Live in Berkeley: Jessica Chen Weiss and Ryan Hass on the U.S. and China in 2025
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Welcome to this special live edition of the Cynica Podcast coming to you from the University of California, Berkeley. Hello, Berkeley! All right, that's what I want to hear. I want to thank Sophie Wolf and Xiaojie Ma and, of course, Rachel Stern, who just introduced us from the Center for Chinese Studies at the Institute for Asian Studies here at Cal for making this happen. What a delight it is to be back at my alma mater, a place where even knowing everything I now know...

about higher education. I would enroll here again if I could without hesitation, but of course now I would never, never get in. It's impossible. Anyway, Cal absolutely made me the person that I am today.

My four years spent here were just some of the best and most memorable years of my life where I made friendships that have literally just endured to this day. Best friend, you know, freshman year in the dorm, spends Black Hall, room 107, unit three. Yeah, all the way to today.

Ate way too much blondies and top dog. I'm still definitely gonna get up there and eat some top dog while I'm here. So in this program, of course, as you know, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.

Sinica, of course, is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The podcast is going to remain free. It's been free. It will always be free. But if you truly value the work that I do and you work for an organization that believes in what I'm doing with this podcast, definitely consider lending your support just as Cal Berkeley has and just as the University of Wisconsin-Madison has.

You can get me at [email protected]. I love getting email from people. Email me. If I had to come up with just two people who I would entrust with the stewardship of American policy toward China, people who I believe have the clearest picture of the challenges that China does and just as importantly does not pose to the United States,

who have both the intellect and, just as importantly, the temperament, the skills, the analytical ability, the whole package, those two people undoubtedly would be Jessica Chen Weiss and Ryan Haas. So you can just imagine how thrilled I am to have them both here with me in Berkeley to talk about the future of the U.S.-China relationship in light of the dramatic developments we've already seen. It is really no exaggeration to say that

In the few short months that we've been planning this event, the world has just undergone, to borrow a phrase, changes not seen in a century. Let me briefly introduce our two guests and then jump right in and pick their brains about the US-China relationship in the recent past, by which I mean the Biden administration, which feels like a decade ago. My God. But yeah, the Biden administration and of course the present and possible scenarios for the future should we actually live to enjoy one.

Jessica Shen Weiss is the David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. She is the inaugural faculty director of SAIS's Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs.

You should listen on a cynical podcast we've been running. We have had another one dropping later this week of the fabulous session that she ran called Getting China Right. And it's the first of many that she's going to be running. You've heard her, I hope, at least on podcasts like The Ezra Klein Show and even Jon Stewart. And of course, you've read her, I hope, in Foreign Affairs and many other prominent publications where she's been one of the most

forceful, persuasive voices of reason in the discourse on U.S. and China. And of course, you've heard her several times on Seneca. So Jessica, welcome back to Seneca. It's just so wonderful to have you. Wonderful to be here. Thanks so much, Kaiser.

Also returning to Seneca for what? What is it, like a fourth time now? I think something like that, fourth or fifth time, is Ryan Haas. Ryan is the director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, as well as serving as the Chin-Tu and Cecilia Yen-Ku Chair in Taiwan Studies at Brookings. Ryan served as the China director at the National Security Council during President Obama's second term, 2013 to 2017.

and had many years of experience in China and in other places as a Foreign Service officer. I just learned while we were in the green room that he took the Foreign Service exam at the age of 22 while hungover. You're not hungover today though, I trust.

You do like that. That's so funny. The important details. Anyway, he has published extensively in outlets like Foreign Affairs, which, you know, articles he's presumably wrote in a state of perfect sobriety. And, of course, publishes regularly on the Brookings website. Ryan, a very warm welcome. I'm sorry for that little anecdote. I couldn't help it. And both of you, so great to be with you here in Berkeley.

Well, thank you so much, Kaiser. It's great to be back with you. I appreciate you having me back on the show. And for my parents who are listening, I am dead sober today. I hope they are. I hope they are. So, Ryan, I'm going to start with you. With the benefit of hindsight, how should we evaluate the Biden administration's approach to China over the last, what was it? It was like, what, 10 years? No, the last four years. I mean, you wrote this terrific and very candid piece talking about what worked, what didn't work.

What some of the fundamental flaws were. I mean, you might recall, I had a conversation with the late, great Jeff Bader, who I'm sure you knew well when you were both in the administration. And, you know, he wrote a not so flattering piece about the white Biden administration's approach. He had some critical perspectives that I think you shared in your own piece. Would you summarize what you argued in that piece and maybe offer us a sense of what, if anything, you would have advised the administration to do differently?

Well, thank you, Kaiser. The piece actually was dedicated to Jeff Bader. And so he was a mentor to me and to others in this room. The basic premise that I tried to advance was that on the merits, the Biden administration did pretty well. When they left office, alliances were stronger. The American presence in Asia, in Europe and elsewhere was in a stronger position than it was when they arrived.

and the American economy on a relative basis was in a much stronger position than it was when they arrived in office. So on the merits, I think that they did pretty well. However, I think that they came up short in a few areas. My two big critiques are first that they prioritize politics above policy and strategy. Whenever there was a tension between something that could be politically advantageous and strategically misplaced or vice versa, they always erred on the side.

of politics over policy and strategy. That was my first critique. The second critique basically was a critique on storytelling. That promoting an idea of pursuing a steady state of managed competition isn't an idea that rolls off the tongue particularly well. It's not something that inspires people to rise above their seats and to sacrifice in service of the common good.

They missed an opportunity to tell a story about why Americans should care, what we should care about, and what we should be trying to accomplish in our competition with China. And when there is no affirmative vision, when there is no story to be told about what we're trying to achieve and why, we often have a vacuum, a vacuum that gets filled by what China is doing to us. And it makes Americans feel vulnerable. It makes us feel insecure. And when we feel insecure and vulnerable, we feel like we have leaders that lack strength.

And it creates a vicious cycle that leads us back into a dynamic where politics drive policy, which is where, unfortunately, I think we ended up. Very good. I would very, very heartily endorse and agree with that. Jessica, though, you were actually in the State Department in policy planning under Secretary Blinken during the Biden administration when some of the really crucial decisions were made.

And I know that after you left government, you were critical about some of the Biden team's policies toward China. But like Ryan, I know you think they got some things right, too.

So, I mean, maybe you could share with us your perspective on the good and the bad. And for you, do you think that the main missteps grew out of wrong assumptions about not getting, not right-sizing the China challenge, as it were? Was it limitations imposed by domestic politics, as Ryan pointed out, always choosing politics over smart policy and strategy? Was it problems with the execution of policies? What went wrong?

Well, there's a lot there to unpack. And I very much share, you know, Ryan's very succinct, I think, diagnosis. We're very much on the same page there. You know, I think that to start off with, I think, you know, one of the things that the administration, Biden administration did right, I think, was to try to restore American standing and leadership in the world, build back the trust of

of allies and partners, that the United States could be a credible force for good. Of course, they were somewhat hamstrung by the ability to do more with less, right? And I think that the domestic politics there, particularly in Congress, made that somewhat difficult.

And I think that they spent more time than ideal on rebuilding what Secretary Blinken liked to call a position of strength, which, of course, went down very poorly with China, which saw that as a well, you should the Chinese should remain perpetually subordinate to you. And that, of course, that's not a great place for beginning a conversation, which but I think, you know, the second half of the Biden administration, there was very much more of an emphasis on.

on stabilizing what had become a kind of rapid descent into greater potential conflict and confrontation. So I think there's two kind of phases of the Biden administration. It's important that in the latter half, we give credit for their efforts to resume some channels of communication, right? So that was important, but I don't think that they...

We or they left themselves enough time or really thought boldly enough about how to really institutionalize that and put wins on the board that as you know Ryan said that was like show that a stable relationship actually delivered benefits for Americans. So we left alone or intact the sense that of grievance.

And, you know, we'll see where, you know, diplomacy leads us, you know, what kind of diplomacy between the United States and China we see in the new administration. I think it's pretty early.

But I think that the fact that there weren't yet enough wins, although I think that they were real in terms of, you know, cooperation on counter narcotics and cracking down on the fentanyl precursors. I mean, that was important, but it was pretty late. And so in terms of showing the value of that approach toward the latter half, I think it would be too easy to undo a lot of that in the months and years to come.

So I think that there is a, and to Ryan's point, I think that the narrative really, the Biden administration really left in some ways unchanged or with some modifications, the narrative that the first Trump administration pursued, adopted of this being fundamentally a strategic competition for what? For, you know, dominance of the world, right? And I think that one of the challenges that that creates is it sets up a zero-sum competition between the United States and China for something that I'm not even sure that

the United States or China really wants anymore, right? And of course, dominance, we can say, oh, we want to be number one and dump our chest. But like truly leadership of the world, I feel like we may be, that we're chasing something that neither the public and neither either country is really, you know, prepared to undertake and support. And so right now, I mean, I think the fragility of that narrative, we're starting to see sort of come undone in this new phase. But I think it was already

underpinning some of the hollowness of the U.S. effort under the Biden administration to lead and repair their so-called rules-based international order. But you can only get so far when the country is not there. Absolutely. It's interesting, but not surprising at all to me, that both of you sort of focus on this absence of an affirmative vision. No one in the Biden administration was really able to articulate

that vision well. And I think, as you say, it really did leave us quite vulnerable to this faltering confidence, which I think is very much at the heart of what's in your book, Stronger. You talk quite a bit about this, and I think that's absolutely correct. In a lot of your writings, you also talk about this, and we'll come back to this crisis of American confidence. But speaking of crises of confidence, the other question, of course, I mean, the thing we want to move on to from the Biden years is into the grim reality that we now face

face. Trump has been in office for only, what, 10 weeks now? But already his administration has upended American foreign policy in just the way many of us feared, but few of us had actually anticipated, it feels like.

His foreign policy record in his first term was, you know, as erratic as that was, looks pretty tame in comparison to what we've already seen. I know that both of you have been asked this. I know I have, too, been asked variations of the same question far too many times just since November, but even before that. But from our current vantage point, and I'll supply the caveat that we all agree,

feel pretty much obliged to offer, which is given that we just can't know anything that will, you know, about what's going to emerge from the chaos of this administration or indeed, you know, the chaos of Trump's own internal thought process, such as it is. Is there an outline emerging? Is there a consensus that's forming? Is there at least a general direction that is now discernible in Trump's China policy? And what does a smart analyst look for?

What should we be looking for to try to capture the shape of this thing? Let's start with you, Jessica, but I'd also love Ryan's take on this. So first, I think what we can observe from the first 10 weeks or so is that his priority has not been on China and that whatever policy emerges is going to reflect the more fundamental parts of what his administration has placed priority on, which is tariffs.

perhaps belief that they are a good thing intrinsically and maybe to be used as leverage. But I think the signs are that maybe this is actually a tool that is sort of seen as intrinsically useful for their revenue or reshoring of jobs, et cetera. And the other is sort of a disdain for allies. And I think that that

will very much, you know, there may be, in the president's own words, there may be efforts to establish a very, you know, constructive relationship with China or with Xi Jinping in particular. But that does not seem to be where the muscles aren't moving yet in that direction. But they are on these other. I think that

U.S. position is fundamentally going to be informed by, and of course the Chinese perception of American foreign policy, not to mention the rest of the world's perception, is going to be, I think, shaped by these kind of fundamental components. So the Biden administration was very much allies, partners first, and invest and align, right, and then compete, right? And I think that this administration absolutely is not on board with the align, although American alliances are hopefully –

somewhat robust. I mean, I think they're not fall apart that easily. But nonetheless, you know, the whole way in which the United States approaches China, I think, is going to be informed by these fundamental shifts in the way the US kind of views the world through the prism of how Trump seems to approach these two issues. That said, I think that the emerging contours of

You know, there still are some actions and words on China. And here, I think it's still the jury is out on which of the different potential interests or influences will win out. And maybe Ryan wants to run down the list of...

Does it help to count the hawks and the doves in his administration? I mean, does Pete Hegseth cancel out Tulsi Gabbard? Is there a strategy we can profitably take to figure out what the hell is going to happen? I mean, you talk about muscles he's exercising. As far as I can tell, his only muscle is the one that flicks on and off the light switch of tariffs. It's like, this is a great strategy. Why don't we just change our strategy every couple of, you know, 48 hours? Let's just turn the tariffs on, turn the tariffs off. He's like my, you know, my

grandnephew when he was like a year old he likes to light switch on and off. Well, okay Kaiser, let me try to take a serious stab at this which is that if I close my eyes...

Turn off my emotions. I've finished sort of yelling in a dark room by myself for a little while. We've all done that. And think about what is it that President Trump is saying. I think what he's saying is that there are three big things he wants to do. The first is he wants to reindustrialize the United States. He believes that we've become hollowed out as a country. We're not building and manufacturing enough. China is manufacturing and building too much. We need to consume less, build more.

So that's the first thing I think he's trying to do. And it doesn't diverge from what the Biden administration wanted to do. Reindustrialization was a priority for us too. The second thing I think that President Trump wants to do is to regain control of our borders. He believes deeply in sovereignty, in our ability to control what comes in and what comes out of our country. And we see this with his emphasis on immigration, also with his emphasis on fentanyl. The third thing that I think he really wants to do is avoid war.

And this is somewhat counterintuitive for a guy who sort of beats his chest and tries to play the part of a strong man so much. But if you think about and listen to what he's saying, he has a deep, deep aversion to the idea of conflict, especially conflict with nuclear powers. And this is an area where I think that Donald Trump and Xi Jinping have something in common, and maybe we can come back to this. But that's at a macro level what I think President Trump is trying to do.

The next thought is that he doesn't run a typical government.

A typical government has a process between departments and agencies. They convene in the White House Situation Room. They develop recommendations. Recommendations move up a ladder of levels until they reach a president for his or her decision. That isn't how this runs. This runs like a palace court where he sits in the Oval Office. People sort of shuffle through over the course of the day. He has a series of conversations. Over the course of those conversations, decisions get made, and then things move out.

And, and so it's hard to, you know, in sort of a classical sense, looking at government discern what is happening on the basis of what the Department of Defense or the Department of State or anyone else says, because it doesn't matter as much anymore. What matters is what happens in the orbit of Donald Trump.

And that leads to the final thought, and I'll turn it back to you, which is that I don't think that Donald Trump has some grand conception of American strategy in a changing world. I think that he has a view of international relations as a very personalized exercise. So in that sense, U.S.-Russia relations are his relationship with Vladimir Putin. U.S.-China relations are reflected by his relationship with Xi Jinping.

And so there may be days when his administration publishes reports or memorandums that suggest that policy is going to move this way or that way. We've already seen evidence that he doesn't feel terribly bounded by things that his administration does. His administration a week and a half ago released a big document talking about investment restrictions in China.

And the next meeting that he had in the cabinet room, he basically said, yeah, I don't care about what they wrote. What matters is what I say. And I want investment from China into the United States. And so we really need to pay attention to what he says and what he does because he is ultimately America's desk officer on China.

And in that vein, I think that until he has an opportunity to sit down with Xi Jinping and sort of sort out the level of ambition, the direction, the scope of the relationship moving forward, we're going to be in this sort of this murky, ambiguous phase, in large part because I think he wants to keep space open for the conversation that he plans to have with his Chinese counterpart to sort of sort things out and move things forward.

The other big question that we constantly get, and I think I'm going to start with you, Ryan, then flip over to Jessica on this, is we're always wondering, how does Beijing see all this? What is the view from Beijing? And we're asked, how much better prepared, assuming that it is better prepared, is it this go-round and not the first rodeo, right? The two meetings concluded...

very recently, we all studied Li Qiang's speech, I hope, like a good sinologist, we all studied Li Qiang's speech. We know we saw, you know, the utterances, the cryptic utterances of Xi Jinping. We know that the foreign ministries responded to the announcement of the additional 10% tariffs on Chinese imports in a pretty

Spicy way I think we would all agree And we all talk to people who are quite well placed In China so let's try as far as It's possible to get specific and not just talking Generalities about what we've seen So Ryan again to you

Is Beijing readier for Trump 2.0? I think Beijing is readier for Trump 2.0 than they were in the first instance. They've had four years to prepare themselves for this moment, and I think that they have a plan in place. I've seen some people suggest that Beijing sees this as a giant opportunity to sort of expand its influence and its footprint around the world. Maybe. But my guess, having been around Xi Jinping, is that he would prefer a predictable, steady trend

rather than an unsteady, unpredictable dynamic. So I think that this is discomforting at a minimum for our Chinese counterparts. But the big point I guess I would leave you with is that I don't think that the Chinese believe that they have a ton of capacity to change the trajectory of things right now.

In other words, they don't think that if they change wording of some document or if they provide some technocratic fix to an economic problem that all of their issues will go away with the United States. I think they feel like this is a structural issue that's not going to resolve itself anytime soon. And in that respect, their view is to make virtue of necessity, to use the pressure that the Trump administration is providing to advance and accelerate their own agenda, their own plans,

whether it be on self-reliance, investments in science and technology, diversifying trade and investment relationships with others around the world. They're trying to use the pressure from President Trump to propel their plans forward rather than to fight against President Trump on every issue every day.

I think we're talking to the same people in Beijing. I mean, because that's very, very much the read that I'm getting. And I wanted to turn over to Jessica. You know, this is something that Ryan talked about that we hear a lot from people who maybe are not talking to the same people.

Beijing is gleeful. Beijing is rubbing its hands in glee at this opportunity. This has just been a gigantic windfall. They can do nothing and win. We've all seen that meme of this sort of large lantern-jawed kind of cartoon-seizing Ping sitting there with a grin on his face and says, do nothing, win. Maybe you've seen it. I don't know. You don't spend as much time trolling these people.

stupid social media sites as I do. But, you know, the Trumpian anarchy, the disruptions to longstanding alliances, all this stuff, the abandonment of security commitments, the de-emphasis or at least the devaluation or the abasement of American values and of ideology. You know, China's long pined for genuine European strategic autonomy. Now it looks like, you know, it's the chess. If

Finn Bar Birmingham from the South China Morning Post, he's going to be on the show in not too long, he wrote a piece the other day where, you know, the lead was that something along the lines of Chinese diplomats are now wandering around the European capital saying, well, your best friend has abandoned you. Let's rebuild the world order together, right? I mean, who knows whether this is true, but

Again, I mean, I tend to see things more like Ryan does in this case, that there isn't that glee in China, that they are not only do they maybe not have those ambitions, but they don't have that capacity. What's your take on that?

So I think as they would say that the risks and opportunities are entirely entangled and it's difficult to separate. There are certainly aspects of the new administration's policy that are in a welcome, I think, both for kind of quitting the field in certain respects, weakening the transatlantic ties,

dismantling the national endowment for democracy, all these explicitly kind of

attacking and dismantling the support for groups that had supported things like Child Labor Watch, etc. On the other hand, I think that they're quite uncomfortable and worried about the potential escalation and also the need to respond to things like the tariffs that have continued to mount. And we may, in this room, think that what comes out of the State Department

doesn't mean anything because the president ultimately is the decider. But, you know, this omission of the U.S. not supporting Taiwan independence from the recent fact sheet has, I think, caused quite some consternation in Beijing, which is, you know, they're thinking about how do we respond to this? And I think that there's a

Across the board, maybe there is hope that someday the two presidents, the two leaders will meet and they may want to preserve space for that. But in the meantime, they're one, not getting any traction and two, the blows are coming. So I think that there's a calibrating this need to be spicy, I think, as you say, and showcasing to the Chinese domestic public that the leadership isn't going to just take one on the cheek, but also not do so much that it

provokes further escalation. This is a really difficult place, I think, for them. And I don't get a sense of overweening confidence, let alone gloating at the moment. Right. I think it's really interesting how many of the people I've spoken to are suddenly very eager to remind me of how much China benefited from the international order of which it was, as they'll remind me, a responsible stakeholder, and I'll pop hard up.

I don't know if that's performative. I don't know if that's... But, I mean, it seems to signal to me at least

They're not going to get too cocky about the moment that they're in, despite all the things that have happened. But, you know, one of the big problems, and I remember having a conversation with Joe Nye some years ago. We were talking about Graham Allison's Thucydides trap, and he was, you know, kind of pooping on it a little bit, even though they're very good friends. He made sure to point that out. But he said there's another trap we should be more worried about, the Kindleberger trap.

I don't know how many people have heard of the Kindleberger track, but Charles Kindleberger was a historian of economics and he's regarded as one of the principal architects of the Marshall Plan. And his understanding of the grand arc of history was that in moments where an incumbent power is no longer able or no longer willing to provide global public goods and the rising power doesn't take up the slack,

And the moment he's talking about really is after the end of the Great War in 1918, after Versailles, Britain was unable to have a stable global trading currency to patrol trade lanes, to provide security, public goods in the world. And the United States, rather than stepping up past bugger-thy-neighbor tariffs, you know, and the Smoot-Hawley Act, and basically went turtle, right? And the result, according to Kindleberger and Nye...

is, was the rise of fascism. It was, you know, the second war. It was the Shoah. Is China right now willing and able to take up the slack? Are we going to keep sneering and jeering at the Belt and Road Initiative? Are we going to cheer when it stumbles? Or are we going to recognize that maybe this is the way out of the Kittleberger trap?

Well, look, I think that China for a long time has recognized that they face what they call three traps, the Thucydides trap, the Kindleberger trap, and the middle-income trap. And of those three traps, I think that we can eliminate one. I'll associate myself with Joe Nye on this. The Thucydides trap is not going to provide a guide to the future of the U.S.-China relationship.

That leaves the Kindle Burger trap and the middle income trap in front of the Chinese. And the Chinese have a real problem here because the United States has been the supplier of public goods for the international system for 70 plus years.

And now all of a sudden the United States is withdrawing from that role. I don't think that China's prepared. I don't think that they're capable of filling a vacuum that might emerge. I think that they will try to find partners to work with to try to close some of these gaps, whether that's with the Europeans who are very good at rulemaking, whether it's through the BRICS organization as a vehicle to try to close some of these gaps. But this is a real challenge that the Chinese are going to have to contend with in the coming years.

Jessica, one of the more conspicuous shifts has obviously been in the U.S. posture toward Ukraine and Russia. In view of Trump's quite sudden volte-face, how is China adjusting its approach to the war itself? I mean, I quoted Finn Barbering, your best friend has abandoned you, let's uphold the multilateral order together. To what effect so far? I mean, is anyone buying what China's selling this way?

Well, I do think that you're seeing signs of a thaw in European attitudes toward China out of necessity, not that their position has changed.

and concern about China's support for Russia. But now that the United States is making common cause with Russia against Ukraine, I think that they're realizing that they need to be a little bit more diversified. But I think that the bigger source of uncertainty really is China's relationship with Russia. And I think there is concern in Beijing, although there's, of

There's of course been efforts by both sides to reassure one another that that's not going anywhere, but that also is I think an important dynamic to watch. - Yeah, for sure. One of the more interesting ideas that we hear of course these days coming out of people like

Marco Rubio, but all other people in the Trump orbit. I know Marco Rubio did an interview with that reputable news organization, Breitbart, and talked about the reverse Nixon, or is it the reverse Kissinger? That's a matter of some debate, whereby the United States will somehow peel, you see, peel China off of, or peel Russia off of China. How does that idea strike you, Ryan? Yeah.

I say good luck. But if I could just comment briefly on the transatlantic relationship and then on this. I think that credit where credit's due. I think that Wang Yi went to Munich. I was in Munich for the Munich Security Conference two weeks ago, and he delivered a very effective speech. His speech to the European audience had three big messages. The first was that the world is moving to multipolarity, and we, China, recognize you, Europe, as a pole. The next big message was that China will be a force for stability in a very unstable time.

which was a welcome sort of refreshing affirmation. And then the third message that Wang Yi really emphasized was that Europe deserves a seat at the table for any resolution of conflict in Ukraine. And in this way, he really was able to present a contrast with the presentation that the vice president had made just before him. So credit where credit's due. I also recognize that the situation is completely different than it was 45 days ago.

The United States and Europe no longer view each other as having shared values. Europe looks at the United States as an economic adversary, as an unreliable security partner. The situation is just different. We are in a new world today than we were before, and I'm not sure that it can be built back or put back together, at least in any short period of time. All that said, I guess I would come out by saying I'm skeptical that China will be able to profit off of this moment in Europe.

As long as the Russia-Ukraine conflict goes on, Europeans are very convinced that China is an enabler of that conflict and is a part of the problem, not a part of the solution.

And as industries in Europe become hollowed out, particularly in Germany, it's going to be very difficult for China to make inroads unless there are structural adjustments to the economic relationship. So let's watch this space, but I would be hesitant to jump to conclusions that China will sort of mathematically profit from the rupturing of transatlantic relations. On the idea of a reverse Kissinger, I say good luck because I don't think it's realistic.

I think that this is a effort by people like Marco Rubio and others who feel uncomfortable with Donald Trump moving so close to Vladimir Putin and are looking for a way sort of post facto to rationalize and justify and put some intellectual grandeur around what is really sort of a crude adjustment on the part of President Trump himself.

The fact of the matter is that when Kissinger went to China, China and the Soviet Union had already split many years prior. We walked into a split. There is no split today between China and Russia. So that is an analogy that doesn't hold.

I would also add, and I'll stop here, I would add that I think that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping think in longer time horizons than three and a half years. And as much as it may be satisfying for them to have the sunshine on their face with Donald Trump for three and a half years, they can't have any certainty as to what will happen after him. And so it would be asking a lot of either of those leaders to abandon their relationship for a short duration benefit that may be reversible.

Jessica, we were chatting earlier today, and one of the problems that I have deeply, I feel very deeply, is that while we probably both object to a lot of the things that have happened with the Trump administration, withdrawing, for example, from the World Health Organization, withdrawing from

obviously from the Paris Climate Agreement on day one, as it promised to do. We're not surprised by any of this. But it seems like even people, reasonable people, keep framing this and arguing against these moves that this non-liberal USAID comes to mind in terms of ceding victories to China rather than just sort of on their own merits as policy. Share your thoughts on this.

So I very much agree that this is a poor way to frame it, in part because sort of on the merits in terms of analytically, I don't see China being there, stepping out and ready to provide the public goods that were previously provided. They're not filling the void. Of course, they're going to continue to do the things that they were doing already. And sort of once you remove American presence and largesse, then you have the field changes a bit.

But I don't think it's necessarily a win. And then secondly, I think that it continues to fail to answer the question, what is the benefit for Americans at home of America continuing to invest in infectious disease surveillance, of conflict prevention, stabilization? What are the spillover consequences of problems beyond our borders to Americans inside? And until you've answered that question, I don't think that the argument about

losing the competition to China is going to matter. It's not going to resonate. And I think that's in part what we saw. I mean, Donald Trump didn't campaign on competing or out-competing China in the way that the Biden administration had framed it. That wasn't the argument, right? And so I think that the effort to

you know, why I think that, of course, I have a lot of problems with the way in which the administration now has attacked and dismantled these agencies, that trying to fight for them on the basis of, well, you know, this is a gift to China is going to be ineffective. And I think it's also analytically off the mark. A lot of this is sort of, an arsonist has burned down our library. Now that other guy has more books than us. I mean,

Oh, no. That's a real problem. Let's move to the Western Pacific here. And Jessica, we've talked about how the Biden administration at least understood the importance of alliances, even if we might not all agree on how the administration leveraged those alliances in the region. But let's talk about how the Trump administration's approach has really raised serious concerns among our traditional allies in the region, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Australia.

And we've just seen Chinese naval vessels conducting live fire exercises in the waters between Australia and New Zealand. It has been sea transit, actually the Australian EEZ. What is the sense in the region and how are various countries among these U.S. allies, but also in ASEAN states who are not formally allied, cooperating?

How are they navigating? I know it's a very big question, but how are they navigating this very uncertain time that's been brought about by these Trumpian policies? Great question. I think there are a lot of different facets to this. I think, you know, on the one hand, there's sort of a relief that this is no longer the United States trying to divide the world up into democracies versus autocracies, which never went very far in Southeast Asia.

On the other hand, you have real concern amongst U.S. allies that they are going to be extorted or abandoned. And so there's a lot of effort to, you know, make nice with and appease and affirm the relationship with the new administration. And then finally, I think that there's a continued concern about a potential conflict

You know, withdrawal, I would say. And so but I would say that there's also no kind of homogeneous response in each of some of these countries. There's actually quite a number of fans of Trump. And so there are, you know, pro-America, pro-Trump kind of contingents that are now really, you know, giving voice to those sentiments there.

So it's a mixed bag, and I think we'll have to see how this evolves. I do think that the concerns about the American security guarantees might have really troubling consequences for proliferation, but it's early days yet. Understandably. I mean, I would love to put that question to you, but in the interest of time, let's move on to talk about specifically Taiwan, something you work on really extensively, Ryan. You had a recent great Twitter thread about Taiwan's reaction to Trump's shift on Ukraine, right?

People have been from the very beginning, from the day of the invasion, have been drawing these ready parallels to Taiwan three years now. How is Taipei actually interpreting this, as well as Trump's threat to tariff goods, especially semiconductors from Taiwan? And what does it tell us maybe about how allies more broadly are recalibrating their expectations of Washington, but maybe more specifically about Taiwan?

Well, thank you, Kaiser. I've had a lot of interaction with friends in Taipei in recent weeks, and they're

pretty jarred by what's happened and for reasons that I understand and that I empathize with. I mean, we have in recent weeks sort of turned on our head a longstanding policy as it relates to Ukraine. We are sort of turning our back on a friend under fire. We're showing ambivalence about standing up for a fellow democracy. And so all of these things have parallels that resonate very deeply with our friends in Taipei who are worried about something happening to them as well.

But here's what I try to tell my friends that will listen, which is that the analogy is imperfect and it shouldn't be taken too far between Ukraine and Taiwan. And there are a few reasons for that. The first of which is that geography is very different. Ukraine has a land border with Russia. There's a lower barrier to entry, so to speak, than there would be in the case of a 100-mile moat between China and Taiwan.

The second difference is simply that the United States has a law on the books, the Taiwan Relations Act, which compels us to maintain certain capabilities and puts Taiwan in a very unique category of partners around the world. And then the third difference, which is really sort of the most foundational and fundamental difference in this current moment, is that the United States can't achieve its goals without Taiwan any more than Taiwan can achieve its security without the United States.

Whether we like it or not, we both depend upon each other. The United States, President Trump's goal is to reindustrialize the United States. It doesn't happen without chips that are produced in Taiwan. 90% of the world's most advanced chips come from Taiwan, and there is just no alternative.

to getting to where we want to go unless we have a productive, profitable partnership with Taiwan. And if none of those things are persuasive to my friends in Taiwan, the final thing that I offer to them is that I think that President Trump recognizes that the Nobel Peace Prize is not going to be won in the Taiwan Strait. And so I think that he is going to be searching for victories and breakthroughs in other areas than Taiwan. Ultimately, this may all be sort of shallow comfort for our friends in Taiwan, but I think it's something.

And I would encourage us not to get too fatalistic about the situation because ultimately it's important for the people of Taiwan to have confidence in their own future, to believe that they have agency in their own future. And I believe that they do and that they should continue to maintain that conviction. It's impossible to talk about the U.S.-China relationship without talking about technology and technology competition. So before we wrap up, I definitely want to hit this topic again.

People have drawn very, very different lessons from what we've seen with the release of DeepSeek R1 in January, which really kind of landed like a thunderclap on the ears, especially just south of here where we are right now.

You know, some have proclaimed that efforts to starve China of key technology imports have simply failed. That this is the proof, right? That all we've done is lit a fire to Chinese ingenuity, that they've, you know, redoubled their efforts. And look, look what they've already done in such a short time. Other people say we need to double down, that we just need to build out a bigger yard and a higher fence, right? That's...

So I guess I'm curious what you expect the Trump administration to do. Which tack do you think they're going to take, either or something entirely unexpected? Jessica, why don't you start? I mean, if I had to guess, I think that they would lean in the direction of expanding the yard, making that fence higher, closing the loopholes. But I think that there's really a need for

You know, greater thinking around the efficacy of a, you know, export control centric strategy with the end goal defined as maintaining a larger lead over China as possible. That's that's language that Jake Sullivan used. I think J.D. Vance has something that's his own version, but nonetheless, it has a lot of echoes of that.

And, you know, I would recommend a recent conversation that I think that we held at the at SAIS on the, you know, the evolution of AI and in particular what it means to be in the lead and in how far behind we really can keep China, you know, given deep seek as well as the evolution of technology and its, you know, use cases.

Because if we can't really maintain a very large lead through export controls, even if they have been somewhat effective to date and that the whole board on which we are playing looks a little different, then we need a different strategy. And I don't know that holding China back and running faster ourselves can really ever be significant enough to mitigate this.

the potential dangers, whatever they may turn out to be. And there's a lot of speculation as to how soon we might get to artificial general intelligence versus regardless of whether we get there or not, what would it mean to have, you know, like 100,000 really smart engineers, you know, in the cloud. And I think that the, you know, strategically prioritizing that at the expense of the rest, I think is a real mistake. Yeah.

Ryan, Foreign Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on her way out did an interview where she famously said that trying to stop Chinese innovation was a fool's errand. She, by the way, Commerce oversees the very department, BIS, that was tasked with actually executing on. So do you think that we're going to see change? Do you think that the Trump administration will abandon this

And will knuckle under pressure that they're getting from a lot of the major semiconductor manufacturers from Intel, from NVIDIA, and from abroad as well, from ASML, to lay off? Or do you think they're going to build a higher wall and a bigger yard? Well, it's a good question. And if I had to, if someone forced me to make a bet, I would bet on what Jessica just said. That I think the natural instinct is going to be to try to build a higher fence and a bigger yard.

That's the instinct that is going to occur amongst President Trump's staff who want to limit China's advancements in technological innovation and accelerate our own. It's unclear whether that's the instinct that President Trump himself is going to have, and ultimately his views are what's going to matter. And so I would just encourage us to have a bit of humility in sort of forecasting this, because as I listen to President Trump, what I hear him say is that he wants to

Expand American exports. He wants to accelerate American Reindustrialization he wants to grow the American economy and his theory of the case for doing so is to strengthen tariffs to Deregulate and to lower energy cost that's that's his theory technology is not part of that Theory for him and so it may be that that his team sort of moves forward along the pathway that President Biden and his team have established and

But I don't think the demand signal will emanate from the Oval Office.

He wants to advance American advantage and to re-industrialize, and he's recently done a press conference with TSMC and sort of shown off how they've— But there seems to be a wholesale abandonment of industrial policies that were only just really getting started, showing actually some progress. I'm talking not just about the Inflation Reduction Act, but also about the Chips and Science Act, both passed during the Biden administration with pretty strong bipartisan support.

Meanwhile, what we're seeing in China, if you followed what's come out of the two meetings, the NDRC just today announced this massive new trillion yuan national VC fund that they say will be all about slow capital that will be for deployment in some of the most bleeding edge technologies, biomanufacturing, 6G. What's with this? I mean, maybe Jessica, you can start with this abandonment of industrial policy. Is that

Am I reading that right? Does that look like where we're going?

I mean, I think Ryan's right to caution us against, you know, reading too much clarity here yet. I mean, I do that, you know, the CHIPS Act is, I'm sorry, the CHIPS folks in charge of implementing that are being, that office is being dismantled. So yeah, there's, I think there is emerging a sense of opposition to public sector investment. There is a lot of interest in private technology companies doing a lot to

to drive the future of innovation. But I don't know what that looks like in terms of, I wouldn't necessarily call that, well, is that industrial policy? I guess it depends. I mean, is it capture? I'm not sure. But it looks different than it did under the Biden administration, which moved in that direction, but was wanting to be very careful about not being seen as necessarily picking winners, or at least not too quickly and doing it in a, unfortunately, pretty slow way, but because of some of these concerns. But that's what I can see so far.

I do want to make sure to leave some time for questions. So I'm going to try to sort of combine some of these last few that I had. And I did say we come back to this idea of an affirmative vision about American domestic politics. And maybe this is a good note to end on before we get to recommendations. Of course, we need to do recommendations. So I'll

What should that look like? I mean, what is possible in this administration? Or maybe we should start thinking forward to what that would look like on the other side of this apocalyptic chasm that we are now stumbling into. An affirmative vision for U.S.-China policy. What is the Ryan Haas version? What is the Jessica Chen-Weiss version?

Well, I'll get us started, but I'll quickly pass the baton to Jessica. And I want to hear what you say on this too, Kaiser. But look, I think that we need to accept that the United States and China are going to be the two leading powers in the world for the rest of the century.

And that if the competition is done right, it can push us both to improve and enhance our performance. And that's what we should aim for. Ultimately, the purpose of government is to provide for the safety, the prosperity, and the health of the American people. That's what it's all about. And so the question then becomes, what type of relationship with China best enables us to do that?

And I don't think that that's where the conversation is going to be on an affirmative basis in the coming short period of time. But that doesn't mean that we need to stop thinking about and refining our thinking on it because there will become a moment in the future where the window will open again and we better damn well have a good answer when it does. Yeah. Jessica?

Well, I guess I would say that maybe the aperture is there already in the sense that there's been a shift, I think, in the rhetoric on both sides of the aisle that we are now in a kind of post-American unipolar moment. We're now in a multipolar world where we are one of the most important countries in the world. But it definitely remains to be seen. What does it mean to advance American interests in that kind of a world where we aren't trying to shepherd the

the entire globe, perhaps in ways that aren't commensurate with our capacity, our domestic political capacity, just to support that role that we played for so long.

So I think the question is then what are the, and this is very much, I agree with Ryan here, is like what are the outcomes both internationally as well as in our bilateral relationship with China that benefit Americans, that allow parents today to think that their children are going to have not a worse life than they, but a better one, right? And so I

I think it's still unchanged that the affirmative vision is one in which we define success not by out-competing China, but by doing well by ourselves, regardless of how well China or badly China does. And that doesn't mean that we live entirely separate fates. Obviously, there are a lot of issues that beset both countries to differing degrees. And so where there are shared interests, let's work together. But let's not define things entirely in relative terms. Ryan, you wanted to add something?

Yeah, I think it also in thinking through this question, it's important to think about what's on the minds of the American people, because ultimately they're the ones who decide the direction of our country. Or so we used to think. You know, China is an issue that consumes us in the policy world.

Not as much in the public. And it doesn't drive a lot of votes. It doesn't change a lot of electoral outcomes. And so we ought to focus on getting the policy right. The one thing that the American people are overwhelmingly supportive of is working to avoid conflict with China. And I feel this everywhere I travel around the country and talk with audiences. The question that I receive most often, most consistently, is are my children going to have to go to war with China?

And that's the starting point, I think, for any productive, serious vision, affirmative vision and narrative for the future of the relationship. And what it tells me is that we ought to be really concentrating our efforts and thinking deeply about how we can work to reduce the risk of conflict with China. That's what the American people want those of us who work around the policy space to be working on. And the more that we're able to concentrate and focus our attention and our energy around those issues—

whether it's on nuclear issues, AI, space, cyber, etc. The more that that will sort of concentrate the relationship in areas where there is mutual benefit to making progress, which I think will, over time, be net beneficial. I know, Ryan, you asked me to weigh in myself, but I'm afraid we're out of time. I will try this. I actually think that before we can get to a point where we can, as a nation,

have an affirmative vision, we need to do a lot of self-examination about what it is that causes such profound psychological discomfiture at China's rise itself. We need to really do this self-criticism session. We need to write a thorough self-criticism. I mean, a lot of it, I honestly think that there's something that sticks in our craw and we're not able to talk about that comfortably.

whether that is just simply this reflexive impulse to demand global hegemony and primacy,

I think it has to do with a lot of things. I think it has to do with these pillars of American exceptionalism that one by one China has sort of knocked over our beliefs about the way that market economics is supposed to interact with politics, that technology innovation is supposed to interact with economics or with politics. All these things where time and again,

China seems to defy these axiomatic beliefs of ours, and that hurts. It causes us some psychological distress, and we're not really wrestling with that as a nation enough.

I think this is only going to be, you know, it's going to be drawn even further forward. So yeah, I want there to be an affirmative vision, but I think it needs to be predicated on us having first gone through this painful introspection and figured out what it is that bothers us so much. Is it race? Is it, you know, is it the sort of replacement theory for your writ large that, you know, we, like the white man in America, sees, uh,

this nation approaching a moment where we will be a majority-minority country, and is it that? Does America feel that, and is that the source of psychological pain? So that's where I am. But I want to, first of all, thank you both so much for flying all the way out here from the other coast. Let's give it up for Ryan Haas and Jessica Chenweiss.

15 years ago when I started this podcast, we started this tradition called Recommendations. And this year I've added a new thing to it. So not only do I do Ask...

my guests to make a recommendation, I have a little new segment called Paying It Forward where I ask them each to simply name check somebody, a younger colleague or somebody young who's in our area whose work just is deserving of attention that they're not quite getting it. I mean, it can be, you know,

a colleague of yours or somebody in another institution, in academia, in a think tank, anything at all. So Ryan, why don't you go first and then Jessica, then after yours, you can go with your recommendations.

So paint it forward. I would like to identify two of my colleagues at Brookings who work on China work who I would encourage everyone to follow and track their thinking on. The first is Patty Kim, Patricia Kim, who has a book that will be coming out soon on Chinese foreign policy. It's going to be great. It's going to be a really original contribution to the field.

You're here. She's great, yeah. The second is John Zinn, who recently joined us at Brookings. He focuses on Chinese elite politics and has a lot of fresh insights and original ideas that I think would... I just read his piece on the two meetings. It was really good. Very good, very good. All right. And then Jessica, and then after that, your recommendation. So I'd like to recommend the work of Jeffrey Ding at Washington. He was recently on this AI panel that we hosted, but is doing really...

Really important work around, again, what does it mean to lead in this space, focusing more on diffusion rather than being at the frontier. That's what will ultimately contribute. As well as the work of my colleague, Jonas Nam, super thoughtful, just came back from the White House Council on Economic Advisors, works on

China industrial policy, both in China and in the United States. I didn't catch the name? Jonas Nam. Oh, yeah, Jonas. Yeah, of course. Who does environmental work, right? Absolutely. Yeah, he's fantastic. Yes. Great. All right. You're up for your recommendation first.

So my recommendation, first I have to say, I think that, you know, although self-examination or self-criticism is all well and good, I think that we're not going to get very far there, Chrysler, frankly. I think one of the other challenges is actually our assessment of China and what I think of as a little bit too much excessive certainty about, you know, what China's up to and where it's headed. Yeah.

And so, you know, one of the values that this new institute that we've stood up at SAIS imbues is the idea of rigor, but also humility. And so my recommendation, actually, as I was flying out here on the plane, I watched the movie Conclave, which, you know, whatever you think of the movie, there was this great moment, and I won't spoil much of the movie for you all.

But was the speech around certainty being, you know, the enemy of tolerance and frankly, that we need more, I think, humility or doubt in some of the assumptions that we make. Maybe it's easy to look at our own government and have a little bit of humility about where exactly is it going? Well, it's not that dissimilar in China. There's a lot of it's a kind of a hot mess over there, too.

I've read like six or seven Robert Harris novels recently. Conclave is the, probably the last one. No, there's, there's, there's one or other that I haven't read recently, but I will get to Conclave. I have it actually. I have the audio book. And so I was saving it for my flight over to China. But, uh,

And you know, with Pope Francis now ailing, maybe it may take on a kind of, well, let's not jinx anything here. All right, Ryan, your recommendation. Well, first of all, Jessica, I'm happy that you didn't spoil the ending because I'm planning on watching that with my wife when I get home. But the two recommendations I have, the first is a piece by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic in the last edition, The Antisocial Century, which

that talked about the way that social media and technology is changing the nature of our relationships. As a father of four kids myself, it really sort of resonated the importance of having human connection going forward. And then to try to be a little bit more professional at Kaiser, I would just add a book called The Ambassadors by Robert Cooper, which is a book that takes chapters to look at the foreign policy thinkers who had the greatest impact in their moment.

And the common thread throughout this book, which traces back to Machiavelli all the way through Kennan, Kissinger, and others, is that a lot of these people who really changed their environment, their views were out of fashion for much of their career.

but they developed it steadily, steadily, steadily. And when the moment was right, they changed the world. And so I just offer that to encourage all of us to develop our thinking and not feel the need to hug a trend, whichever direction the wind blows. Fantastic recommendation and really good sage advice from a father of four. My turn, my recommendation. So I have this strange fixation now with sort of

Pre-war German and Austrian writers, people writing in Germany. I've read quite a bit. I mean, Stefan Zweig, I read novels by him and his memoir. I read Thomas Mann. I've read a lot of German stuff recently from the late 19th and early 20th century. Recently, I started Robert Musil's book, The Man Without Qualities.

It's fantastic. It's an unfinished novel that he wrote basically between about 1930 and 1946. So it took him a while and still never quite finished it. And even in this form, it's incredibly long. I think the print edition, which I do not have, I'm listening to it on Audible, it's over 1,000 pages. It's 60-odd hours. When I buy audiobooks, I'll...

In my family, we have a Chinese motto that we live by. It's, you know, you can't be too long about that. And we go for, I like long. I mean, I want to get my money's worth. If it's like eight hours, nah, I'm not going to. I can just read that. I want a nice, long, long, meaty book. And so this thing is 60 hours long. And so I'm into it. It's just fantastic. It's a novel of ideas. And it is just the subtlety. It's just such sublime psychological exploration.

Not for everyone. It's very deeply philosophical, very Germanic, you know, and it takes place in the year 1913. A lot of sort of contemporaneous subplots that intertwine in odd ways. Just fantastic. The man without quality is Robert Musil. So that's my recommendation.

And with that, once again, thank you so much, Ryan and Jessica, for coming all the way out here to my alma mater, to UC Berkeley. Go Bears! Thank you, everyone.