Lawfare Daily: Did Washington Walk Into Beijing’s Trap? Xi’s State Visit with Jonathan Czin

[Intro]

Jonathan Czin: I worry about this. I struggle to see what we really got out of this summit, either in terms of the optics, which I think were not strong, right? There was a lot of bonhomie at a moment when there are a lot of big issues on the table that were largely left unaddressed, including the explosion of anxiety in our own country about artificial intelligence.

Julia Curlee: This is the Lawfare Podcast. I’m Julia Curlee, a Public Service Fellow at Lawfare. My guest today is Jonathan Czin of the Brookings Institution.

Jonathan Czin: The fact that so much of this is percolating in the Chinese press, I think what it underscores is that it’s useful for Xi Jinping to have Trump think that he’s his friend, right?

And to have him think that they’re his buddies and that there’s some kind of bromance going on between the two of them, right? Because again, it gets to that underlying strategic objective. What is Xi trying to accomplish? Not much in the, in terms of the way of tangible deals, but to buy time and space and relief from U.S. pressure.

Julia Curlee: Today we’re talking about Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington last week, what the two sides agreed to, what they left out, and what the dueling readouts tell us about U.S.-China relations. For those who don’t know, Jon and I served together at the CIA and in the NSC. Jon was a member of CIA Senior Analytics Service in the China Mission Center.

He was a director at the National Security Council for China, where he staffed President Biden’s engagements with Xi Jinping, and he’s the guy I call to make sense of anything related to senior-level Chinese engagements with the U.S. president.

[Main podcast]

I’ve invited you on the podcast today because Xi Jinping just made his first visit to Washington in 11 years, and our two governments came home telling noticeably different stories about what actually they agreed to on trade, on Taiwan, what even call AI and sorting out what it means. I can think of no better person that I’d want to talk to about it. So, before we dive in, can you get our listeners just a little bit more on your background and how you came to watch Xi Jinping for a living?

Jonathan Czin: So, the way I got to, into the China business is a little bit circuitous, but really what got me into national security affairs in the first place is that I grew up in New Jersey with a view of the Manhattan skyline, a real bridge and tunnel kid, and 9/11 happened a week after I showed up at my college campus, right?

And so, that was obviously a transformative moment for me, and I think for a while I thought I would be like many in our generation, including you, Julia, I thought I’d be a Middle East person and go hunt bad guys in the desert. But what happened was as I went on in my education, what I really realized was that I was more interested in great power competition.

So, I guess you could say I was into it before it was cool, going back to the early 2000s, and that’s kind of what got me hooked. I think what got me into the China business was that I realized that no matter how much time I would study this, I would always be impressed by how much I didn’t know, and I think that’s been a big part of what’s kept me going.

In terms of the Chinese leadership, I was at the mercy of our bureaucracy. I knew when I showed up at the CIA that I would be doing something related to Asia, hopefully China, ‘cause since that was my background and I had studied the language. But I didn’t know until I walked into the bubble in- got sworn in that I was going to be following China’s leadership.

And just by happenstance, I started just weeks after Xi Jinping became vice president of China. So, it’s just good luck.

Julia Curlee: Yeah, it sounds like it. I mean, it, you and I had the similar story of 9/11, and you apparently just stayed on track, whereas I was like a squirrel, you know? Or, I was like a dog following the squirrel chasing it wherever it went.

Jonathan Czin: I can assure you, I have many squirrel-like moments too.

Julia Curlee: But, I finally got back to what I really wanted to work on, which was China, just in time for us to get to work a little bit together. But that’s great. Appreciate that. So, let’s start with your expectations going into this summit. So, I watched a bit of what you’d written and spoken about and, you know, you said you had pretty low expectations I think, that for an extension of what you call the gentleman’s agreement.

You know, could you walk us through that?

Jonathan Czin: Yeah, I mean, it’s, it was driven by kinda two main factors, right? I think especially as a former NSC staffer, just at a very mundane level, it was very hard to detect any signs of kind of meaningful discussions since the last summit, right? There were a couple of engagements, but He Lifeng and Secretary Bessent, who had the lead on these issues, hadn’t had any in-person meetings until just the week before the summit.

You had the executive vice foreign minister, Ma Zhaoxu, come in the middle of August for a pretty abbreviated trip. So, really, like, these trips, I think your listeners should be aware, they just require a painstaking amount of effort, right? And work, and especially with the Chinese, right? I have often joked that, you know, planning a summit with the Chinese is like wedding planning, but really, it’s like wedding planning with the worst possible in-laws you can imagine, right?

Like, they don’t like the food, they wanna haggle over everything. So, it requires a tremendous amount of preparation, and that just didn’t go into this, right? So, I think just at a mundane level, there just wasn’t the runway to adequately prepare for a lot of this. And I th- and then I think structurally, I don’t think that there was a real focus from the administration on this set of issues.

I mean, the decision-making, as you well know, has become so centralized and so personalized on foreign policy in this administration. The old National Security Council, as you’ve written up, as we knew it, has kind of been blown up. And I think more so on China issues than any other suite of issues.

Trump is his own China desk officer, right? Like, you don’t see people like Witkoff or Kushner or these other characters anywhere involved in it, right? And just from a bandwidth perspective, I think to the extent President Trump is focused on foreign policy issues, it’s really Iran as the first and probably second priority, Ukraine and Russia, you know, kind of a distant third, and then I think China’s number four, right?

And so, I think that was part of why I just had very low expectations, just ‘cause you didn’t see the focus from the U.S. side on getting its act together ahead of the summit.

Julia Curlee: Yeah. So, Jon, I mean, I wanna get a little b- bit more on this council that was involved in national security of which you speak in the, the previous administration, and help just tee this up just a little bit more on how you would contrast with how this administration, you know, prepared for this summit.

Jonathan Czin: Yeah. I mean, when I was on the National Security Council, I mean, the preparation that would go into this would start months ahead of time, right? And you’re negotiating with the Chinese over every aspect of this: the content, the sequencing, how this is going to go down. And especially since, you know, in the Biden administration, we didn’t do any state visits.

There was no visit to Beijing or to the United States by President Xi except until the end of the administration. We were often meeting in third country, right? So, it was a question of who is technically hosting whom, ‘cause then you get to control the agenda. And I just wouldn’t underestimate the level of detail to which we would negotiate things, right?

How long are those opening pleasantries going to be? Are they gonna be thirty seconds? Are they gonna be a minute? That sort of thing. And all of that fell to us. And then in terms of the substance, you know, there was more of a bottom-up process about, you know, what kind of decisions needed to be made ahead of this meeting, right?

Not just about the summit itself, but, you know, the broader geopolitical dynamic and everything else that’s going on, which I think especially in this instance is such a, such an important part of the story here too, right? It’s not just about the summit, it’s about the things that we’re not talking about because the summit has sucked up so much of the oxygen in the room right now.

Julia Curlee: Yeah. So, if we were still so fortunate to have you writing the PDB on the summit, you know, how Beijing might perceive the outcome objectively, how we all did, the scorecard of a summit like this, what would you write in terms of, you know, what was agreed with the deliverables, the optics, and anything else?

How would you measure who came out ahead?

Jonathan Czin: Yeah. So, there’s two facets to this, right? There’s the way I would’ve thought about it going into the piece, and this is kind of my natural starting point anyway, right, as a former analyst. How does this look from Xi Jinping’s perspective? What is Xi looking to get out of this meeting, right?

And I think the main thing that I would really emphasize, and that I was emphasizing before this meeting, is that Xi’s not really looking for anything in particular in terms of tangible deliverables coming out of this meeting. He really wants to do two things in a meeting like this. I think, number one, from an optics perspective, he wants to position himself and China by extension, as the United States’ peer and as Donald Trump’s peer, right?

So, by that metric, I mean, I think it’s very clear from what we’ve seen, check. He got that in spades, especially with Trump going out to Joint Base Andrews to personally greet him. And I think the other thing that Xi is looking for, it’s less about the particulars, it’s more about just buying time and space and relief from U.S. pressure, right?

From the variety of competitive actions that were undertaken earlier in the Trump administration, going back to the Biden administration, right? So, there’s not really an affirmative agenda that Beijing is looking to accomplish here, which I think gets back to the first question, too, about why were there so few concrete deliverables.

So, I think by both metrics coming out of the summit, I think Xi got what he wanted, right? Even though the gentleman’s agreement that we talked about has only been extended till January, I mean, we’ll see what happens with that. But I think they are making a calculation that given everything else that the Trump administration has on its hands, they’re not gonna want another cycle of escalation, and for China to yank on the rare earth supply chain again and create the pain that it would cause for U.S. companies and the broader U.S. economy, which is already facing a variety of headwinds in the, in this moment.

So, I think if you’re grading it afterwards, that’s what I worry about, too, and this was, you know, this was never our job at the agency to assess and appraise, you know, how the U.S. did coming out of this. But now that I’m out in the wild, I do have the liberty to do that, as you know. I worry about this. I struggle to see what we really got out of this summit, either in terms of the optics, which I think were not strong, right?

There was a lot of bonhomie at a moment when there are a lot of big issues on the table that were largely left unaddressed, including the explosion of anxiety in our own country about artificial intelligence. And yeah, in terms of the substance, I don’t really know what we got substantively out of this meeting except for, you know, you’re gonna get a two-month extension of the gentlemen’s agreement on rare earths, which I think my understanding is that’s gonna alarm many in the business community because it doesn’t allow them enough time to really prepare and do what they need to do to inventory and stock up.

And so yeah. So, it’s really challenging for me to see what were the positive aspects that came out of this meeting, especially because I think part of what Beijing’s doing, we already ha- see evidence of this, is that as they’re pulling the United States in closer, they are pushing our partners and allies much harder, right?

And we saw that after the first encounter between the two presidents in Busan, South Korea last year, where just a month afterwards there was this big kerfuffle with Japan, right? And they’ve been pushing the Japanese pretty hard. And again, we are seeing it with this summit, that at the same time, just as Xi is wheels up from Washington, there’s a note in my inbox about the Southern Theater in China, the Southern Theater Command, starting a military exercise around Scarborough Reef, right?

Right at the same time, on the heels of this. So, they see this as an opportunity to push and to probe and see what they can get away with our allies and partners.

Julia Curlee: You also host a, a rival podcast, which I will not hold against you, The Beijing Brief. But in that you a- you actually warned a few months ago s- about something called the constructive strategic stability trap, and we saw the U.S. in the readout of this seemingly adopt that, that language in the fact sheet with the words fairness and reciprocity adapted.

Did we just walk into the trap that, that you said that was being set for us?

Jonathan Czin: Yes, we did. And you know, I keep joking that constructive strategic stability is a lot like Defense Department programs. The more innocuous it sounds, the more dangerous it probably is, right? I mean, it sounds on the face of it like, oh yeah, it’s constructive, it’s strategic, it’s stable.

But no, I think the real issue here is the spin that Beijing is gonna put on the ball, again, with our allies and partners, and try to undermine not just our soft power, but really our hard power too, right? Because what they’re going to say to folks around the region, which I, what I think they have been saying to folks around the region, is that when the United States says that it wants constructive strategic stability with China, it means that they are setting aside your gripes and your grievances and your challenges with the PRC, right?

So, I think that’s true with the Japanese. I think that’s true, like what we were just talking about, with the South China Sea, right? That is how Beijing is going to frame it. And I think the fact that, you know, if you look at the readout from the previous summit, that was the only mention of any of the strategic issues that were on the agenda between the two sides.

There was no reference to South China Sea, or Japan, or any of the other issues that you would usually see mentioned in these kind of readouts. So, that is the real danger in terms of accepting Beijing’s framing. It’s not necessarily that, you know, Trump is not, and his administration are not really constrained by, you know, by such niceties of phraseology.

They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do, but that is where the real damage is done. It’s not about Washington, it’s about the message that it sends globally and especially to our allies and partners. And they’ve tried this before, right? Going back to the Obama administration, they had a similar, similarly sounding innocuous phrase, called new type of great power relationship, that we want to avoid the conflicts that have beset a rising power and a declining power in the past, right?

And you still see some of this floating around from Xi Jinping with his discussion of the Thucydides Trap, which again, it’s remarkable that the Trump administration hasn’t pushed back on it, because what he’s saying pretty explicitly is China’s— we, China, are the rising power, and you, America, are the declining power, right?

And for a president not to push back on that is fairly remarkable.

Julia Curlee: Yeah, completely agree. Before we go on, I wa- I wanna make sure we dive into a couple of the substantive issues-

Jonathan Czin: Yeah.

Julia Curlee: … that you haven’t yet mentioned in depth. The first was this AI discussion, where our side was seemingly focused on what do we call AI, but the other side was focused on what potential agreements could be between us.

Could you give us a, a bit more on the, the AI, what was in it and what wasn’t?

Jonathan Czin: Yeah, I mean, so what’s disappointing about it is that this was part of the homework for Secretary Bessent and his Chinese counterpart coming out of the last summit in May, that they were supposed to stand up an AI dialogue.

And then just in terms of the mechanics, what ended up happening was that this ultimately got rolled up into the meeting I mentioned between Bessent and He Lifeng just the weekend before President Trump and President Xi met. So, what that means is, I mean, they spent a day together in New York at JP Morgan headquarters talking about a whole suite of issues, right?

So, these are meetings that typically occur in consecutive translation, right? So even if they spend a full business day together, you know, each side gets, you know, half that amount of time to express their views, assuming the Chinese side doesn’t filibuster, which they often do, right?

So, AI was one of many issues aside from the trade, standing up the board of trade, maybe discussion of board of investment. I’m sure the Chinese talked about export controls that the United States has in place that they don’t like. So, AI would have gotten really short shrift. And again, it’s, it, this is part of the issue when you consider that in the broader context about this explosion of anxiety about AI and the U.S. and China having the lead, you know, these are not meetings that are meeting the moment by any stretch of the imagination.

Especially because, you know, even the meeting between Secretary Bessent and He Lifeng, I mean, this is a discussion between a guy in his sixties and a guy in his seventies who may or may not have had first-hand contact with AI in the first place, right?

And now they have the charge afterwards. So, it remains to be seen. It’s a positive set that they agreed to talk about it, but there just doesn’t seem to be a lot of there there. This just seems to be if there is some kind of incident, you know, Bessent and He Lifeng agree that they would pick up the phone and call each other.

But the issue, as you know, Julia, is that one, is Beijing really gonna pick up the phone? This has been the perennial issue with crisis communications, that they don’t have an interest in talking to us when things get tense. And number two, if China has an issue and they have an incident, are they gonna pick up the phone and call the United States, their chief geopolitical rival?

And I worry about this, because as we saw during COVID, that was not the case, right? Their default setting is not to be communicative when they have a potentially embarrassing problem on their hands domestically, right? So, it’s positive sign that they’re doing it. It’s better than them not doing it, but it’s pretty it’s pretty thin stuff at this point, and it’s kind of jarring when you contrast it with you know, the proliferation of discussion of people talking about, you know, the probability of doom from AI.

Julia Curlee: Yeah, and you would think if it was serious, it would be more than just Bessent and its Chinese counterparts exchanging cellphone numbers, right?

Jonathan Czin: Yes.

Julia Curlee: I don’t detect anything that suggests there’s an ongoing working group of technical experts in exchange of, you know, monitors to make sure that the other side is complying with whatever agreement.

It seems pretty shallow.

Jonathan Czin: Yes. Yes. I think that’s right. That’s the main takeaway.

Julia Curlee: And some people I’ve read have compared this to the strategic stability talks or the idea that the U.S. and China should have agreements on nuclear weapons and exchange ex- you know, monitors to build confidence.

And do you think that’s a good analogy to this, and why Beijing might not be interested in such a deal?

Jonathan Czin: I mean, it’s not a bad thing to aspire to, right? But the problem with this, and including on nuclear issues, right, not just this suite of emerging technologies, is that Beijing is allergic to discussing these issues with the United States.

They see any discussion about arms control or about these emerging technologies that could have military applications as a trap, right? That China’s behind us in these domains and that any kind of dialogue mechanism would just be designed to lock that in from China.

And I think the discourse about AI probably has only reinforced that perception in Beijing because while President Trump and Dario Amodei don’t agree about much, including, you know, the probability of doom from AI, the common denominator in both of their public comments is that China needs to remain behind the United States, and the United States needs to maintain its lead.

So, if you’re a policymaker in Beijing and you’re staffing Xi Jinping ahead of this meeting, you’re gonna hear that, and it’s just gonna reconfirm your priors, right? That this is what this is really about, right? It’s about keeping China under, underfoot rather than having any kind of meaningful dialogue, right?

So, I mean, across all these issues, I get— I understand the impulse, right, to go back to what we were able to accomplish with the Soviets, right, in terms of arms control. But, you know, when you make that comparison to the Chinese, you’re actually rubbing that raw nerve, right? Because they know how the Cold War played out.

They know that the Soviets lost and unraveled, and so they— that logic does not have resonance with them at all. Quite, quite the opposite. It ends up having the opposite effect.

Julia Curlee: I wanna move on to the other easy issue in U.S.-Chinese affairs, which of course is Taiwan. As a longtime Taiwan person, I was relieved that we didn’t leave the summit having traded Taiwan for a soybean deal.

I know that’s setting the standards a little low. But I was wondering if you could speak a bit to what actually happened here. I think there was ... It’s pretty clear there was a divergence in what Beijing said on the subject of what was agreed to on Taiwan, or the words that were used, and the words we used.

Of course, that would never happen in the context of Taiwan, but I’m being sarcastic. Jon, please give us a bit-

Jonathan Czin: I know.

Julia Curlee: ... of what happened on Taiwan.

Jonathan Czin: Ta- Taiwan policy has the tendency to slip from the tangible quickly to the, the theological, right? And disputations over the liturgy. But, you know, neither side really mentioned it in their formal readouts, but what we did see in Chinese press was Xi pushing the United States to adhere to the correct course of opposing Taiwan independence.

And for, you know, the laity and the, the uninitiated who are going to be listening, this is something the Chinese have pushed for a long time, right? That they want the U.S. to come out and say explicitly that we oppose U.S. independence, which we have said in the past, but it was, it’s been a long time since we’ve said that officially.

You have to go back to the Bush administration to really find an instance of saying this. Usually what we say is we don’t support Taiwan independence, right? That’s the official U.S. position and has been for quite some time. So, the Chinese have been pushing for this. I think what they are doing, though, is they’re not looking for some kind of big bang moment where Trump says the thing that they want him to say.

I think they, they expect ... I think they kind of suspect that the distinction is so nuanced that it’ll be lost on Trump. And honestly, it’s, I think it’s lost on most people. It kinda sounds like tomato, right? And if you’re talking about a real estate developer from Queens, you know, do not oppose versus, you know, oppose independence versus do not support what’s the difference, right?

I think what it shows instead is that China just keeps chipping away at this, right? And again, the intended audience is not necessarily the Trump administration. I don’t think they expect them, Beijing expects them to abide by what they say. The message is to Taipei, right? That the U- raising these doubts and underscoring that, you know, behind closed doors or even publicly, the U.S. ain’t gonna have your back, right, if it really comes to a crunch, right?

And I think that is what they are trying to do on the Taiwan front. And again, I think it’s a real missed opportunity, right? I was just in T- Taipei for a Brookings trip last month, and we got to meet with President Lai and a variety of senior political and national security officials, and what’s striking to me, having watched this issue evolved over time, is that they still have a long ways to go when it comes to doing what they need to do on the defense side.

But I think they have reoriented the ship of state, right? And they are taking this issue seriously, and they’re not complacent in the, about, about the threat from China as they have been in the past. That’s number one. Number two is that the economic pieces are in place. They have a huge economic boom going on that’s basically riding the coattails of our own AI boom here in the United States.

And I would say, you know, in a lot of ways, I think the bumper sticker for me is that Taiwan has refashioned itself as a model Trump administration partner. They are taking their own defense seriously. Their economy is increasingly tied to ours rather than to China’s, including they have a trade deal with the Trump administration that unlike most countries, they actually seem to be happy about, right?

What that means is the short pole in the tent or the weakest part of this relationship right now is what should be the easiest, the talking points, right? And the things that we say about Taiwan. This should be easy, and we should be capitalizing on the opportunity that we have to double down on that relationship with Taiwan instead of focusing on, you know, vetting Xi Jinping in this moment

Julia Curlee: Yeah, I completely agree with you and especially about the Taiwan’s turning the corner on their defense strategy.

But what they don’t have is unlimited time, and it seems as if the $14 billion arms package, including arms that they desperately needed, has been put on hold or declared a, a negotiating chip. And correct me if I’m wrong, but with the president a- agreeing to go to Shenzhen and Xi coming to Miami, is this basically on hold now, or can we ever expect the arms deal to go through?

Jonathan Czin: I would be shocked if something happens by the end of this year, right? Between the midterm elections going on and you’re gonna have these two additional summits I have a hard time envisaging a scenario in which the Trump administration actually moves forward with this deal sometime before the end of the year.

And I think your point about the upcoming summits is a point to emphasize, right? Like, the optics from this meeting where Trump is hosting our chief geopolitical rival just weeks before a midterm election were already, frankly, living in Washington, D.C., kind of surreal and strange. But, you know, the words of Alice in Wonderland, it’s gonna get stranger and stranger in the coming couple of months, right?

And it’s not just because they’re gonna have reciprocal visits. I think part of the way the, the Chinese have been trying to bait Trump into visiting China and schlepping across the Pacific again, which is, you know, a big deal for a leader in his 80s, right? Like, this is no ... it’s a big trip, as, as you know, Julia, right, to cross the Pacific even at, when you’re half that age.

Julia Curlee: It’s how I ended up in Papua New Guinea with Mike Pence.

Jonathan Czin: Yeah, yeah.

Julia Curlee: It’s like for APEC, yeah.

Jonathan Czin: Yeah, exactly.

Julia Curlee: The man at the top wasn’t gonna get on the plane.

Jonathan Czin: Yep, exactly. Exactly. But I think part of the way that the, the Chinese have enticed Trump into doing this is that they’re talking about a Big Three photo op with Trump, Xi, and Putin, right? With the obvious and unfortunate historical resonance with Yalta and the other Big Three meetings from World War II, or maybe Cairo is the better reference here since the Chinese participated in that one.

So, it’s, it ... The optics of all this are about to get a lot stranger as President Trump really focuses more on, you know, courting two hostile powers more than he seems focused on actually countering them.

Julia Curlee: Yeah, I completely agree. And one imagines this photo of the three, you know, great leaders, the great men of our world bestriding all of the middle powers, you know, instructing them to suffer what they must.

It’s gonna be, it’s gonna be a rough optic, but it does play directly to how Trump seems to perceive Xi and I don’t wanna use the, the Xi’s not into you, but which… the most overused. But, I mean, clearly Trump sees his relationship with Xi as the personal aspect of it as being fundamental to the relationship rather than the underlying competition.

Jonathan Czin: Yes. Yes, and that’s what we’re— that, that is very much what we’re seeing, and, you know, you even have some people you know, in the Twitterverse pointing out that, you know, a lot of Chinese commentators are also saying this, right? But, you know, my understanding of Xi, and I wrote about this in The Atlantic a couple weeks ago, is that we know very few things.

There’s a lot we don’t know about Xi Jinping, but one of the things we do know is that this is not a guy who’s sentimental about his personal relationships, right? And we have gotten a lot of evidence of that just in the past year, right? And the, the probably the best data point about this is the purge of General Zhang Youxia, who was formerly the top commander of the PLA, and this is somebody that Xi Jinping has known since childhood.

Their fathers fought together. They were in the same field army in China’s civil war back in the 1940s, right? And even more recently, Xi had kept Zhang around after he had passed his expiration date at the last party congress, the last time there was a big leadership reshuffle. So clearly somebody who had a historical relationship with Xi and had a current contemporary relationship with him, and Xi just got rid of him, right?

And so, if that’s how Xi treats people in his innermost circle- I think we can extrapolate how he’s gonna think about his encounters with, again, his chief geopolitical adversary, right? That he’s not going to be sentimental. I think what, the fact that so much of this is percolating in the Chinese press, I think what it underscores is that it’s useful for Xi Jinping to have Trump think that he’s his friend, right?

And to have him think that they’re his buddies and that there’s some kind of bromance going on between the two of them, right? Because again, it gets to that underlying strategic objective. What is Xi trying to accomplish? Not much in the, in terms of the way of tangible deals, but to buy time and space and relief from U.S. pressure, right?

So that there isn’t a reorientation from the United States that focuses primarily on countering China. So, that’s useful to Xi, but I think we could see it in the body language, both from this summit and the last summit. You know, I mean, Trump, you know, was very explicit and forward-leaning in his praise for Xi Jinping, and Xi just doesn’t really respond, right?

It’s very unrequited, this focus on the personal relationship. And yes, they did things in Beijing, like the tour of the gardens and the Chinese leadership compound to give Trump face, but it’s not reciprocal, to use the Trump administration’s term, right? It is lopsided in the dynamic between the two of them.

Julia Curlee: Yeah, I saw many fewer gold baubles and, you know, FIFA World Peace prizes delivered by Xi Jinping to the equivalent of whatever that would be, and it’s just not much courting from the other side.

The— I was gonna ask you, l- just one more bit about the agreements. If the two militaries sign a crisis communications agreement, who on the Chinese side is actually gonna pick up this phone, and where in the Chinese system do we expect that kind of mil-mil cooperation to happen, if it does?

Jonathan Czin: Yeah. So potentially, like, the person that they, the Chinese side usually puts forward as a counterpart to our own Secretary of Defense is their own Minister of National Defense, right?

The problem with that is that the Minister of National Defense is not in the operational chain of command the way our Secretary of Defense is. He’s not even, in Xi’s third term, even on the Central Military Commission, which is the party’s supreme military decision-making body, right? And as our former colleague, John Culver, used to like to point out, he’s also the only minister in China with no vice ministers, right?

Which tells you something about just how much wasa this guy has inside the Chinese system, right? So presumably, that would be the counterpart because that’s often who they shepherd us towards. But it’s also worth noting, because of the purges in the high command, and this is one of the really dramatic stories of Xi Jinping’s third term, there’s nobody at the top to pick up the phone right now, right?

Like, if the chair— our chairman to the Joint Chiefs of Staff used to actually have a relationship, right, or an ability to reach out and contact the chief of their Joint Staff Department. There is no chief of the Joint Staff Department right now, right? And a lot of the deputies are gone, too, right?

So, it is kind of striking. The other thing that’s really peculiar about this is that this, this kind of crisis communications and mil-mil engagement is something that the United States has been seeking out since the George W. Bush administration, at least, right? Since the EP-3 crisis, where, you know, a Chinese fighter jet crashed with a U.S. reconnaissance plane in the South China Sea, and I think everybody on the U.S. side had kind of an oh shit moment.

Like, we don’t have a way to get in touch with these guys if we have steel hitting steel. It has not been a priority for the Chinese side, right? This goes back to our conversation about arms control. This is one of the things that they see as a trap. They see it as a way for the United States to try to bound China and hold them down in a crisis.

So, it’s really striking in the readouts that it’s mentioned on the Chinese side, not on the U.S. side, and there’s no mention of it on the U.S. side. And, you know, in the reporting that’s come out overnight, you have anonymous administration officials denying that it came up at all in the course of the conversation.

So, it’s— I still don’t have a good explanation for that yet at this point, except that, you know, these two readouts, like I said, it’s like the old Chinese idiom, like it’s like a chicken talking to a duck, right? These look like two things that should be talking to each other, but not really.

Julia Curlee: I’ll try to work out which is the chicken and which is the duck at this point, but we can figure out that later.

You know, one of the issues that, that you would think would command more prominence between two of the world’s most powerful leaders, the United States is in the middle of an ongoing war in the Middle East in which we are blockading and restricting the passage of oil of, from one of China’s most important energy providers, in Iran.

China depends heavily on Gulf energy and yet has, of course, declined to help with the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. I don’t know if we would want them to. But can you explain what, if anything, comes out of this summit related to the war in Iran? What explains Beijing’s real strategic patience on this subject?

Jonathan Czin: Yeah. I think it just captures a mismatch in the two sides’ geopolitical assessments, right? I mean, there’s such an intense focus on this right now in Washington, and I think sometimes we end up mirror imaging that Beijing is just as concerned. But, you know, Beijing has been preparing and planning for some kind of contingency like this for much of the past decade, right?

And this gets back to their response to the first Trump trade war, right? They’re trying to minimize those vulnerabilities and those dependencies, not just on the United States, but on kind of international exogenous shocks on their system. And so, I think they’ve been hesitant to play any kind of constructive role with the Iran crisis and war in particular because they haven’t felt like they needed to, right?

They’ve weathered the shock much better than just about any other country, especially in East Asia, right, ‘cause they built up tremendous stockpiles. We don’t know exactly how big they are, but it just hasn’t had the same kind of jarring effect on China’s economy so far. So, they really feel insulated from it, in part because they don’t have the kind of dependencies that they did in the past.

Some of that is green energy, but some of that is that their, a lot of their manufacturing base is equipped to go, to shift readily from, you know, from fossil fuels to coal, right? And China does produce a lot of its own coal domestically. So, I think that is a big part of the driver. They just see it as an unnecessary, what’s in it for them to bestir themselves to try to get involved in this?

I also think it gets to their theory about how to surpass the United States. They are not looking for some kind of big bang moment where they overtake the United States, and they want to surpass the United States, in my view, and I know this, again, this is one of these theological questions in the China watching community, but they are not looking to have the same responsibilities that the United States has taken onto itself, especially in the Middle East, right?

They have watched what we have done and the ways in which we’ve gotten bogged down and distracted and dissipated our strength in the Middle East for the last quarter century. And I think they have zero appetite for doing that. And, you know, kind of you’ll appreciate this, Julia, kind of getting their tie stuck in the shredder on this one, right?

They really want to avoid that outcome and don’t see— they don’t see any reason to. That might start to change a little bit as they, as this gets on. I mean, they can’t rely on their reserves forever. But again, I think the threshold is gonna be high. And I think, you know, how they’ve handled other major international crises that they’ve had a stake in is instructive, right?

Look at their role in Russia, Ukraine. It’s basically been to back Russia throughout this crisis, right? They haven’t really played a constructive role. And look at the North Korea issue for much of the century, right? That’s right on their backyard. You’re talking about, you know, kind of a junior partner to Beijing acquiring a nuclear weapon.

And at most, you know, kind of episodically and with a lot of U.S. wrangling, they’ve occasionally maybe sometimes played something of a constructive role on the margins, right? But not really, right? It’s a, it’s— so it’s a high threshold for them to really get animated about things that are beyond their own very narrowly construed interests.

Julia Curlee: Yeah. I mean, I’ve written extensively how I see the Iran war as the giant geopolitical debacle for the United States, and it’s undermining our relationships with our allies and partners and weakening American power around the world. And if I were in Beijing, I would be not wanting to interfere with my strategic adversary while it was committing great power suicide.

I was wondering if you— first, if you see it that way, if part of Beijing’s hesitation is just letting the United States play out its own debacle to its logical finish.

Jonathan Czin: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think they see it as presenting an opportunity to them. And it’s not that, you know, they’re about to undertake, you know, the, the million-man swim to Taiwan.

It’s because they see it as an opportunity to continue fortifying themselves. And I think what, you know, what listeners should appreciate is that, you know, although Trump is, in fact, in many ways very idiosyncratic and different from his predecessors, I think from Beijing’s view, when they look at this war and this conflict, they see a lot of continuity, right?

I think in their view, this is no different from, you know, the Obama administration and its intervention in Libya or the Bush administration and its interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, right? They see this as the main thrust of U.S. foreign policy. And it— I think from their perspective, it’s been beneficial, right?

We’ve been talking about pivoting to Asia. We’ve talked about it so many times, I think we’ve gone round and round in circles a few times, right? And from Beijing’s perspective, that’s fine. Let the United States continue to dissipate its strength in the Middle East without, you know, frankly, having much to show for it in terms of real tangible benefit for the United States.

Julia Curlee: Yeah, completely agree. I mean, this summer writing in Lawfare, I talked a little bit about what lessons the war in Iran might hold for Beijing and the PLA thinking about a military campaign against Taiwan. Do you think that whether it is at the military level or strategic level that Beijing is drawing any real lessons for its future potential operations against Taiwan?

Jonathan Czin: Yeah. I assume they are because they’re very diligent students, as you know, Julia, about U.S. military operations and try to glean any lesson that they can from it. You know, and here I’ll be speculating a little bit about, you know, what kind of lessons they might be drawing from this. I think there’s probably a couple.

Number one, I mean, especially at the onset of the war, and I think for both this conflict and Venezuela, you know, the, the initial phases of this war, tactically and operationally, for the United States were pretty impressive, right? Like, you know, we did kidnap a foreign head of state, right, with this kind of very precise operation in Venezuela.

And then, you know, the Trump administration talking point is not wrong about obliterating Iran’s navy and air force, you know, early in the early phases of this campaign. And I think Beijing will take that— see that and take it seriously. The problem is really about what happens over time, right?

It’s the temporal aspect of this. And I think what they are learning, number one, is so they have a new suite of things to think about in terms of U.S. offensive operations. But I think in terms of playing defense, they are also probably learning new things from the Iranians, right? Beijing has built out a lot of advanced capabilities, right, and high-end munitions, but I think they’re also learning about what they can do more cheaply at the lower end with drones and that kind of technology, right, if it did come to a conflict with the United States, and I think thinking really seriously about that aspect of the equation.

And then there’s a deeper strategic question. I think what they are learning from this conflict is that, yes, the U.S. military does have a lot of impressive kit and capability, but what it doesn’t have is willpower, right? And the stomach for taking things to their logical conclusion or even— and also more practically, the magazine depth that they need, right, for a sustained conflict.

I mean, we’re really, you know, exhausting ourselves fighting a military that is in no ways comparable to the PLA and the kind of capacity that it has, and a country that doesn’t have the industrial manufacturing base that China would be able to bring to bear in a conflict, right? And yet we’re already running out of munitions and ordnance.

So, I think they’re watching this quite closely and really thinking hard about all these issues, right? And I’m— what it reminds me of, this was from a civilian Chinese counterpart, even before the Iran war got underway. I think what they’ve learned from the U.S. and from watching the Trump administration in particular over the last year, is that we just don’t have the appetite for taking risks, right, and for escalation from Beijing in particular.

And what they— what this colleague said after the Busan Agreement last year was really bracing as an American. He said, it’s not that the U.S. doesn’t have leverage over China. You do. What we’ve learned over the past year is that you don’t have the stomach to use it. Right? And so that’s what I worry about being their takeaway.

I think there’s actually a really interesting parallelism here between the Iran conflict and its narrative arc and what happened in the Trump administration’s trade war in the first year, right? They’ve basically followed the same course where the Trump administration comes in, you know, literally in the second instance, guns blazing, right?

And underestimating the other side, right? Bessent said that the Chinese were, quote, “playing with a pair of twos” before the Liberation Day tariffs. And then learning, through sight by touch, how much resilience and capacity and leverage the other side has, including a hold over key choke points, right? And then scrambling to find some kind of diplomatic denouement to get them out of the, out of, themselves out of the corner that they painted themselves into.

So, it’s unfortunate because, I mean, they’re ba- it’s basically learning on the job about the parameters of your foe’s capacity, which is, you know, what people like you and I were paid to do, right, in an earlier time. So, I just offer that as an observation about how this has all played out, obviously with a much different scope and scale on the Iran side, and we don’t have a tidy resolution or any kind of gentleman’s agreement like we do with the Chinese case, and it’s not clear if and when we are going to actually arrive at that.

Julia Curlee: Yeah. And I would hope that among other people learning lessons from the Iran war that are relevant are the Taiwanese who could be- ... observing how a country with no navy has now denied a strategic strait to one of the most powerful navies on earth.

Jonathan Czin: Yeah.

Julia Curlee: Hint.

Jonathan Czin: Yes.

Julia Curlee: Yeah. And I— It’s fascinating. We’ll have to see how that one plays out, ‘cause I don’t think the war is gonna end anytime soon. That’s just my hot take for the moment. I wanted to just, as we head toward the end, and you’ve been really generous with your time, looking ahead on the next two summits, first of all, you have full employment, I think, through the end of the year.

Yes. You might have been taking, thinking you were gonna take the rest of the year off. Sorry, John. Sorry, Brookings. You got some work to do. Could you walk us through what to expect in Shenzhen and then, and in Miami? Can we expect Xi Jinping on the golf course? Appreciate your insights.

Jonathan Czin: I think we can expect, like with this summit and the last summit, I think we can expect very little of substance, right?

There is another Chinese idiom that I like to throw around with these meetings: It’s all thunder and no rain, right? So, I think at best what we can get is maybe, you know, some kind of manifestation of the agreements that, that we were talking about earlier, another iteration of the AI dialogue, right?

This board of trade that the two sides are discussing seems to be finally showing some fi- signs of life after the summit. But I think in the context of relations between the two superpowers, I think it’ll be small ball stuff. This isn’t gonna be like Yalta, where these two leaders are gonna sit down and have a real serious conversation about the fate of the international order.

It will be kind of a sad pantomime of it. Right? It’ll have the photo ops and the feels, and I think all it’s really going to accomplish is, like I said earlier, sending the signal that we’re not serious about thinking about international order or about how to create some kind of order in this really chaotic moment.

So, I’m very pessimistic about what of good is going to come from either of these meetings. And I think the interesting question too that I’ve been, that I’ve been starting to think a little bit about is not just what happens through the end of the year, but really what happens next year, right?

This is kind of an unusual bumper crop of head of state engagements between the two side. I think this will be the most encounters that a U.S. president and Chinese president will ever have had in a single year. But then what happens next year, right? After the midterm elections, when President Trump will be a lame duck, right?

And Xi Jinping is going to be increasingly occupied with laying the groundwork for his fourth term in office at the party congress in the fall of next year. So, I don’t know. I think it creates more space as little has come from these meetings and as much damage as I think they have done to some of our interests, if you don’t have this backstopping on the calendar next year, you know, who’s gonna be— what’s going to focus Trump’s mind on the China relationship, and does it create space for, for things to unravel and for the U.S. to have, you know, some kind of other real foreign policy problem on its hands?

Julia Curlee: Yeah. I’ve been trying to think through what could be the points of escalation and, you know, it’s embarrassing to admit as a former CIA analyst, it’s hard to pin down ‘cause some of the things, like for example, the allegations that the administration made about Chinese interference-

Jonathan Czin: Yeah ...

Julia Curlee: in our elections, which is seemingly laying a predicate for further interference down the road, whether it’s this midterms or down in, in ‘28, seemingly swept under the rug when-

Jonathan Czin: Yes.

Julia Curlee: … we hosted the leader of China. Are there any other escalation points that we should be thinking about?

Jonathan Czin: It’s a good question. I think the main ones are the obvious ones, right? Like there, there was this great note in you know, Matt Turpin, who was a China director in the first Trump administration, said that, you know, well, you know, the reason the gentleman’s agreement is only prolonged to January is because Trump’s not gonna really need it once he gets through the midterms, right?

Which is striking because it just leaves— opens the question then, well, what happens if Trump just becomes inattentive to this? Is China gonna yank on the rare earths card proactively? Are we gonna go back to tariffs? Are we gonna have, you know, trade war three point oh next year? I don’t really think that’s where the Trump administration is going.

But what I worry about is that what you will have instead is this kind of Jimmy Carter-esque sense of malaise and just drift, right? Especially on our China policy, right? That there’s not really a focus on competing with China or, and there’s not much that really comes from all these engagements next year, right?

And I think part of the issue too, in terms of flashpoints, is that the things that normally would be flashpoints, enhanced Chinese pressure on Taiwan or Japan or in the South China Sea, we’re already seeing all of that, and it is not unsettling the relationship, right? Which is in and of itself alarming, right?

So yes, on the one hand it’s good that there’s not a flashpoint, but on the other hand, it’s like, well, maybe we should be really worked up about these things and just concerned about what’s going on.

Julia Curlee: Well, thanks, John. One last question, and this is directed, you know, directly at our former CIA colleagues.

What is the best part of not working in a windowless box in your post-government career? I know I’m ambushing you with the hard one at the end.

Jonathan Czin: Oh, man. You know, as, as much as I learned from the coordination process at the agency, it is nice not to have to go through the government clearance process to just write what you think, right?

Like, I keep joking that, you know, the, the bureaucratic equivalent of I love you the three magic words are cleared without edits, right? And those are words I actually hear more on the outside that I... I never heard those words on the inside, right?

Julia Curlee: That- that’s remarkable. Yeah, I’ve got the same feedback on my Lawfare editors that include one or two layers of review, which is delicious, versus the, what, we have like twenty-five layers of review with, at CIA for the average PDB, which made the product better at every level as, as you know, I’m sure.

Jonathan Czin: Yeah. I can neither confirm nor deny that.

Julia Curlee: All right. Well, John, appreciate it. Please let us know if there’s gonna be a World War III before the holidays, and it’s been great to catch up with you. Likewise. Thanks so much for coming on Lawfare.

Jonathan Czin: Thanks so much, Julia.

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