Two months into U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S.-Chinese relationship—the most consequential one in the world by a long stretch—faces new uncertainty. Trump has threatened larger tariffs as China has continued its military buildup and activities in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea. But Trump has also focused his ire on allied capitals, rather than on Beijing, and talked about making a deal with his “very good friend” Xi Jinping.

In a recent essay forForeign Affairs, Jude Blanchette and Ryan Hass stressed the importance, and highlighted the challenge, of understanding the balance of power with America’s top rival. The biggest risk, they argue, is not that Washington will underestimate China’s strength, but that it will neglect the sources of its own.

Blanchette runs the China Research Center at the RAND Corporation; Hass, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, long worked on China policy at the National Security Council and State Department. They joined editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan to discuss Beijing’s assessment of American power, the prospects for a “grand bargain” between Trump and Xi, and whether fears of American decline risk becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Sources:

“Know Your Rival, Know Yourself” by Jude Blanchette and Ryan Hass

“What America Wants From China” by Ryan Hass

“No Substitute for Victory” by Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher

“The Societal Foundations of National Competitiveness” by Michael Mazarr

“The U.S.—Decline or Renewal?” by Samuel P. Huntington

The Foreign Affairs Interview is produced by Julia Fleming-Dresser, Molly McAnany, Ben Metzner, and Caroline Wilcox, with audio support from Todd Yeager and original music by Robin Hilton.

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DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Jude, Ryan, thank you for joining me and for the fantastic work you’ve both done inForeign Affairs over the last few years, separately and together.

RYAN HASS

Thank you, Dan.

JUDE BLANCHETTE

Thank you, Dan. Appreciate it.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to attempt to step back from this rather wild and hard to interpret moment in U.S. foreign policy and the U.S.-Chinese relationship to the broader strategic situation that the two of you describe in the essay you have in our January/February issue, it’s called “Know Your Rival, Know Yourself: Rightsizing the China Challenge.” Ryan, as you looked at the consensus assessment of Chinese power in the U.S. foreign policy world over the last few years, what in your view, had it gotten wrong?

RYAN HASS

Well, Dan, the premise of the piece that you referenced was that it’s important for us not to overestimate and also not to underestimate the nature of our rival. And I think that there’s a risk in going in either direction, and I think at various points in time we’ve shot in excessive directions. There was a period earlier on where China was on this meteoric rise that was unstoppable, and they were going to surpass and eclipse us. Then, in Washington, the conversation quickly moved into “peak China,” and maybe, they’re at the apex of their power and getting ready to have a hurling descent. I think both of those narratives may do more to conceal than reveal. And so part of what Jude and I tried to do through this piece was to really focus in at a granular level on what it is that China is doing well and where China is having weaknesses and how that compares to some of the United States’ strengths and weaknesses.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And could I get you to expand a little further on how you saw that balance as you attempted to work through that net assessment—where it came out?

RYAN HASS

Well, we wrote the piece, it was published on January 7. So in a sense it sort of serves as a time capsule to a moment in time before President [Donald] Trump’s inauguration. And at that moment, the United States had an incredibly resilient economy, an economy that was larger than the next three economies combined. Nine of the ten largest companies by market cap were in the United States. The United States was attracting record levels of capital, and American technology companies were really pushing out the frontier of innovation. And so in that moment, the United States looked very strong.

At the same time, China was facing incredible stresses. They were having capital outflow, mounting debt, a sclerotic political system, and real stresses with many of their most powerful neighbors and other powerful countries in the world simultaneously. And so on January 7, when the piece was published, I think that the picture looked very favorable to the United States.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You both spend a lot of time reading Chinese sources, talking to Chinese scholars, Chinese officials, Jude, how did Chinese observers of this see their country’s position at the start of this year? It’s striking that as Western economists and policymakers talk a lot about stagnation and economic problems in China, and geopolitical analysts look at the ways in which China seems to be driving its neighbors into closer ties with the United States and alienating large parts of Europe and other key centers of geopolitical influence, the Chinese government does not seem to be really changing course. It seems to have a different assessment of these dynamics. What is your sense of what that assessment is?

JUDE BLANCHETTE

Yeah, thanks Dan. I think it’s important to remember first that there’s an asymmetry in us, American analysts, trying to tease out signal and noise on the Chinese side and vice versa. And I think that’s mostly because the conversation in China is much more circumscribed by politics than it is, until recently, I think, in the United States. So when you’re looking at assessments coming from Chinese scholars, often for folks like Ryan and myself, it’s trying to understand the questions they’re asking, the points of observation that they’re focusing on as much as the top line assessments. Because the top line assessments from many of these scholars are determined in some ways by political correctness and what’s possible. So at every point along the last, let’s say, eight years, you’ve found relatively rosy assessments from the Chinese.

But I think it’s been clear that we’ve moved from a position from, let’s say in 2020 or 2021, where many Chinese analysts and the Chinese government itself were pretty clear that they saw the United States not in terminal decline, but certainly in a dramatically weakened strategic position. And their list of dynamics were, of course, events like January 6, but also an approach to foreign policy under the first Trump administration that prioritized unilateralism, using tariffs as a key means of foreign policy, and that that had had a real negative impact on the solidity of U.S. alliances and partnerships, which it’s important to remember is not just a U.S. talking point about it being a pillar of power.

When we see the Chinese—as we saw with Xi Jinping a year ago, uncharacteristically for him—lash out at the United States. . . [Xi] critiqued the United States and its partners of containing, encircling, and suppressing China. And it was the joint effort of that endeavor that really caught the Chinese attention. So they’ve always seen many aspects of U.S. power as being coalitional power, not just unilateral. But I think that was really the Chinese assessment when the Biden administration took office.

I think four years later, the assessment had moved to one where you saw much less of the overt triumphalism from the Chinese propaganda apparatus talking about the east is rising, the west is declining. That was still there to some extent. But I think it’s important for listeners to know that that narrative of the United States as a paper tiger has been there since the mid-1950s under Mao Zedong. It’s a key part of Chinese propaganda. So the art is in determining, is this just a mere propaganda slogan or, actually, does this lie at the heart of Chinese assessments of relative U.S. power? And I think by the end of the Biden administration, China was feeling like it was a bit more equally matched now with the United States—one that had, in many ways, rebuilt and strengthened and expanded some of those alliances and partnerships. I think the Chinese saw the homeland as being politically more secure. I want to be careful though not to say that the Chinese saw the Biden administration as an unalloyed success for the United States and that the United States had buttoned everything up. I just think in a sort of a large muscle movement, they felt that the United States had gotten some of its strategic mojo back.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Were there policy adjustments, Jude, that you saw the Chinese government making in response to these changes? Obviously, at a top line you saw, as you noted, the rhetoric hadn’t changed—that triumphalist rhetoric had shifted only somewhat. But as you look at the economic approach, the foreign policy approach, especially in Asia, did you see changes that you think reflected an understanding of the change dynamic?

JUDE BLANCHETTE

Yeah, and I should say that there’s a common saying in Washington, D.C., that—the Trump administration when they were leaving said this, I heard many in the Biden administration say this too—that we’ve sort of given up on the idea of trying to shape China. I’ve always found that argument a little bit lacking because the reality is the United States and China are consistently shaping each other, usually for the negative, but are constantly shaping each other because there is an action-reaction dynamic in the bilateral relationship. And I would say that the actions and the reactions have grown in amplitude and significance over the last decade or so.

That’s a throat clearing to answer your question because I think really the dominant trend in Chinese policy as of recording today, but this has been the case over the last five or six years, has been Chinese efforts to fortify and build resilience in a political economy that they think was overly exposed to, reliant to, and subject to the whims of the United States and its allies and partners on fundamentally vital domains of technological economic security.

And so yes, I think the Chinese very much reacted to policy. I want to be fair, this is not just Biden-era policy. I think a lot of this started in the Trump administration with actions against Huawei and ZTE, that it’s hard to overemphasize how significant those were in terms of raising the alarm for Beijing on key vulnerabilities it had in its own technology supply chain. Those, I think, continued through the Biden administration, especially the October 7 [2022] export controls and even on its way out the door with the AI controls that the Biden administration put in, this struck at the heart of a Chinese vulnerability that is, I think, arguably the dominant thread of policy that would not have occurred were it not for U.S. actions over the last eight or so years.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The two of you note in your piece the incredible military buildup in China over the last several years. There’s also a major expansion in its nuclear weapons program, which for the first time really puts it—it’s not quite on par with the U.S. and Russian programs, [but] it’s really a significant nuclear player. And you’ve also seen continued, fairly assertive policies, active policies, in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait in many ways that got much more aggressive over the course of the Biden administration. Ryan, as you assess Chinese foreign policy and what that approach is meant to do, how do you see that playing into this dynamic? What is driving those moves, if that’s the right way of characterizing it?

RYAN HASS

I think the Chinese have reached a judgment that it’s better to be feared than liked. And that as much as they would like to present themselves as a warm cuddly panda that everyone can just snuggle up next to, the reality is, they are a big continental sized power with revanchist aims that strike right at the heart of many of their neighbors. And they’re not going to be able to pacify those anxieties or concerns of their neighbors and further afield.

And so what I believe we’re seeing is China acting more and more like a major power, channeling its resources into capabilities to compel countries to reach a conclusion on their own that it is better to accommodate and capitulate to Chinese demands than it is to confront China head on and roll the dice in hopes that the United States will come to their defense.

And so it hasn’t worked yet in the sense of, none of the territorial boundaries have shifted. No countries have decided to capitulate to Chinese demands. In fact, during the Biden administration, I think it’s fair to say that there was a certain bandwagoning effect, with South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, AUKUS, the Quad. There was a real sort of convergence of players that were all working toward a common cause of ensuring that China was not able to impose its will on its periphery.

JUDE BLANCHETTE

I just wanted to add another dynamic. I think Ryan’s absolutely correct. Just another one is, I think the Xi Jinping administration’s sense of time and time horizons is important here. Xi Jinping’s sense of urgency on a lot of issues. So I think Ryan’s correct, it’s an understanding from Beijing’s perspective that they’re going to use their coercive power to achieve ends, and if there are negative consequences in terms of its reputation, those are worth paying.

I think the second issue is, they’re also not just going to sit around and wait for dynamics. They’re going to actively shape them—in ways that I think Xi Jinping’s time horizon and sense of urgency is just fundamentally different from previous leaders. This is most aptly captured in the idea of “hide your brightness, bide your time,” which was a Deng Xiaoping maxim that Xi Jinping, I think, in no way believes. Or more importantly, the “hide your brightness, bide your time” was until conditions were correct, and I think the Xi administration has come to the judgment that conditions are correct, and it’s time to start more aggressively asserting this.

And just final comment on this is, it’s not just urgency for the sake of urgency. I think it’s urgency because they see windows of opportunity and risk for them that they need to take advantage of, right? Whether it’s windows on, as the Chinese say, in some of these critical and emerging technologies, “passing on the curve,” right? You’re at unique moments with the emergence of some of these technologies that you have to take the initiative, whether that’s to gain advantage or perpetual advantage, or to take the lead in some of these technologies and standards writing, or on issues like Taiwan. So I think that the issue of time is important as well as a Chinese consideration that it’s time to start throwing their weight around.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let’s linger on Taiwan for a moment. I think when many people in Washington hear the kind of analysis you just laid out, Jude, they start to worry about a near-term attempt by Beijing to unify Taiwan by force. Ryan, you spent a lot of time working on this in the U.S. government and the National Security Council and the State Department. You’ve spent plenty of time trying to consider these risks recently. How do you assess Chinese strategy and the risk of that kind of precipitous action in the near term?

RYAN HASS

Well, Dan, to be honest, I haven’t yet lost a night of sleep over this, and I care a lot about Taiwan. And the reason why I haven’t lost a night of sleep is because even if you take everything that you said is a given and an accepted fact, it’s still an extraordinary challenge and incalculable risk for China to decide to use force to assert control over 23 million people in Taiwan. And the reason why China hasn’t yet done it isn’t because they’re kind and benevolent; they are clear in their determination to impose their will on Taiwan. It’s because the risks have exceeded the perceived benefits. And I don’t think that there’s anything that’s going to happen in the coming short period of time that is going to alter that.

I think in this current moment that we’re in, the direction of U.S.-Chinese relations is pretty uncertain. I think President Xi is waiting for sort of a directional signal from President Trump on which way the relationship is going to go. Until he receives in a way that he has confidence in and ability to sort of project forward the nature of the U.S.-Chinese relationship, I think that he will hold where they’re at. Now that’s not going to be comforting, because China’s gray zone activities and activities around Taiwan are ramping up. The capabilities that they’re fielding are growing significantly on a year by year basis. But the threshold to action still remains very high in my estimation.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So let’s linger on the Trump policy and see if we can help Xi Jinping understand what some of the early signals mean. You know, there’s been obviously no shortage of surprises in the first couple of months of the administration, but I think one thing that has surprised me perhaps more than anything else is how little attention China has gotten in the administration’s foreign policy and in the president’s rhetoric. Obviously, in his first term, Trump had a pretty central role in driving home and solidifying the new hard-line approach to China in Washington. That’s one that the Biden administration in many ways continued. And when you looked at his early national security picks, from his national security adviser to secretary of defense or secretary of state, and really across the whole administration, if there was one common thread, it was that they were all fairly hard-line on China.

But Trump has, in some ways, been kinder in the ways he talks about Xi Jinping than almost any other leader. And even while he’s talked about imposing tariffs and imposed some, he’s generally spent much more time focused elsewhere, whether that’s on Europe or Ukraine or, more surprisingly, Canada or Panama or Greenland or other places. How do you make sense, or not, of the second term Trump China policy? Where do you think this all is going? Ryan, you can take that.

RYAN HASS

Well, so I think the hard thing to judge about what’s going on with President Trump’s approach to China is that the range of possibilities is so much wider for President Trump than it has been for any leader dating back to Nixon. You can imagine a scenario in which the U.S.-Chinese relationship experiences a breakthrough, where there’s a new understanding around synchronizing overall tariff rates to bring them into rough compliance with each other. There’s progress on risk reduction between the United States and China. Neither Xi nor Trump has a lot of confidence in their military or any desire to wage a war. There could be a sidelining of friction points. President Trump, for example, is unique in his disregard for human rights. He has no interest in trying to create a containment wall around China in the way that the Chinese perceive that President Biden would. He’s not interested in ideology. So on one end of the spectrum, it’s possible that there could be some dramatic breakthrough because President Trump is so unique in his willingness to pursue things with China that no other leader would in the United States.

In the same breath, I think you can make a credible argument for the possibility of a breakdown in the U.S.-Chinese relationship in the coming period where there is an unmet sense of expectation. President Trump makes a good-faith effort to try to reach a deal with President Xi, and again, sort of finds himself rebuffed, reminded of that feeling that he had after the phase one trade deal in 2020 that underperformed. And Trump, a bit like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, begins to feel like he’s being disrespected and he needs to take action to put China back in its place. And all of a sudden you see a return of the super hawks into the administration who are given a mandate to sort of let it rip and teach China a lesson.

And so it’s very difficult to predict which sort of scenario or pathway we’re going to work our way down. I guess the one safe bet that I would offer is that the best directional indicator of U.S. policy is President Trump himself, that he is his own desk officer for China. It is his views that are determinative. It’s not something that is going to be foisted upon him or pushed by members of his cabinet and he’s going to be a reactive member of.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Jude, you have a brand newForeign Affairs piece that attempts to make sense of the Chinese reaction or early Chinese positioning after the first couple of months of the administration. How are decisionmakers in Beijing making sense of these signals, and how are they shaping their own policy in response?

JUDE BLANCHETTE

I think in some ways, Beijing is in a position similar to Ryan and myself—of you looking through a glass darkly and trying to get a sense of, as Ryan said, I think he’s completely correct, Trump’s relatively idiosyncratic views not only of China and China policy but just of grand strategy in general. Beijing is having to interpret: are we seeing a massive epochal shift in U.S. foreign policy away from a hubs and spokes alliance model toward a sphere of influence model; trying to interpret what Trump’s various underlying motives for tariff policy are; attempting to understand, is he serious or not about using economic and military coercion to gain territory in Greenland, Canada, and Panama? But more narrowly, Beijing has been struggling, really since Trump’s election, to find the right interlocutors to probe and interpret Trump’s view on a more narrow set of issues, which is, Is he serious about a deal? What should be in the deal? Where does he come down on issues like Taiwan on technology, on tariffs?

And right now, you could cobble together, as Ryan said, various different pathways of Trump action based on the set of actions we’ve seen so far, right? Intervening on behalf of TikTok in defiance of a law passed by Congress and signed by President Biden. Trump being, I think, really one of the only elected officials in Washington to openly welcome and call for stepped up Chinese investment into the United States. The list is long. So I think that’s made it challenging for Beijing. Also, it’s important to remember that the Chinese political system engages in these things much differently than the United States does. Xi Jinping is not going to stick his neck out and not come to the United States to figure out what the deal is in a way that Keir Starmer, Justin Trudeau, others would. But sending out lieutenants is more challenging because they don’t have as many golf players in China as you would need, I think, to penetrate into the Trump administration, and folks like Cai Qi and Ding Xuexiang, close allies of General Secretary Xi Jinping, are probably less adept at navigating the pathways of Washington than other governments.

Just quickly on how I think China is looking at this more broadly. There’s an assessment you could make that China is reveling in all of the headwinds that the administration is facing, right? Growing polarization, pushback by the courts, the headwinds that those alliances and partnerships are facing. And I think that’s partly correct, but it’s important to remember: the Chinese Communist Party is a pretty conservative organization, likes predictability, and in many ways, I think, sees a world of both risk and reward. Two quick examples.

One is just building on the U.S. part of it; I think Beijing understands that it has to get this first round of negotiations with the Trump administration, right. It doesn’t get to take a mulligan on a summer summit and then move on to another issue. More narrowly, it’s got to figure out the trade issue, right? Tariffs are the gateway, I think, to a broader portfolio of issues they could discuss with the administration. I think their fear is, if they mess this up, then that cadre of hawks that are standing behind Trump who have a very long list of actions they’re itching to take against China, might see more leeway in this administration. And something similar to what we saw in the year 2020 where, I think, Trump really turned on China and basically gave hunting licenses to a lot of his folks in the administration.

The second, and I think maybe even more complex, is Beijing trying to navigate dynamics in Europe. It is the case that Beijing has found what they see to be a relatively sustainable posture on Europe and specifically on the war in Ukraine, which is they support Russia to the hilt but do so in calibrated ways that give them a little bit of space to still have productive relations with Europe. They’ve certainly taken a hit in their relationship with Europe since February 2022, but they haven’t lost their relationship with Europe. What’s happening now in the ongoing and fragile peace talks in Ukraine has the potential to. . . both upside and downside.

The upside is, I think, China would be absolutely delighted if a settlement is reached where Russia, and Putin specifically, comes out as a clear winner both in terms of holding territory that’s currently under Russian occupation and then in some sort of peace deal brokered by the United States where Russia steers way clear of any indictment for the war, has sanctions lifted, economic pressure lifted, and is welcomed back into the arms of the international community—or guided back, I should say, by the United States. China gets its partner in Russia and now a big irritant in its relationship with Europe is removed.

On the other hand, there is no guarantee that this path being pursued by the Trump administration is going to work. And if this breaks down, you could imagine this breaking down hard and we might enter a new and much more dangerous phase of the war, one in which Putin now feels he can take the gloves off. China may be less likely to act as a bit of a break on that. And then, China is going to have to face a much more stark path forward on Europe of: does it want to keep its relationship with Russia and continue to support Russia, or does it want a good relationship with Europe? It’s found a bit of both right now; I’m not sure it can sustain that should things fall apart.

RYAN HASS

Yeah, if I could just add to what Jude said, I think that his comment is exactly right. From Beijing’s perspective, I don’t think that they’re gloating. I also don’t think that they’re cowering in fear. I think that they’re struggling to make sense of what is going on. When I’ve been in the room with President Xi and other Chinese leaders and listened to what they’re most concerned about, what they’re most anxious about—President Trump has taken most of those issues off the table. They’re concerned about ideology, weaponization of human rights, use of alliances to put pressure upon China, economic strangulation, the possibility of color revolution, of war. Those are not present day anxieties that the Chinese leadership needs to carry because President Trump is so idiosyncratic.

The other thing though, that President Xi is uncomfortable with, is erraticism and unpredictability. He likes things that are stable, predictable, steady, and President Trump is nothing, if not, unpredictable, and so I wouldn’t want anyone to leave this conversation thinking that they are at ease with President Trump either. They’re just in a very uncomfortable place waiting to get a sense of the direction of travel.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There’s a lot I want to pick up on in both those answers, but let’s, before getting to some of the allied relationships and other complications of this, stick with this idea of a grand bargain or kind of a deal, accepting that we don’t really know what’s in Trump’s head. Ryan, if you were back working on the National Security Council and trying to craft this deal and make a case for this approach, how would you do that? What do you see as the real prospects here? Do you think it’s a good idea for the United States to attempt this at this point?

RYAN HASS

Well, I could understand why President Trump may be attracted to the idea of a grand bargain because he wants to be a historic figure that does things that no other leader is capable of doing and changes the course of history. So I get the impulse. I just don’t see a path to a grand bargain, for a couple of reasons.

I think that there is no work that’s underway. The grand bargains are not designed by leaders sitting knee to knee sort of sorting out the affairs of the world. They require detailed diplomacy and negotiation. That’s not happening at the moment. I also think that there is a residual lack of trust in China’s word, whether that’s fair or not, I’ll leave that to you to be the judge. But the phase one trade deal; President Trump felt burned by it. The Chinese response to COVID-19; President Trump felt burned by it.

And then the other factor is that this is just simply not something that the American people are asking for. The number one priority of the American people—69 percent of the American public wants the United States and China to avoid war; 60 percent of the American public wants the United States to maintain its technological edge. There isn’t a constituency that’s clamoring for President Trump to tie a bunch of issues together into some grand bargain. I think that there’s a recognition among many people in the United States that we have a competitive relationship with China and that’s how it’s going to be.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Jude, I want to go back to you on this question of Europe and the Chinese relationship with Europe because this has, I think, been one of the most interesting dynamics of these first couple months of the Trump administration. You saw kind of acceptance of a fairly hard-line view toward China among most European governments over the course of the last few years. Do you get a sense that that is shifting back as the transatlantic relationship with the United States comes under threat?

JUDE BLANCHETTE

I think it’s too soon to say, Dan. I do think though, and you and I were both at the Munich Security Conference, Ryan was there as well—it’s hard to underestimate just how shellshocked I think Europe is right now. And so they are clearly thinking thoughts which, I think, once would not have been remotely conceivable. We’re seeing that, of course, right now play out in German politics with the said to be increase in defense spending. I think it’s clear, though, that U.S.-European coordination on China does not happen by Adam Smith invisible hand market incentives. This is not a boulder rolling down a hill. This takes an extraordinary amount of very, very detailed work, compromise, arm twisting that happens behind the scenes across all levels of these governments. And that is obviously going to take a hit right now.

When we were in Munich, I had dinner one night with a set of senior European policymakers who just said, “Look, the functional reality is we’re just going to be a lot less aligned” because those of us in European governments who have been pushing for a harder line did so because we could make a good faith argument about the United States as a partner. And we can’t make those arguments to more skeptical elements of our governments anymore.

Second thing is, going back to our discussion about China and Europe, I think it would be an overstatement to say that China’s now going to run the field in Europe. I think the landscape for Beijing is dramatically different now since 2017, right? That’s when European governments really became very concerned about outbound Chinese investment into strategic industries. Europe in many ways was moving on its own in a more, I think, competitive posture vis-à-vis China that was accelerated under Trump, and then certainly under Biden.

But marginal actions matter, and at the margin, I think you’re going to see much more willingness in Europe as its relationship with its largest trade partner, the United States, becomes beset with controversies, with attacks, with tariffs. They’re going to look to their other largest trade partner, which is China, looking for opportunities—so things like the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, the CAI, which was frozen in 2022 after China levied sanctions across European lawmakers and think tanks such as the [Mercator Institute for China Studies]. . . Is there appetite to maybe restart some of those discussions?

Also, I would say at the member state level, you’re going to see much bolder action to align with China from countries like Hungary, which were already predisposed to do so, because they’re going to say, “Look, we’ve got two essentially options right now in the economic basket: the United States, which is unreliable, tariff prone, or China, which is rolling out the red carpet for us. Which one are we going to take?” So I think this is going to be messy. I don’t think the future is set here. I think there’s a lot of contingency at play. But certainly, opportunities are open for China that were not there three months ago.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Ryan, I imagine that when you talk to most allied governments in East Asia, they’re happy to have mostly stayed out of the headlines in the United States over the last couple of months. What is your sense of the level of anxiety, or lack thereof, among key U.S. allies in Asia? And then just to focus on Taiwan again, what is the debate on Taiwan about Trump policy and what it might mean for the cross-strait relationship?

RYAN HASS

Well, I sense a general sense of unease with allied countries across Asia, to be polite about it. Because the underpinnings of the alliance historically have been sort of a shared value, shared ideology, shared strategic vision. All those underpinnings have been removed. There’s nothing left underneath these alliances anymore beyond the transactionalism of the current sort of moment in their relationship with the United States. And so each country is having to calibrate and adjust its approach. I don’t think that it’s surprising that China, South Korea, and Japan are meeting on a more intensive basis now.

But if I could just isolate the Taiwan question for a minute, I think that two issues can be true at the same time. The first is that Taiwan is in a more vulnerable position today than it was 66 days ago [], because those underpinnings of the relationship no longer exist. There are no longer the shared values, the shared strategic vision. President Trump has demonstrated a tolerance for walking away from a democracy under duress, under attack, by an authoritarian power in ways that have uncomfortable echoes for friends in Taipei.

So that is all true, but at the same time, Taiwan is not Ukraine, right? The geography is different. Taiwan is separated by a 100-mile moat as opposed to a land border. The United States has the Taiwan Relations Act, which has certain legal obligations of the United States to Taiwan that do not exist in the case of Ukraine. And Taiwan is just fundamentally irreplaceable for President Trump’s vision for reindustrializing the United States. There is no other pathway, there is no alternative to Taiwan for President Trump’s vision of reindustrializing the United States in the same way that there is really no viable way for Taiwan to credibly secure its own defense without support from the United States. And so there’s a mutual dependency there that exists that makes Taiwan sort of unique and separate from the circumstances that people in Ukraine face today.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I’m not sure that President Trump himself would articulate this, but if the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, or another reasonably intelligent official in the administration were sitting here, they’d probably make the case that what is really driving most of Trump’s foreign policy thus far—whether it’s on Ukraine or the transatlantic relationship, or even if you look at the text among senior Trump officials about the strikes in Yemen that were accidentally shared with the Atlantic that we’ve all been reading this week—a lot of that is about how you limit U.S. exposure in the Middle East. You see these officials reckoning with this so that they can refocus on Asia.

And there is something to that case, that over the course of a couple of decades, the United States has focused a lot on other geographies and other problems and probably neglected really adequately investing in deterrence in Asia and the Indo-Pacific. Ryan, do you see any validity to that argument, if you were sitting here with Mike Waltz or someone else in the administration?

RYAN HASS

If President Trump were not in power, I could see validity to that argument. The simple truth is that the Trump administration is comprised of competing tribes. There are primacists who believe that the United States should be the unalloyed global power that should be unchallenged for global supremacy. There are prioritizers, like you’re describing, Dan, who believe that the United States needs to focus less on Europe and the Middle East in order to prioritize our efforts in Asia. There are restrainers, or isolationists, who can point to public sentiments in the United States where 60 percent of the American people want the United States to focus more on problems at home than dealing with the world’s challenges. And then there are business types such as Elon Musk and others who believe that the purpose of American policy should be to get favorable deals for the United States, its workers and its firms.

And above all of those competing tribes sits Donald Trump. And I don’t think that he has a fixed view. I don’t think that he has a favored son among these four tribes. I think that he will sort of oscillate between them as circumstances warrant, and that can be seen as either a strength or a vulnerability depending upon your point of view. But he is intellectually flexible and not committed to one direction or the other.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Jude, let me get you to pick up on the Russia-China element of this. The most radical and perhaps most easily deflated goal is what is called the “reverse Kissinger,” that is, enlisting Russia to counter China. Among other things, it neglects that when Kissinger executed the opening to China in 1971, there had already been friction between Moscow and Beijing for 15 years or so at that point; they’d fought a border war. And we don’t see those kinds of tensions today.

But I think there is a somewhat more subtle and perhaps more credible version that, look, we should accept that a slightly more stable relation with Moscow would help when it comes to countering China. I think the Biden administration attempted a version of this earlier on. Do you see any chance to balance these relationships a little bit more, even if you can’t truly pick off Russia in the way that the “reverse Kissinger” suggests?

JUDE BLANCHETTE

Yeah, just to pick up on a point Ryan made—the problem with all these theories is, a lot of us are sitting around spending time trying to parse signals and breadcrumbs to figure out what the strategy is, but without having President Trump himself come in and weigh in on any of these in any coherent manner that gives us a clear articulation of what his underlying strategy is.

Look, if the view is that we’ve got to find a way to add additional strategic mistrust in the relationship between Moscow and Beijing, I say absolutely. I think that is a manifestly noble goal of taking this partnership, which has already proved to be destructive, insofar as China has been able to perpetuate and support Russia’s war efforts, and could go in places that I don’t think we can entirely calculate yet. . . So if there are ways in which we can add sand into the gears, that’s great. I have not yet heard, though, any convincing articulation of what that would look like. And to be honest, I don’t think that’s what’s motivating actions vis-à-vis Russia in Ukraine.

I think Trump has a respect and appreciation for Putin and Moscow. I don’t think Trump himself walks around with a fully fleshed out “global Monroe Doctrine,” but I think he has a sort of a vague notion that Russia is the dominant power in Europe and gets a veto vote. In many ways, China’s the superpower in the Indo-Pacific and gets the big veto vote. We, the United States, have equities there, so we’re not going to give them a free ride, but Trump will be in a better position to deal with that if I’ve got a strong relationship with these two other leaders. So I mean, really the proof is going to be in the pudding this summer to see how he handles China. My guess is he wants a wedge between neither, and he wants good relations with both. But again, we’re sort of grasping here because we haven’t had a clear strategic intent articulated.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Jude, you’ve written for us a few times about how Chinese policymakers and Chinese observers are understanding the war in Ukraine and what lessons they’re drawing from it. What do they see now as they watch U.S. policy shifting, and what would the most radical version of U.S. Ukraine policy, which would really mean a kind of forced end of the war that would probably not be on Ukrainian terms. What would that mean for Beijing?

JUDE BLANCHETTE

Let me slightly modify my previous answer, only to say that in Beijing right now, there was, is, and will always be concern about the United States having direct engagement with Moscow, in ways that Beijing is not entirely sure where the end zone is and how far the ball is from the end zone. So I was in Beijing a month ago and certainly heard from folks I engaged with in government and at think tanks and at universities that there was a little bit of weariness—not because they saw that a full rupture was in the making. I don’t think they believe the Trump administration has the ability to do that.

And also, Xi Jinping and Putin talk. They talked recently. Again, to your point, Dan, about the split already being there when Nixon and Kissinger intervened—the Russia-China relationship has been steadily improving since the mid 1980s, right? This did not start in 2012 when Xi Jinping came to power. But you have seen this relationship become complicated. I think Vladimir Putin’s trip to Pyongyang and the North Korean intervention in the war was tolerated but not welcomed by Beijing. I don’t think that was going to be their first choice.

But I think for Chinese analysts right now, priorities number one, two, three, four, and five are making sure that Moscow comes out of this the winner. And everything they’re seeing right now, I should say, indicates that that is likely to be the outcome. I was reading an article recently by a Chinese strategist who was reflecting on the interview that Steve Witkoff gave to Sean Hannity last week where he talked about Putin and Trump, these two great men working together for the betterment of humankind. And the analyst thought he had to check the translation on that because he was sure he might’ve misheard it. So I think the Chinese are—for all that I just mentioned about strategic mistrust, uncertainty, they like predictability—I would say the signals right now are that Europe and Ukraine are going to get the short end of the stick and that Trump is going to prioritize his relationship with Moscow. And really the stability vote that Trump wants is coming from the Kremlin, not coming out of Kyiv.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me try to, as we get towards the close of this conversation, try to step back a little bit from the first couple of months of the Trump administration given how uncertain everything remains. Ryan, you wrote in an article for us in2023, and this is a theme that’s come up again in both of your work that, I’m quoting you here, “The absence of a compelling vision of success for the United States strategy with China is dangerous.” This is what has become known as the “end state question,” and it’s one that U.S. policymakers and analysts have tangled with for years at this point.

In my assessment, the people who have most clearly laid out an end state are sort of at the extremes of this debate, and I mean that descriptively, not dismissively. To take one example, Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher, a former Trump administration official and a Republican Congressman, arguedlast year inForeign Affairs that it should be U.S. policy to essentially change the nature of the regime of Beijing, not through force, but that that should be our goal strategically. Do you have a different end state that you would articulate, and do you see this debate progressing at all in U.S. policy circles?

RYAN HASS

Dan, I appreciate you raising this. I think it’s an important discussion, and I think it’s also important coming out of the Biden administration because one of my critiques of the Biden administration, even though I think they got a lot of things right, is that they just sort of fumbled when it came to building a narrative. And when you don’t have the support of the American people behind a vision for how you’re going to deal with your foremost strategic rival, it weakens your overall strategy.

And so on your first question, do I think that there’s going to be progress in this debate in the coming period? Probably not, just simply because there’s not a market demand for that. That’s not the way that President Trump thinks for those who are advising him. But should we be advancing the discussion outside of government? I think absolutely. And I guess I would put forward just for your and Jude’s reaction, a couple of quick thoughts.

The first is that the United States and China are going to be the two leading powers in the world for the rest of the century. And healthy competition between us is going to be necessary for us to both push each other to reach our potential. So there’s a benefit to the competition. But to have healthy competition, you must have rules of the road. Rules of the road require constant, intense direct contact with each other to sort out the boundaries of the competition. At the same time, I think that it’s understandable that many people in the United States are uncomfortable with a sense of dependence upon China, the sense that China is just sort of occupying too large a share of the global economic pie in terms of manufacturing. And Americans like to have freedom of action. They do not want to depend upon anyone to meet their needs, whether it’s for medical supplies or other things.And so it’s entirely reasonable that we’re going to have to build stockpiles, invest in secure supply chains and things like that. But that is different, I would argue, than trying to compel the collapse of the Chinese Communist Party or to permanently decouple the world’s two largest economies, which would both be seismic events that would have intensely negative reverberations in the United States.

And I guess where that leads me is, let the best system prevail. We’re in this sort of century-long competition. America’s governance and economic system has generated more wealth and power for the United States and its people than any other system in the history of humankind. And we should have confidence in our system and our ability to continue to innovate and adapt and lead in this coming century, rather than sort of finding ways to try to become a slightly better version of the Chinese system itself, which I don’t think is very attractive to many people in the United States.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Jude, how would you address that end state question?

JUDE BLANCHETTE

One of the last things I did at CSIS is put out a report where we got about, I don’t know, 25 or so individuals to take a look at this issue from across the spectrum. And what surprised me is I don’t think a single person came down saying, “We need a specifically designed end state, and here it is.” I think some of that is because, implicit in some of the end state discussion is that the end state would have to be something like the peaceful evolution, to use a euphemism of the Chinese Communist Party. Either it evolves itself into some democratic system or it collapses. And I think there’s a recognition that [would be a] costly strategy for the U.S. to pursue. And also the question you have to ask when you think about regime change is, what comes on the next side of that? And I think we have enough experience to know we’re not great at predicting that. So I think a version of Ryan’s answer, which is, I think we’re stuck with a messy middle.

Now, there could be, I think, a better attempt to refine what that messy middle looks like. I absolutely agree with Ryan; I think one of the things that’s missing now, was missing certainly to the Biden administration, but you don’t see it with the Trump administration, is a story. And I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense, but a story that is communicated to the American people to clarify what our relationship with China is and is about. Twenty years ago, implicitly, we had a story—a story of engagement, which had various parameters. But I think that was a story where if you asked my uncle or my neighbor, “What’s our relationship with China about?”, they would have an answer. Right now, there is no story, or I think the story that folks have is a Cold War 2.0 story, which is fine from a distance, but you start getting up to that and asking some hard questions about, “Well, what is the outcome of this Cold War 2.0 strategy?” It can’t just be, “We win, they lose.”

But I do think strategic communications is incredibly important—one I fear that this administration will not do well at because, as we’ve seen, and as Ryan has indicated, so much of the policy is coming out of such a small circle. And in particular out of one man who. . . I think his views on all these may shift and evolve, to put it politely. And that will make this very, very difficult not only for us in the United States to understand what the desired outcome of U.S. strategy and policy on China is, but I think equally as important for our partners and allies and our adversaries. And the last one’s important as well. They do get a vote. And clarity is not to make nice with China or Russia or Iran or North Korea. Clarity is to reduce however much we can of misunderstanding. And I think this is just going to be a really, really tough, what, three years and nine months?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So let me close with a question that may seem abstract and philosophical, but I think is in some ways at the heart of the debate over policy and strategy right now. And that’s a question the two of you get at in the January/February essay about whether fear of decline is helpful or unhelpful for Americans. Samuel Huntington, the great scholar, wrote inForeign Affairs piece in the 1980s about fear of decline being a kind of secret of American success, that it’s exactly what prevents us from ever losing our edge because we’re constantly anxious about it. You argue, or you suggest at least, that our fear of decline has become, in fact, self-destructive; that it’s kind of risked becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. What has shifted in that American declinism, in your view, that has led it in this way, and how would you seek to correct that impression to give us the right kind of drive without creating the kind of paralysis or pessimism that you think is dangerous? Jude, I’ll let you start with that.

JUDE BLANCHETTE

Yeah, somewhat unfairly, I think Ryan and I were advocating for a Goldilocks position here, and I don’t think we wrote that assuming that folks were going to implement to the T what we were calling for. I think we were just calling for something of a rebalancing. What motivated the article, I should first say, is not a view really about China. This was more a view about the United States. China is beset by problems at the same time that China has pretty significant strengths.

It had struck us, though, that the view that the United States was ill equipped to compete in many ways, had a flawed set of institutions, was beset by, depending on which side of the aisle you asked, a different laundry list of pathologies, was not, except for occasional bouts of focused productivity, yielding sort of moonshots, NASAs. Again, there are exceptions to this, to be sure. I would say the CHIPS Act is an exception; you can point to components of the IRA. But I would say in general, I think this was leading to, in some sense, unproductive conversations. Key to that is failure to focus squarely on what are the enduring foundational elements of U.S. power, innovation, vibrancy, resilience. And I would point to my colleague at RAND, Mike Mazarr, has written an extraordinary set of monographs on national competitiveness, looking at historical case studies of societies that compete and win over the long-term. What are basic attributes of those? And it is rule-based systems that are open to failure, by which you mean companies come in and companies go out—open capital markets, pluralistic, open to human capital coming in and out.

And it felt to us like a lot of the conversation in the United States was moving to a sort of a purely a risk-based approach of how do we close gaps, tighten loopholes. That’s all very, very important, right? That’s very, very important. But it is not if you’re starting to think about only, “How do we stop bad Chinese students from coming to the United States?” and not thinking holistically about immigration reform to make sure productive talent wants to continue to come to the United States. It felt like it was going way too much risk-based and not enough, “How are we going to ensure the pillars of power perpetuate?”

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I have to say, as I was rereading your essay a couple of days ago, I was struck that so many of the things that the two of you highlight as these enduring strengths of the United States and these enduring sources of U.S. power are exactly the kind of things that are under attack right now. And that, to me, in some ways reinforced your warning that this obsession about decline was going to cause us to neglect the strengths that were going to be most important to averting that decline.

RYAN HASS

Dan, I think you’re absolutely right. What we were trying to argue is the best way to avert decline is to double down, invest in your strengths—your sources of comparative and competitive advantage. To focus on cutting-edge industries, attracting global talent through immigration reform, fortifying alliances, rebuilding the U.S. defense industrial base. These are foundational investments in the strength of the United States on the world stage. What we were trying to preempt was the notion that we, the United States, have become strategically insolvent and therefore just need to burn it all down and start from scratch again. Where the argument is that we’ve become de-industrialized, we have spiraling debt, the working class is hollowed out, nothing works, the globalist elite have sold out the country, and therefore everything just needs to be taken down to the ground and rebuilt.

And we’ve watched the past 66 days, the confidence in the U.S. economy has been undermined. The credibility of our independent courts has been undermined. Political divisions have been inflamed. Our global alliance system is under incredible stress. We now have a leader advocating for territorial conquest. We’ve abdicated efforts to solve global challenges. We’re tearing apart the enablers of our soft power on the world stage. And this is a function of this idea that nothing has worked, everything needs to be reimagined. Which is—well we’ll see how it plays out. I’m confident that the pendulum will swing back to a more stable resting place with time. And I still have a lot of long-term confidence in the United States, but I think that there’s going to be a bumpy stretch in front of us.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Well, I will look forward to having both of you both back in our pages, but also back for another conversation once some of the signals are a little bit more clear and we see how this relationship plays out. But for now, thank you so much for joining me and for the great work you’ve both done inForeign Affairs over the last couple of years.

RYAN HASS

Thank you, Dan.

JUDE BLANCHETTE

Thank you, Dan.