are buying oil.
So from a Chinese perspective, I think it’s a net positive, both in the short run and perhaps also in the longer run, because if it contributes to a further weakening of the ties between the United States and its traditional allies, a reduction in the trust and confidence that other countries have in the United States, that’s all to the good from a Chinese perspective. I do think they were probably worried at the outset, and I think I mentioned this in our last conversation, I think at the beginning of the 2003 war with Iraq, they were a little worried that things might go splendidly for the United States and we would overthrow Saddam and have a favorable regime in sitting in control of the Persian Gulf and therefore in control of the energy resources that China relies on.
Maybe they were a little concerned at the beginning of this that perhaps the Iranian regime would collapse and maybe something would emerge that would be more favorable to the United States. That hasn’t happened. It doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. So I would think their anxieties about that have been reduced. The disruption in flows of energy through the strait out, because so much of it goes to Asia and some of that goes to China has to be a concern, though the news reports suggests that China has been able to get some amount of oil out tankers that the Iranians are letting pass through on their way to China, but it appears that the flow of oil has been reduced. That’s not a good thing. They don’t want that to go on forever, but it’s something that appears to be manageable, at least for the moment.
Something that people have pointed out is that in a way, this crisis and the consequences that flow from it have vindicated Xi Jinping’s emphasis on self-reliance and on preparedness. And the Chinese do seem to have been prepared for something like this. They have vast oil reserves that they’ve built up. Something else people have noticed they’ve invested tremendously in electrification. They’re not all the way there yet, but they’re becoming less reliant on oil as a source of energy, particularly for transportation. So, they seem to be farsighted and their position seems to be reasonably good. I don’t think they want this to go on forever, but they’ve shown that they can ride it out.
This may be a little bit off the point that you were getting at, Bill, but there’s something that struck me about what’s happened in the time that Trump has been in office. So in the last, whatever, it’s been 16 months, 18 months. On two occasions, the administration has done things which sort of activated responses from other countries, which turned out to reveal vulnerabilities that we have and to which we don’t have a quick response. And one of those was the rare earth minerals and the export controls that China started increasing on those, particularly in October last year, which created all kinds of economic dislocation and seems to have been the reason that we got a truce and the Trump administration backed off some of the very high tariffs that it had imposed. And that is still a sword that hangs over our head and that of all the other advanced industrial countries.
And the US might have liked, for example, from this summit to get some sort of reassurance from China that it wasn’t going to reimpose or tighten those restrictions. And in fact, the readout, the US readout from the meeting says something like China agreed to, it’s some very bland formulation to discuss the concerns that the United States has about the reliability of rare earth mineral supplies, but that doesn’t mean they agreed to do anything. So, the world knows, we know, the Chinese know that we have this point of vulnerability, the effects of which have now been demonstrated. And of course, the other one is the Strait of Hormuz, that what Trump did by starting this war with Iran wasn’t to create a new situation. Iran had been working towards the capabilities that would allow them to do this, but it did provide the occasion for them to disrupt flows of energy out of the Gulf.
And the world now sees that they have that capacity and that we don’t have a ready solution to it. So it’s kind of revealed, it’s not revealed preference like the economists say, it’s kind of a revealed vulnerability or revealed weakness, which is the result of two, I would say, rather rash decisions that Trump made, which were intended to produce some kind of quick and decisive positive response, but actually wound up provoking reaction, which has caused a lot of problems for us. So that’s a little bit away from what you’re—
BILL KRISTOL:
No, no, that’s very interesting though, and very important actually. And yeah, you shouldn’t maybe thrust your chest out and do… I can put tariffs on anyone. I can get rid of this regime, and it is a bad regime and maybe getting tougher with China on trade wasn’t crazy. Incidentally, you’ve argued for it in certain ways, but doing it without thinking through what you’re going to do after they make their move is kind of a mistake, right? I mean, that’s…
AARON FRIEDBERG:
Right. And that’s also, I guess that points to coming back to the strategic level and the larger concern about where the parties are going or what they’re doing. I think the Chinese are in a sense playing for time. They believe that the trends are favorable, meaning that their relative power is increasing. I think they may now believe that the slope, the rate at which their relative power is increasing may be greater, perhaps in part because powers are as relative, and they see ours as declining.
So whatever it is they’re doing, we’re weakening ourselves in their assessment. So that gives them time, but they know what they want to do with that time. They want to further augment their military capabilities. They want to reduce their dependence on technology that we still control and become more self-reliant, as they say. They want to do things that reduce their vulnerability to energy shocks in the event of a conflict with the United States.
And they know they’re some distance away from being where they would like to be, but they know where they want to go and they now see that they’re going to be able to continue to move in the direction that they want to go. We should be also trying to strengthen ourselves in various ways. And we have a long list of things that we really need to do, some of which I think we have started to do and we started to do a few years ago in particular, things that would reduce our dependence on China for various intermediate goods materials like rare earth minerals, but also some manufactured goods. That’s a long list and it’s going to take quite a while and a lot of resources to reduce our dependence. We should be working on that. And this administration and the previous administration too started, for example, on the railroad minerals, critical minerals to do things to increase domestic investment, to cooperate with other advanced industrial countries to develop alternative sources of supply and processing of those materials, but that’s all going to take a long time.
So are we using this time, as we should be, to strengthen our position? I’m not sure. China certainly is. They know they have a ways to go, but they’re working towards it. I am concerned that we don’t yet have a clear direction and a very determined set of policies that will reduce those vulnerabilities and increase our strength relative to China.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s worrisome. And then I think even more worrisome, you mentioned this right at the beginning and now we should come to it is Trump’s comments, which I guess were mostly really post-summit on the plane coming back and then subsequently on Taiwan, which I think in a way everything you said so far, which is very interesting and helpful and informative on the summit is ex-Taiwan. I mean, it’s the summit as it stood whenever Trump got on Air Force One, where I guess we knew that they had discussed Taiwan and Xi … I think it only turned out later that Trump said Xi actually spent a long time on it in their private meeting, whatever that was Thursday night, I guess one of the evenings of the summit. But then Trump sort of decided to opine about Taiwan and the arms deal with Taiwan. I know friends of mine who follow this stuff much more closely than I do and almost as closely as you do were pretty astonished by some of that. But walk us through just what he said about Taiwan the arms deal, what the backdrop of that is and why it matters if it does.
AARON FRIEDBERG:
Well, he has said in the past a number of things that could be interpreted as raising doubts about the US commitment to Taiwan’s defense in the event that it’s attacked by China, and he said it sort of indirectly. So he’ll say, Taiwan’s a long way from us, but it’s closer to the Chinese mainland. And he repeated that trope a couple of times now using specific figures, although I don’t know if they’re accurate for how far Taiwan is supposed to be from us and how far it is from the Chinese mainland. What’s the message there? Well, it’s very difficult to project power over those long distances and it is going to be difficult if we ever had to do it to defend a friend from an opponent that’s very big and very close by. He’s stating a truth there, but by doing that, I think he’s introducing a question of whether he is truly committed in the long run to Taiwan’s defense. So, he did that again.
He’s also at times said things about how Taiwan stole our semiconductor industry, and I don’t know that he repeated that particular statement, but there too, when people say, well, we should be supporting Taiwan in part because we’re dependent on them for all these semiconductors, part of the answer to that is, well, that’s not a situation we really should be in. We should be working to lower that dependence. And that’s what the Biden administration was doing with the CHIPS Act. And I think the Trump administration wants to do that too and is trying to encourage investment in high-end semiconductor production in the United States, but talking about it in that way doesn’t express any kind of affinity for Taiwan, any sense that we’re sympathetic to them as a fellow democracy or even that we regard them as we should as a very successful economic and technological power despite their small size and an admirable example of the benefits of democracy and free market economic policies and so on.
So, he said a couple of these things. The thing that he did, which is different, and I think worrisome, don’t believe that he’s ever done this before, was to say explicitly on the plane, I think on the way back, well, we’ve got this arms deal pending with Taiwan. In fact, it’s been approved by the Congress, but it’s waiting for the White House to approve the sale to go forward. And Trump said in so many words, I can’t reproduce the exact quote, but that’s a pretty good bargaining chip, I’m going to be looking at that, implying that he’s thinking about how he might use that chip to get something out of Xi Jinping. And what exactly it is isn’t clear.
As I said earlier, my worry is when he thinks about any of these things, he’s thinking about very near-term economic benefits that we might gain. But by saying that, Trump violated one of the so called “Six Assurances,” and here we get into the almost quasi-religious aspects of the Taiwan relationship and all these documents and statements and so on. But the Six Assurances were sent by President Reagan to the Taiwanese government in 1982 after the US had agreed in principle to limit arms sales to Taiwan if certain circumstances applied. It was rather vague in that respect. But in order to reassure the Taiwanese that we weren’t going to cut the legs out from under them, the US sent what was at the time a secret message saying, “We will not do the following things,” and listing six things that we wouldn’t do. And one of the things that we said we wouldn’t do was to allow China to get involved in any negotiation or discussion of our arms sales to Taiwan. So saying, “This is not up for discussion with China.”
And Trump has just said explicitly that that’s the case. So he’s violated one of the Six Assurances. You might say, “Well, who cares? What difference does it make?” Maybe it makes a big difference to people in Taiwan because it’s a change that has to cause them some anxiety. I would worry also that it’s a signal to Beijing that we’re kind of open for business on this and make us an offer. Tell us what you’ll do in return for our constricting or cutting arms sales to Taiwan. And of course for Taiwan, that would be a disaster if it happened. And even if it doesn’t happen, the thought that it might happen and the fact that an American president is now seemingly willing to discuss the possibility that it might happen has to arouse deep concern on the part of people in Taiwan who fear that ultimately the mainland is going to try to coerce them into accepting what they would call reunification.
So I haven’t followed what the reaction has been in Taiwan, but it has to cause a lot of concern, certainly among people in the current government. And maybe it also gives some encouragement to the opposition party, which has generally taken a softer line on relations with the mainland. So Trump, in this offhanded comment, has, I think, stirred a hornet’s nest and we’ll see what comes of it. It’s possible that nothing will and he’s just sort of musing about this, but it does sound like he’s looking for leverage. He’s looking for things with which to extract some kind of deals from China and he seems to be edging closer to attempting to use the Taiwan relationship in that way. And that would be a dramatic departure from previous US administrations going back to 1979.
BILL KRISTOL:
And so I suppose we’ll see what he does with the actual arms sale. And we’ll know much more one way or the other. And pretty soon, I guess these things can drag out, but still it has been approved, right?
AARON FRIEDBERG:
Yeah.
BILL KRISTOL:
And this is something I think approved in a bipartisan way, Biden was for it and Trump was for it. So I mean this is kind of a pretty dramatic if we walk away from that.
AARON FRIEDBERG:
Right. And I have to say, I don’t expect that we will, at least not right away. Maybe we will. But that would be quite shocking. But there may be things that followed from it where we start to introduce into our discussions with the Chinese the question of our arms sales to Taiwan. We’ll see what happens. But yes, there’s been bipartisan support for it. As of the end of last year, I guess the beginning of this year when the package was approved, one of the things that you heard from people in this country who have been arguing that in spite of what he may be doing on the domestic front, in spite of what he may be doing with regard to Ukraine, for example, Trump is going to take a very tough line on China and that the arms package was supposedly an indication of that. Well, if he’s putting it on the table and now suggesting he’s willing to bargain over it, that’s not a very tough position. So I haven’t heard what some of those people have said about this, but I’ll be curious to see their reaction.
BILL KRISTOL:
I mean, how broadly do you think the image in Taiwan, but more importantly, I suppose, well, in Beijing and around the world is coming out of the summit and the surrounding events and the policies that are or aren’t on the table and so forth, is that the Trump administration’s gone soft on China. What was supposed to be its signature tough policy. Obviously, they never were pro Ukraine. Trump wasn’t… He’s always disliked NATO. Other things that some of us would think are mistakes and are kind of softness, you might say, or damaging our alliance structure, which is part of our strength, but okay, they thought it wasn’t part of our strength.
But China was the one that thing they were unambiguously tough on, right? I mean, I think supposedly at least, both in terms of trade being hardheaded and the tariffs and tough dealing, but also obviously in terms of the military competition, I think Hegseth says maybe we say in the defense document from late last year that we are committed to military superiority, is that right? Or dominance or something in the Pacific Theater? So there’s a lot of talk like that. How much do you feel personally, just analytically, we’re sort of softer ironically than previous administrations that were criticized by a lot of us, a lot of our friends, a lot of us, actually, for being too soft on China. How soft have we gone on China? And how dangerous is that in terms of how Beijing understands that?
AARON FRIEDBERG:
Well, I think there are a lot of things that are underway kind of below the surface, particularly on the military side, which as far as I’m aware, are continuing to proceed. And we’re saying we’re going to spend $1.5 trillion on defense and presumably some chunk of that is going to go towards forces that would be relevant in the Pacific, a bigger fleet and so on. So it’s not like we pulled the plug on any of that stuff, but it’s not what is front and center, at least in what the administration is talking about.
And we haven’t terminated or threatened to terminate our alliance relationships with Korea, or Japan, and Australia, things that Trump may have sort of fulminated about in his first administration. So I don’t think there’s reason for people to be deeply concerned in the short term that there’s any shock coming. And there are things you could point to which suggests that we’re competing and we’re staying in the game. But one thing that I worry about is if it appears that we are backing away from a tougher stance towards China, for example, on export controls, it’s going to be that much harder for us to convince our friends whose cooperation we need on some of these things to play along with us.
It was hard enough before and it’s only going to get more difficult if they have to think that perhaps we’re not going to follow through. So I think we’re weakening our hand, we’re lessening our ability to gain the cooperation of our friends and allies if we’re talking as if we are pursuing détente with China rather than continuing to compete with them vigorously, even if for the moment there isn’t dramatic change in what we’re actually doing.
BILL KRISTOL:
How worried are you that Xi Jinping might think or might be persuaded to think that there’s a window of opportunity here to move progressively on Taiwan?
AARON FRIEDBERG:
I’ve tended not to be that concerned about the idea that there’s sort of a short-term window. I thought that the anxiety about 2027 and the significance of the CCP leadership statements about military readiness and the identification of 2027 as a relevant date was overstated and probably was a misinterpretation. That it’s not like the leadership is saying once the calendar flips over, we need to be at a point where we’re going to go to war. I don’t think that’s the way they think about things. And I still don’t think that.
I’ve tended to believe that their decisions reflected a kind of longer-term assessment or an assessment of longer-term trends and that on balance they were pretty optimistic about that. As I said earlier, I think there’s reason to believe that they are more optimistic now than perhaps they were a year, year and a half ago because of the difficulties that the United States now finds itself in. There is one concerning thought, and this is pure speculation, it’s not based on anything that’s happened or that anybody in China has said, but I do wonder if they can’t believe their good fortune if they are looking at the situation now and thinking Trump is kind of on the back foot, he’s done a lot of things which, from their perspective, have weakened the United States and perhaps damaged our alliance relationships. Do they think that this is going to last? And if not, how does that affect their calculations? Do they believe that the next American president is likely to snap policy back more in the direction that it is going, or do they think Trump has set the path for the future and they can continue to bide their time?
If they thought that the situation was only going to get tougher and this was as good as it was going to get, might they, under those circumstances, be willing to take greater risks and apply pressure? And in the expectation, which might turn out to be wrong, that Trump just didn’t have the stomach for it and that he really meant it when he said, “Well, they’re 9,500 miles away, what are we going to do about it?” So I do worry about that a little bit. I think they’ve… Again, I suspect they can’t quite believe their good fortune that things have gone as badly for Trump as they seem to be going, and I suspect they also don’t believe that that’s going to last forever because their view of all of this is ultimately the personalities don’t matter so much, it’s kind of material trends and world historical forces that shape the relationship that’s inherently competitive and that isn’t going to change.
So they believe that that’s where things are going. But they do also try to keep their finger on the pulse and assess the conditions almost minute by minute. And for that reason, I’m a little more concerned over the next couple of years than I might’ve been otherwise.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yikes, I mean, well, let’s see how their assessments day-to-day and week-to-week and month-to-month go, and we’ll keep a close eye on that. But putting that aside for a minute, let’s conclude with, I’d love your broader thoughts just on the relationship on China’s view of its relationship standing vis-a-vis the US and of course vis-a-vis the world.
AARON FRIEDBERG:
As I’ve said, I think they’re constantly assessing the longer-term trends. They’ve believed that, as Xi Jinping likes to say, the East is rising, the West declining, by which they mean China is rising and the United States is declining. One of the things that people pointed out about the recent summit is that Xi, on a couple of occasions, used these formulations, which are, I think, pretty clearly stating the view that the United States is a declining power and he invoked the infamous Thucydides Trap, the significance of which, I think, from a Chinese perspective, is they are a rising power, the United States is the declining power, we have to figure out some way to accommodate them and get along, or who knows what might happen, there’ll be great risks. And he used this in one of the public sessions. Trump must have been told after the fact that some of the things that Xi had said were actually expressions of the view that the United States is declining.
And so he sort of tried to clean up the record after the fact and said, “Well, Xi said these various thing, but then he clarified to me that he was really talking about Biden, when Biden was president, the United States was declining.” And again, Trump’s construction of what Xi said. And he went on to say that since Trump came back, America is having this amazing resurgence, and he repeated some of these things that he says about the United States being the hottest economy in the world and so on. Well, I bet my bottom dollar, I’ll bet my retirement that Xi Jinping did not say that. So Trump may have, after the fact, realized that it wasn’t that Xi was insulting him, but Xi was saying some things which are kind of condescending to the United States. So I do believe they think their position is getting stronger. I think they believed it before. As I’ve said, I think they see, in many of the things that Trump is doing, opportunities that may be accelerating some of those trends.
They may not be as convinced that the United States is going to respond as vigorously as they might’ve feared that we were going to. So that’s all the longer term judgment. As people always point out, they have tremendous internal challenges and difficulties, slow economic growth, unemployment and so on. So they’ve got lots to worry about, and that’s always the case, but their reading of the larger situation, I think, on balanced has to be pretty favorable. I guess another thing that I would say is they’re always looking for opportunities to drive wedges between us and our friends and allies, and Trump has presented those in spades over the last 18 months with his tariffs and bullying demeanor towards our European allies. China would like to take advantage of that, but so far, I don’t think that they’ve been able to do as much as they would’ve hoped because the Europeans in particular have woken up to this threat to their manufacturing industries and are now trying to mobilize themselves to respond.
So it’s not as if everybody is falling into their lap, but there are opportunities there that maybe are better than they would’ve been otherwise. And then in the other theater that matters to them, the so-called Global South, they have, for a long time, taken the view that they’re sort of the natural leaders of the developing world, even though they’re not technically a developing country anymore, that they are the leaders or they would like to be the leaders of opposition to American and Western arrogance. Chinese now can talk about so called universal values. And there too, I think they’ve seen opportunities and I have to believe that they think that Trump’s behavior, both at rhetorical level and the practical things we’ve done like getting rid of USAID, opened opportunities for them to do more of the same. It’s not that it changes things drastically, but it’s pointed in a direction that they would like it to go. I mean, what are we doing now to compete effectively with China in the developing world? I don’t think we’re doing as much as we should be or could be.
So there too, some reason to be optimistic. All of that said, I guess here, again, I’m speculating, but I’ve always believed that—and this based on some reading of what they write—that they’ve had a decent respect for the United States and for the US capacity to mobilize itself and to compete effectively when pushed far enough. I think I’ve talked to you before about this notion of the Cold War mentality and how the Chinese like to say, “Oh, you have a Cold War mentality.” And I think they’re concerned about that. They believe that if we were to lapse back into a Cold War mentality, we would be able to compete with them much more effectively than we have thus far, and they have to still be worried about that. That’s why they’re being cautious. They’re not pushing their luck. This is going back to our comments a few minutes ago about Taiwan, why I’m not really thinking that they’re reading all this as an indication that they can go ahead and seal that deal, but they have respect for us and for our system, but it’s dwindling.
They see us divided. They see our political system as kind of deadlocked. They see us having economic, social problems. Of course, they play all that stuff up, but I think they do genuinely believe that we’re a power in decline. They do think that that, at least in the near term, could make us more dangerous. We may be lashing out in frustration or trying to do things to prevent them from rising as rapidly. They have to be worried about that. But that’s a problem you’d like to have as compared to the opposite with feeling like it’s slipping away from you. I don’t think that’s what they believe. Of course, nothing is preordained, nothing is written. I think we’re still capable of snapping ourselves into focus a lot more so than we have been. And there may be some things that Trump administration is doing, which in the long run could be beneficial, at least in terms of our competitive position towards China with respect to some technologies and so on. So I don’t want to make it seem that it’s all coming up roses from their side, but they have a pretty good hand to play right now, I believe.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yikes. Well, look, it’s important to be so hardheaded and clear eyed about what’s happening. You and I are old enough because we met in the ’70s in grad school at Harvard and things looked pretty dire, and they were pretty dire, and these things can reverse kind of quickly, so I guess that’s maybe the good news. Sometimes it takes a change of administration, sometimes administrations reverse on their own. But I think I really appreciate you giving us this kind of candid and hardheaded view of what happened last week, but more importantly than just the details of last week, where we are in this crucial relationship, and one that the Trump administration itself has heralded so much as the centerpiece of global politics. And maybe it is the centerpiece of global politics, but if it’s the centerpiece, it’s not one that, as you’ve said, it’s not one that’s entirely reassuring right now, right?
AARON FRIEDBERG:
No, it’s the centerpiece. It, I believe, is the central axis around which someone else in the world is going to orbit, and I believe it’s a profoundly competitive relationship rivalry and we need to be keeping up our end to that because the Chinese certainly are working hard on theirs.
BILL KRISTOL:
Aaron Friedberg, thank you very much for this really interesting and informative and, I think, important conversation. Thanks for joining me again. We’ll do another one in however soon we have to, depending on what events transpire. So thanks, Aaron.
AARON FRIEDBERG:
Who knows— the pace this seems to be picking up. But thank you very much. It’s a pleasure.
BILL KRISTOL:
And thank you all for joining us on Conversations.
