Pod Save the World - China’s Rise with Evan Medeiros

Episode Date: April 5, 2017

Tommy and China expert Evan Medeiros preview Trump’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. They discuss the meticulous planning and choreography that goes into these talks, tensions in the South China Sea, Taiwan, human rights, and how the Chinese view Russian hacking of our election.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. My guest today is Evan Medeiros. Evan served on the National Security Council for six years, including several as President Obama's top advisor on the Asia-Pacific region. You focus a lot of your time in U.S.-China relations, but you also have a doctorate international relations from the London School of Economic and Political Science and a master's degree in China Studies for the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. Evan, welcome to the pod. Thanks so much for being here today. Thanks, Tommy. It's great to be here and it's great to be working with you again. Yeah, man, I miss you. The timing is great, right? Because it's so easy to get lost in all the stupid tweets and the silly controversies that there are really big challenges that this president is going to have to deal with. And one of them is China. And President Trump is going to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Mar-Lago Resort on Thursday and Friday of this week. So this is their first official meeting.

But Trump has already managed to make things a little bit tense thanks to campaign rhetoric where he accused China of raping the U.S. economy by taking a phone call from the leader of Taiwan. during the transition through a series of tweets that were annoying enough that it led Chinese state-run media to publish an editorial suggesting that he should lay off the Twitter machine. So what do you think is on the agenda for this meeting? Evan, what do you think President Trump will face when he sits down with Xi Jinping? Well, Tommy, the meeting at the end of the week is a really big deal, right? You can tweet, you can say lots of things in the media, but when you actually have to

sit down and talk with a foreign leader and, you know, the president of China nonetheless, It's the rubber hits the road and you can't sort of BS your way through international diplomacy anymore. And so there's really two big issues on the agenda. It's the bilateral trade relationship and North Korea. Those are Trump's top two priorities and the Chinese know that. You may have noticed that just yesterday, Trump did a big interview with the Financial Times where he laid down some pretty heavy-duty markers, which is a pretty bold play to do before you meet a Chinese president. I mean, it's sort of tantamount to issuing an ultimatum.

Basically, he's saying to she, either you come ready to play ball or else. And the question is, what's the or else? Is it a bluff? You know, in the art of the deal, he talked about bluffing, or is there more there there? Yeah, that was a remarkable interview, mostly for how little it appears that he knows about any of these issues. I mean, do you think showing your hand like that as a good negotiating tactic with the Chinese? In this instance, no, I don't think so. Because first of all, the administration has basically already made that point. I think Tillerson made that point. Secretary of State Tillerson made that point when he was over there in Beijing. And so the problem with doing it publicly is it's very easy for the Chinese or somebody else to call your bluff because everybody will want to know the answer to, okay, what else is there if the Chinese aren't going to work with you? And it's not like that there's some sort of secret box of tricks on North Korea that nobody but Trump has figured out how to operationalize,

right? I mean, we know what the or else is. It's military activity or some kind of military action, right? That's not so simple. That risks war on the Korean Peninsula. There's some kind of, you know, heavy duty major sanctions that risks rupture in the bilateral economic relationship that would set back all of Trump's trade goals. So not clear to me. I'm not clear to me. me that it's going to be that successful. And, you know, if you look at what Trump is done on China already, right, he came into office and said, well, maybe I won't respect the one China policy. He did a 180 and reaffirm the one China policy. He came into office and said, I'm going to name China currency manipulator on day one. He backed off that. His secretary of state during his confirmation

hearing said some pretty bold stuff on the South China Sea, sort of effectively stating we're going to draw a red line. The administration backed off that. So the Chinese could be forgiven for saying, hey, this guy likes to talk big, but when it comes to follow through, not so much. Yeah. So as the Chinese like to say, all had no cattle. So just to dig into those two issues a bit, if you were advising President Trump and you said, coming out of these meetings, I want to achieve X on North Korea and Y on trade, what would those two priorities be for you? Well, first on North Korea, it's getting the Chinese far more deeply engaged in North Korea. They need to feel like the monkey is almost fully on their back. And that if they don't change their current approach, that the status quo is not sustainable. The issue is, how much do you do publicly versus how much do you do privately? Because it's, you know, admittedly a difficult thing to do because the Chinese, for, you know, for their own reasons, are concerned about squeezing the, the North Koreans even more. They're worried about collapse. They're worried about losing what

limited influence they have already. So there's genuinely a good argument. So how much you do publicly versus privately in terms of laying down ultimatums is a big tactical question. Trump went for the public play. It's just difficult to back off that. And on the trade and economic relationship, it's sort of a big complicated piece of business because, you know, what Trump is focused on is jobs. And as any economist will tell you, you know, many of the manufacturing jobs the U.S. has lost. It's not all about China. In fact, it may not even primarily be about China. It's a lot about automation and technology. It's a lot about the international division of labor, right? Yeah. Low-end manufacturing jobs have left the U.S. and they're not coming

back. So, you know, the question is, has Trump properly framed the trade issue? I mean, his guys are focused on the trade relationship, but any decent economist will tell you the trade relationship is not an adequate measure of whether or not one side is cheating or the other, because, in fact, many of the products that we, quote, import from China have actually been produced in other countries, but just assembled in China. So they're really a function of a region-wide supply chain of manufacturing as opposed to, quote, made in China. I mean, the iPhone, for example. It's largely assembled in China. Right. Sounds like you're saying these issues are more complicated than any one tweet could explain. So, oh yeah. So I can't think of any other meetings

that are more meticulously planned and scripted than bilateral meetings with the Chinese. And you have worked intimately on these issues. Can you talk a little bit about what that process was like? For example, when Obama and Xi met at Sunnylands in California during, I believe, 2015, What kind of preparation goes into this? What gets negotiated? And what could go well or can go poorly in these meetings? Absolutely. Well, I mean, the Chinese pay an enormous amount of attention to detail.

And it's detail of the schedule and the agenda. It's, you know, what does the table look like? Who's seated? Where? Of course, meticulous, meticulous attention to the press statements. Do you do one joint statement? Do you do two parallel statements? Are those parallel statements reviewed and approved by either side or are they just sort of loosely coordinated by both sides? I mean, everything is meticulously prepared. And that's on a good day. When we started planning Sunnylands in late spring of 2013, the meeting was June 7th and 8th of 2013. Ooh, I was way off on the time frame. My God.

Well, a lot has happened in recent years. Yeah, man, dog years. You can be forgiven for that, yeah. And what was surprising to us is when we first put forward the proposal to the Chinese, we thought it was like maybe 50-50 that they would accept it because it was so out of their comfort zone. I mean, we went to them. I remember it was late April, late April, early May that we began talking about this internally at the NSC. And Tom Donnell, the National Security Advisor at the time, gave it a go.

So I, you know, sat down at my trusty NSC computer, pumped out, you know, a concept paper, and we gave it to Zhang Yes, Wei, who is the ambassador at the time. He's currently the number two in the foreign ministry, just a really stellar Chinese diplomat. You could do a lot of serious work with him. And what was interesting is, you know, is that the proposal didn't fit into any of the sort of Chinese protocol boxes, right? It's either you have a state visit or you have an official. visit or, you know, you could even have a working visit, which are all in Washington. Right. But this was totally outside of their comfort zone. And so, you know, to our surprise, within a week, they bought it and they went for it. What was interesting was that they then began building a trip for Xi Jinping to Latin America so that he could say, oh, by the way, after my big trip to Latin America, I'm going to just stop off on the west coast of the United States and have a meeting with the U.S. president. So the preparations were first and foremost about the agenda. What are

we going to talk about? And so what we did is Tom Donnellin, Danny Russell, the senior director, and myself as China director, went over to Beijing for a couple days to begin hashing out the agenda. It's just amazing to hear the amount of work and planning that it went to this. I mean, I remember when you and Danny would go off on these pre-trip visits. It would just be marathon negotiating sessions where Tom Donnell would go over to China and spend. hours and hours locked in a room with officials, you know, working these things out. Do you have a sense of what kind of preparation went into this visit? I mean, am I reading too much into the fact that it's at Mara Lago? Do we think that that will be viewed positively by the Chinese, or is this, you know,

diminishing the sort of pomp and circumstance they might want? Oh, I think they deliberately wanted that for a few reasons. Number one, they wanted equivalence with Abe, right? Prime Minister Ave of Japan. They saw that he got a mammoth three-day visit. that included meeting in the Oval Office, lunch in Washington. Abbe flew down on Air Force One. Now, do you remember in the Obama administration? I don't think there's any foreign leader that flew on Air Force One. I was told that Abe may actually have been the fourth leader, foreign leader, ever in the history of Air Force One to fly on the plane. And then, of course, he had something like 27 rounds of golf with Trump. So, you know, in the great world of geopolitical competition in East Asia, the Japanese just got won up on China in a big way.

So I think the Chinese were very much angling for Mar-a-Lago, and they liked the equivalence with Sunnylands, right? It's the president is taking us to his sort of personal place. It's Sunnylands and Mar-Lago sort of became what Camp David was during the Cold War, right? It was a sign of having, quote, a personal relationship. So one of the funny things that I'm sure will happen later this week is there'll be lots of pictures of, you know, of Jin Ping and Donald hanging out together, showing everybody what good pals they are. It's amazing how in leader-level diplomacy, how both sides can sort of, it sort of feels a little bit like first grade like, hey, let's decide we are friends today. Right. Do you think they'll have Bobby Flay flipping steaks and drinking cocktails like you guys did?

That was one of the best things about Sunnylands was those meals. I mean, lobster tamales, which I have to admit, we're a little bit weird at first, but I got into it, porterhouse steaks, and then individual cherry pies. But the best part was the booze. It was the first time I saw Obama with a drink in his hand. I didn't even think Obama drank. You know, I had been at the NSC since 2009, you know, been on all these trips with him. And he had a martini in his hand.

And then Xi Jinping brought a special kind of Mao Tai from, I think it was made in Shendong province. And it was really funny because everybody was sort of standing around the dinner table. And Xi Jinping presented this. And Obama said, oh, what's that? Chinese moonshine? And Jim Brown, the interpreter, was trying to figure out how the hell do I say moonshine without offending Xi Jinping, who just brought this really elegant kind of Mao Tai. Now, if anybody's ever had Moutai, elegant or not,

it just tastes like, oh, God, it's sorghum-based. It's like gasoline. Oh, it's stuff will kill you. Well, it sounds like you guys had a good time at this event. You're listening to Potsay of the World. Stick around. There's more great show coming your way. So, you got your PhD in international relations,

masters in China Studies. I bet you did not think that you should have a minor in island construction, but it appears that that has become. like the primary issue and irritant between the U.S. and China. So the background here of my nerd joke is that in 2014, the Chinese started piling sand onto reefs in the South China Sea to create islands. And they've since completed construction on port facilities, a runway, an airstrip, and there's military equipment. Can you explain why this has become such a big point of contention and a bit about the underlying dispute in the South China Sea?

Sure. So the disputes in the South China Sea are a seriously complicated piece of business. And it's made even more complicated by the fact that the United States actually doesn't have any claims in the South China Sea. So everybody says, well, why should we care about it if we don't have any claims? So the issue comes down to the fact that there are a whole variety of different countries in the region, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, that all claim different sort of small, let's call them features, because that's sort of the legally appropriate term in the South China Sea. And they've been debating about this for decades and decades. I mean, this has been going on for a really, really long time. And everybody has different claims to different features. Some people actually occupy the features.

Vietnamese occupy a bunch of them. You know, some of them are sort of big, major islands that can actually sustain life. But most of them are sort of basically small rocks, some of which don't even sort of exist when there's high tide. Right. What happened was China, beginning around 2010, began throwing some elbows in the South China Sea, really began to be much more aggressive in its use of its Coast Guard and its Navy to protect and advance some of its claims. And it was starting to create some real concern in the region. We had a variety of different countries in the region come to us and ask us for help because they were really concerned. China was going to start to sort of muscle in on this.

So in 2010, in Vietnam at the ASEAN Regional Forum, we had teed up Secretary Hillary Clinton to make a big, bold statement that basically caught the Chinese off guard, threw down the gauntlet, you know, and the Chinese didn't know what to do. And that sort of was the first domino that initiated this big sequence of interactions between the U.S. and China and all the various claimants. Now, what the Chinese began to do in 2014 as they were sort of maintaining. a level of Coast Guard and Navy activity in the region is they very quietly and very carefully started to reclaim land at seven different features in the South China Sea, some of which are called low tide elevation, which basically means at high tide they don't exist. Nothing is above the water. And as you said, they started to create, you know, airfields, ports, basically making, you know, mini islands that could sustain life. Now, ironically, when we started calling them on this, they said,

oh, we're trying to create something that will just contribute to regional stability, global public goods. In the future, if there is a maritime disaster or a hurricane, we will have forces in the region that help out. But really what the concern is, is number one, the Chinese are ignoring international law in certain instances. They're demonstrating that when countries disagree with them diplomatically, that they will, use their coercive power to push other countries around. So it's international law, it's peaceful

resolution of disputes. And then, of course, the big one for the U.S. is the fact that if China actively begins to militarize in a sustained way these seven features, it could really complicate freedom of navigation in the area because the U.S. and other countries will have to think twice about whether or not the U.S. Navy or even commercial vessels can freely operate. Now, the Chinese like to say, well, we've never threatened freedom of navigation, but in fact, they fudge that issue because when it comes to whether or not U.S. Navy planes or ships can get close to some of these reclaimed features, they use very ambiguous language about whether or not they have a 12 nautical mile territorial sea or a 24 nautical mile contiguous zone around them. It's all very, very fuzzy. So it suggests that they're willing to be flexible in how they interpret international law. if it advances their strategic interest. And there's genuine fear that this could escalate to an actual conflict in some of these areas, right? I mean, people will take this very seriously.

Well, certainly the Vietnamese take it very, very seriously, right? I mean, they're the country that has probably gotten into the most serious conflict with the Chinese. There was an instance when I was at the NSC, May of 2014, where the Chinese just threw down an oil drilling rig in Vietnamese claimed waters that set off this huge incident where you had, ships and Chinese ships just going at it. You can actually see pictures of this on YouTube. It's incredible. You have these big Chinese Coast Guard ships just ramming Vietnamese fishing vessels. And you know the Vietnamese.

I mean, these guys are tough as nails, right? I mean, they're very happy to run at the Chinese in a very serious way. So that was an episode where we were quite concerned that we thought could escalate. But of course, Vietnam is not an ally of the United States. So we have no security commitment to them. The Philippines is a different story. They are an ally. We do have security commitments.

But the difference with the Philippines was the election of this new president, Rodrigo Duterte, in 2016. It changed everything. And it's interesting because commentators, sort of journalists, they like to say, well, the U.S. is losing influence with its allies who are now curing favor with China. And they like to point to Duterte and the Philippines. Philippines, when in fact the reality is that Duterte got elected on a platform that had everything to do with domestic circumstances, crime, anti-drugs, boosting the economy, nothing to do with the United States. Duterte didn't have a pro-China anti-U.S. platform

during the election. But once he got elected, he saw a huge opportunity to push this dispute with China to the side and then get access to big piles of China. Chinese cash. So the Chinese had played the Duterte piece really well. Yeah, he is a nightmare. So what is your response to critics who say that the Obama administration didn't do enough to deter Beijing from building these islands when it was still possible to stop them? And now they have this destabilizing and permanent military outpost in the South China Sea. I mean, look, Tommy, that's a really fair question. And it's one that I've, you know, thought about over and over again, you know, because you leave the and a scene, you sort of think, what could I have done better? On that particular question, I think

about it in a couple different ways. Number one, we didn't know beginning in early 2014 that they were about to launch this major land reclamation project, right? I wish that we had somehow intercepted their strategic plan and we knew advance that they were going to do that, because that would have given us the time and space diplomatically to really run at them in a serious way. They did it so quietly and so incrementally that it constrained, you know, our policy space. Secondly, you can't want it more than your allies and partners do, right? And we were working in lockstep at that point with the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia and who were all very concerned about Chinese activities because it was affecting the freedom

of navigation of those countries. But, you know, there were limits to how much they were willing to do. So, you know, how credible is it for the U.S. to sort of start running at the Chinese more than the countries in the region who actually have competing claims with China, want you to. So that made it really hard. Third, is the issue of what exactly could we have done? In other words, the Chinese, I think, correctly identified that they could pursue a strategy that was what's become known as, quote, gray zone activities, sort of like what Russia ended up doing in Ukraine, you know, the green man activities, right? Activities below the threshold of

conflict, right, that don't quite justify a sort of major kinetic response, but nonetheless, will gradually, incrementally have a strategic effect on the region. Got it. Right. And that's going to be a long-term enduring challenge for the U.S. and even Japan, because I worry the Chinese are going to try and adopt similar kind of strategies in the East China Sea. And, you know, it's something the political scientists like to call the stability instability paradox, that if you have sort of stability at the nuclear level, it allows for greater instability at the conventional level.

because, you know, both sides are so concerned about escalation that it actually provides a greater freedom of maneuver. And I think this is one of the real new challenges in the U.S.-China relationship as the U.S. and China sort of jockey for strategic position shadowbox in East Asia going forward. So speaking of disputed islands, I want to ask about Taiwan. Reference this earlier, but Trump created quite a stir when he took a call from the president of Taiwan back in December. It was the first call between a U.S. president and a Taiwanese leader since 1979. Can you talk a little bit about why this was such a big deal in the history of Taiwan and the somewhat convoluted one China policy? Sure. It was a big deal because it sort of violated the grand bargain at the heart of the U.S.-China relationship.

And you have to go back to 1979 in the normalization of relations. But basically, the deal between Beijing and Washington was, We will normalize relations as long as the United States de-recognizes Taiwan, and we, China, will look the other way as you establish this, you know, informal, unofficial relationship with Tai Bay based on economic and cultural ties. And part of the informal unofficial relationship is that the leaders of both countries will not speak and interact with one another because that connotes a formal official relationship. So since deregagnition in 1979, no U.S. President has dealt with his Taiwan counterpart. So it was sort of breaking the sort of de facto agreement at the basis of the U.S.-China relationship. What was strange about Trump taking the call with Taiwan was that it wasn't clear at the time what the rationale was or if there might be a broader strategy behind this that would create some leverage for the United States. But since it happened, it seems like they've completely forgotten about it.

and maybe backed off a lot of the tough postures he took along the way. Am I wrong to view this so cynically? Or is there a grand strategy here that you've seen? No, I completely agree with you. I think the administration totally backed into this. You know, a couple people around Trump who knew the issue, thought it was a good idea, probably didn't expect it to be publicized. Or if it did, they thought it would be a sort of the thin wedge to make progress on the issue. teed it up for Trump, he didn't really understand what he was getting himself into, and then the whole thing blew up. Now, the interesting thing about this episode, and it tells you a lot about the Chinese mindset when it comes to Trump, was that the Chinese Beijing did not totally freak out afterwards. Yeah, that was interesting. It was very surprising. In fact, they were very calm and measured

about it, which says to me that they understand exactly what they're dealing with when it comes to Trump. But here's the key is that, so they gave him space to sort of understand what he did and walk it back, but then Trump doubled down. You might remember that he, I think he went on Fox News and basically said, look, why do I need to, you know, reaffirm the one China policy, especially when the Chinese keep screwing us on trade in North Korea right, left and center. So he doubled down on it, and that's when it got a lot more serious. And I think the Chinese got really nervous. You're geeking out with me on POTSA of the World. More on the way. So, I mean, we're talking about all these sort of like discrete, massive irritants. There's Taiwan, there's a South China Sea. I mean, more broadly,

China is a great power. They have a nuclear army military. They're a greatest economic competitor. They're potentially the biggest market in the world for exporters. So there's so much business we have to get done with them. But they're also a human rights abuser. The 2017 World Report by Human Rights Watch said the outlook for fundamental human rights. including freedom of expression, assembly, association, and religion remains dire. How do you juggle the need to press them on human rights with all the other things we need to get done? And do you think that those issues are still going to be on Trump's agenda or is he signaling that he's going to give them a pass on these things as he does things like, for example, meet with the president of Egypt today? You know, Tommy, I'm glad you raised this because in sort of the modern era of U.S.-China relations with such a focus on sort of big strategic issues,

I think sometimes the traditional oldies but goodies in the U.S.-China relationship like human rights get short shrift. Yeah. Right? I mean, in the 90s, this issue used to come up all the time because of TNMN. It doesn't come up as much anymore. I really wonder how much Trump is going to make an issue of this. He, in other relationships, has sort of poo-pooed it and not made it a big priority. I know he's meeting with the Egyptian leadership today in Washington.

I'll really be curious to see what his. press statements look like and the extent to which he raises the issue. Because with China, he absolutely should. I mean, the political environment under Xi Jinping has gotten far more restricted. The space for lawyers, NGOs, both domestic and foreign, civil society, and, of course, freedom of the press and access to information have only gotten worse under Xi Jinping. It's really sort of unfortunate. The challenge for any policymaker, and I face this constantly, is that your leverage to address Chinese human rights issues is really, really limited, right? You know, what is it that you can sort of hold at risk? What is it that you can use to press China to make

changes to their domestic situation? And, you know, what we would do is make sure that we regularly stood on principle. We would raise cases publicly and privately, make sure that the leadership in Beijing knew that we weren't ignoring this and they would continue to be an irritant in the relationship. The challenge that we have is that sort of as China has really emerged as, you know, this big global power, it can basically ignore the criticisms of other countries and get away with it. You know, I have to admit I was really pleased to see that just last week, the Senate in Australia rejected the extradition treaty that the Turnbull government had negotiated with Beijing basically because they didn't believe that the sort of legal

protections inherent in the extradition treaty were viable enough. And I really give them credit for doing that because that's a hard thing to do. I mean, Australia is a country that does an enormous amount of trade with China, right? China is their top export market, full stop. Right. There's a lot of Chinese money coming into Australia for education, tourism, increasingly property, right? And yet the Senate stood up on principle and said, we can't conclude an extradition treaty because we cannot ensure that if we extradite somebody to China, that they will face due process. So they're, you know, they're due credit for that. Now, of course, the U.S. does not have an extradition treaty for China. I don't think we're likely to have one anytime soon. But human rights will continue. to be a problem. And I think that's one of the sleeper issues that we should all watch to see how Trump manages. Right. I mean, so I think the take home from the conversation so far is how complicated this relationship is. And, you know, as I read more and more about the upcoming visit, you see, you know, Jared Kushner is seemingly a big part of the policy. But, you know, you used to

annoy you and me when people would say, well, who's in charge of China for Obama? Because it's not some boutique issue that's owned by an individual. There's military, economic, intelligence, diplomatic, equity in play. Oh, yeah. I mean, I used to, I used to say, Tommy, and you'll recognize that, you'll know what I'm talking about because you're on the clearance line for all this, that when I was China director at the NSC, I was the most loved and hated person simultaneously because China touches everything. There wasn't a single geographic or functional directorate at the NSC in which China didn't come up in one way, shape, or form. So everybody sort of wanted a piece of view. Everybody wanted to make sure that when Obama and Hujin Tower, Xi Jinping sat down,

that they got their talking points in the paper. But I was also the most hated person because, you know, I had the thankless task of having to make those hard decisions about what got in and what didn't. Of course, you know, people could always go to, you know, Dennis McDonough or Tom Donnellin. But nonetheless, I mean, the key challenge with China policy is it requires tradeoffs, right? You can't do everything at the same time. You can't expect the Chinese to give you everything. And I think that comes to your second point, which is sort of who's running the show, because the only way to run a policy that involves multiple competing interests in which tradeoffs have to be made means you have to have a good process. Right.

Right. Everybody has to feel like they get a fair hearing and that there's transparency about the tradeoffs involving their issues. because otherwise people will, you know, people could start leaking, people try to undermine your policy, right? Yeah. And that's what I worry about with the Trump administration. Where's the process? And how does the process work when you have, you know, Jared Kushner sort of being the point of contact with the Chinese ambassador? Banging around in foreign policy was Steve Bannon. I mean, I just, it was so nice when I was at the NSC because there were people who are, you know, Obama people who were hired. as political hires. But I also got to be friends with so many of you guys who were technocratic policy experts first, partisan, 53rd, right? And I'm wondering where are those voices and who are those people? Is there anyone you have relationships in there with who are in the government now that are helping make good decisions? Well, I mean, I think a sort of key, key figure to watch is the National Security

Advisor, General McMaster, right? Because he's going to be key to running a good process. And one of the interesting things for me is to see, for the first time in literally decades, you have a national security advisor that doesn't seem to be taking an active role in China policy, right? I mean, you know, the Chinese are obsessed with Kissinger and the role of the NSC. Now, that said, the fact that they have their hooks in Kushner, you know, is sort of their dream come true because not only to get to the White House, but they get to, you know, an American princeling. but I think it's really going to be, ultimately it's going to come down to whether or not McMaster is able to set up a decent process that involves both the security side and the economic side. I mean, you know, I can remember when, you know, when Thomas National Security Advisor, Mike Froman was the Deputy for International Economic Affairs. I mean, all of us were joined at the hip. Me, Jeff Bader, Danny Russell, Mike. I mean, you know, these issues were constantly being. debated, arbitrated internally side by side with one another. But you can only do that if you have, you know, sort of an inclusive process. Everybody respects everybody else. And then once the boss makes

the decision, that's in. That's it. Right. Execution. And it's tough to see the clarity in the current administration. Yeah. And it's, it's one of those scary issues where Trump seems to think he knows what he's talking about. So he kind of pops off all the time. But I think. I mean, you wonder like what's going to happen when he is sitting across the table from Xi Jinping, right? I mean, this is a guy who spent 30 years in the rough and tumble world of Chinese politics, right? Where two of Xi Jinping's staunchest political opponents, Bo Shilai and Zhou Yong Kong, are now basically in the Chinese gulag in Ningshah province breaking rocks for a limit, right? I mean, Chinese politicians don't play around. Yeah. Right? I mean, this is, you know, these guys play hard.

Hardball. And, you know, what does the Trump-She dynamic look like? You know, apparently Trump and his wife and she and his wife are going to have a private dinner together. What's that conversation going to look like? He's going to bitch about how he actually won the popular vote and how the media's mean to him. I mean, I mean, I can't imagine what this guy says in private. What I wonder is, I wonder if he's going to start talking about his golf courses in China, not realizing that Xi Jinping as part of his anti-corruption campaign actually sort of outlawed. party cadras playing golf as too much of a bourgeois activity that lends itself to, you know, capitalist rototype behavior. Right. Well, the reality is the Chinese will probably know what Trump is going to say before he says it because they are a global cybersecurity threat. They stole millions of government personnel records, including probably years and mine when they hacked the Office of Personnel Management.

You think they're listening right now, Tommy? Because they know what roles we had in the former NSA. Yeah, yeah. They love, they love Hasbin Obama guys. Hey, can you just imagine, you know, maybe Xi Jinping on his flight over as part of his prep will actually be listening to this podcast. I hope so. With, hey, Xi Jinping, we love you over here. That would be Jin Ping.

Jin Ping, we love you. And Joe Biden says hi, by the way. At some point, we got to talk about the Jin Ping, Joe Biden connection, because that's just legendary. Okay. Well, that will be our next question. So here's my question for you. The Chinese have newspapers. They're reading about Russian hacking.

they see all this tussle about the interference in our elections. They're also one of the most proficient hacking organizations on the planet. They have entire army units dedicated doing this. What do you think their take is on all this? Do they see an opportunity? Should we worry that they're going to ramp up these overt cyber efforts and response? I mean, I think that their take on Trump is he's somebody that talks really loudly. He's focused on short-term gains.

He's somebody that can be manipulated and shaped. you know, see my previous points about one China, South China, Sea, and currency policy. So I think they're still very much taking the measure of him. But I think that they feel like they've got their hooks into his son-in-law. You know, they were able to convince his Secretary of State to sort of repeat verbatim their very Leninist phrase for the U.S.-China relationship, no conflict, no cooperation, win-win, which, by the way, means China wins twice. Right. You know, so I think that they believe that they can that they're going to be able to manipulate this current situation.

So you don't think they'll see the cyber effort and think we should ramp up what we're doing or have they already ramped up? Oh, I think that they're constantly, you know, ramping up. I mean, you know, cyber for China is sort of like what a nigma was for the U.S. and its allies during World War II, right? Because the Chinese have always had, I think, pretty mediocre intel collection capabilities. You know, it's gotten obviously a lot better in recent years. But when they developed cyber capabilities, it was like a step function for them in terms of getting access to people's emails and computers and all, you know, everything.

Because they didn't have the decades of relationships at embassies and diplomatic contacts. Exactly, exactly. They just sort of didn't have the depth or the experience on the Intel side. Certainly not the kind of experience that the U.S. and the Soviets had during the Cold War. So, you know, for them, you know, cyber is this great new tool. But it's also a double-edged sword because, you know, part of the U.S. and the Soviets had during the Cold War. what they were doing with the cyber piece. And this is actually something that Obama really laid into Xi'an at Sunnylands in sort of actually a strikingly confrontational way was using cyber activities but for commercial gain. Basically, breaking into the computers of American

companies and stealing their trade secrets, confidential business information. I mean, American companies have lost hundreds of millions of R&D funds because what China has stolen. what they've been doing. What is the Xi Jinping Biden story? I don't know the background there. Yeah. So the whole setup to Sunny Leans actually is quite interesting because, you know, beginning in 2011, we recognized that there was going to be, we knew there was going to be a big leadership transition in the fall of 2012, right? The 18th Party Congress. We were almost certain that it was going to be Xi Jinping and Li Kichung because of the Chinese leadership succession works in a pretty predictable way. Now, of course, when it happens again this fall, we'll see how predictable it is. And the issue was, we need to begin to get to know the new leadership before they take control. So, you know, I wrote a memo to Tom Donald at the time and basically said, we know the leadership transition is coming up in a year, year and a half.

We got to get ahead of this. So why don't we use Biden and have him reach out to then Chinese vice president Xi Jinping? and begin developing a relationship between the two. And, you know, Tom, because he's an old-school Biden guy, understood how effective that strategy could be, you know, agreed. And so beginning in sort of early summer of 2011, we actually put the two leaders together. Actually, the first time they met was actually in Italy in June of 2011.

Nobody else was around. I don't even know if Tony Blinken was there. But Biden went to Italy as a... part of the celebration for, I think it was called the Giribaldi Festival. It was something like the celebration of 200 years of the unification of Italy, something like that. And so we talked to the Italians and asked the Italians to seat Biden and Xi Jinping next to one another. And to our surprise, they hit it off. I mean, Xi Jinping sort of saw Biden as an elder uncle. And the fact that Biden had had sort of a consistent relationship with China going back to the late 1970s,

Biden actually in 1978 went to China and met with Deng Xiaoping at the time. It did some sort of really serious, interesting work in the U.S.-China relationship. And so what we did was we built a trip for Biden to go visit China, Beijing, and then interesting Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, in August of 2011. And it was just great. They just sort of, you know, they got on well. They visit a school together, Chinese kids studying English. I mean, it was really quite interesting.

I mean, how do you not love Joe Biden? One of the great things about working on the NSC was for a lot of the vice president's calls to foreign counterparts or the president's calls to foreign counterparts. We got transcripts that the sit room would make, put in our little cubby holes, our intelligence cubby holes in the sit room and you just read them. The Biden transcripts were just the best. I mean, the guy had the best time doing, you know, having whatever phone call he was having whatever foreign leave. I miss that. Oh, Xi Jinping knows. Fascinating.

Xi Jinping now knows far more sort of, you know, Irish proverbs than I think most Irishmen do. Or stories about his grandkids or like, you know, and all this endearing stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it was interesting. It was the best. And what was great about that particular time is that Xi Jinping, he was sort of far more relaxed and unscripted back then. I mean, I can remember the meetings in Beijing because the meetings always involve like a big meeting with everybody, a small meeting. and then like a super small meeting.

And the smaller the meeting gets, no surprise, the more sort of honest and frank the conversation gets. And then once we met Xi Jinping out in Chongqing, he just sort of, you know, he was after a day or so of, you know, walking around, seeing the sights. I think they even, you know, shot some hoops together. You know, Xi Jinping sort of talked about his views of China, his views of Mao.

I mean, it's just, we learned a lot about sort of, his approach to China. Now, fast forward from summer of 2011 to June of 2013, Xi Jinping showed up at Sunnylands much stiffer, right? He was the president, the general secretary, and the head of the military. He's on script. Oh, big time, big time. I mean, his guy, he was flanked on two sides by Li John Shu on one side and Wang Hunang on the other, and these guys just kept shoving in papers. I mean, it was just classic. Sounds like a fun job. Evan, I could talk to you all day, man. Thank you so much for joining us. A perfect week. A huge, huge meeting for President Trump this week. And thank you for all the insight. I just want to say thank you to the Center for American Progress for allowing

us to use their studio. They are doing great work over a cap. Check out their website, the Center for American Progress.org. Thanks, guys. Thank you.