Assessing the Trump-Xi Summit with Da Wei

Expectations for the 3rd Trump-Xi summit since Trump returned to power were modest, and the meeting delivered limited concrete outcomes: a two-month extension of the trade war truce, lower tariffs on some US and Chinese goods, an agreement to talk more about AI risks, two pandas for the Atlanta zoo, and a potential MOU between the US and Chinese militaries on crisis prevention and management.

As Bonnie Glaser wrote in an analysis of the summit, Xi Jinping came away with a larger diplomatic and strategic win. He was greeted personally by President Trump upon arrival at Andrews Air Force Base and hosted for a lavish White House dinner. Those optics can be displayed to the domestic Chinese audience as evidence that China is now a peer of the United States, and its leader Xi is a peer of the US president, Donald Trump.

Summits are rare opportunities to advance policy agendas, and this meeting fell short. The two leaders reportedly talked for about 90 minutes with consecutive interpretation. In my view, the leaders of the world’s two largest economies failed to seize the opportunity to discuss how to address bilateral, regional and global challenges: AI risks, technology competition, Taiwan, China’s rare earth exports, and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. The result was a summit that preserved the fragile stability in the US-China relationship without addressing the broader challenges that make it so consequential.

On today’s episode, Glaser speaks with a renowned Chinese scholar, Dr. Da Wei, Director of the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University and one of China's leading scholars on U.S.-China relations. They discuss his perspective on the summit and where U.S.-China relations may be headed next.

Timestamps:  
[00:00] Introduction
[02:32] Competing Views of a New Framework
[05:19] Will a Warm Reception Impact Chinese Policy?
[10:18] Will the Fourth Period Effort Last?
[14:04] Barriers to New Bilateral Dialogue Mechanisms
[18:09] Comparing the U.S. and Chinese Readouts
[21:37] Beijing’s View of a Military-to-Military MOU
[25:43] Greater Chinese Confidence = Greater Restraint
[31:19] Trump and Xi on Taiwan
[37:00] Lai Ching-te and Taiwan‘s 2028 Election
[40:22] What Can Be Achieved Before the Next Summit