Macartney to Mar-a-Lago

Xi-Trump in the Long Context

This post originally appeared in ChinaTalk.

“The metric of competition is not escalation. You don’t get paid by the escalation if you’re competing. That’s a silly way to think about it.”

Julian Gewirtz, former Biden administration China official, now at Columbia, joins me to chat about the Xi-Trump visit and all things US-China. Matt Sheehan, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, drops by to give his takes on the AI angle.

We cover:

• What to expect (and not expect) from the Trump-Xi “stalemate summit”

• Historical echoes from the 1793 Macartney mission and the 1972 Nixon-Kissinger opening: summit optics, status games, and the choreography of power.

• Taiwan: arms sales, declaratory language, and Beijing’s long game on Taiwanese morale and politics.

• The good and bad case for China in the Iran conflict, and how Chinese officials may be reading America’s military commitments, political cohesion, and staying power.

• The US-China AI safety conversation after Mythos, China’s approach to frontier AI risks, and the control, harness, govern playbook for emerging technologies.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

Leverage, Political Will, and Deals

Jordan: Let’s talk about leverage between the two countries and the two leaders. What’s the right way to think about this?

Julian Gewirtz: President Trump is going to China in just a few days. This question of leverage is at the center of everything for both sides.

Historically, we’ve thought that the United States has a lot of leverage over China, and we can exert that leverage and that also shapes the strategic dynamic between the two countries. But over the last year and a half, you have seen China exerting leverage to an unprecedented degree. They’ve used critical minerals, instituted a global export control regime, and employed other forms of leverage as well. That has had the effect of putting the United States on the back foot.