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

The Lawfare Podcast

Julia Curlee and Jonathan Czin analyze the implications of Xi Jinping's recent state visit to Washington. They examine the lack of substanti

Key takeaways

• Xi Jinping's primary goal was to establish himself as a peer to Donald Trump and gain relief from U.S. pressure.
• The trade truce regarding rare earth supplies has only been extended by two months, creating uncertainty for U.S. businesses.

Main topics

• Xi Jinping's Washington State Visit
• U.S.-China AI Dialogue

Notable quotes

It's all thunder and no rain.

Conclusion

The summit provided temporary diplomatic optics but failed to address

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) I worry about this. I struggle to see what we really got out of this summit, either in terms of the optics, which I think were not strong, right? There was a lot of bonhomie at a moment when there are a lot of big issues on the table that were largely left on interest, including the explosion of anxiety in our own country about artificial intelligence. This is the Speaker 2 (0:22) Lawfare Podcast. I'm Julia Curley, a public service fellow at Lawfare. My guest today is Jonathan Zinn of the Brookings Institution. Speaker 1 (0:30) The fact that so much of this is percolating in the Chinese press, I think what it underscores is that it's useful for Xi Jinping to have Trump think that he's his friend, right? And to have him think that there's buddies and that there's some kind of bromance going on between the two of them, right? Because again, it gets to that underlying strategic objective. What is she trying to accomplish? Not much in terms of the way of tangible deals, but to buy time and space and relief from U.S. pressure. Speaker 2 (0:56) Today we're talking about Xi Jinping's state visit to Washington last week, what the two sides agreed to, what they left out, and what the dueling readouts tell us about U.S.-China relations. Speaker 2 (1:06) For those who don't know, John and I served together at the CIA and in the NSC. John was a member of CIA's Senior Analytics Service in the China Mission Center. He was a director at the National Security Council for China, where he staffed President Biden's engagements with Xi Jinping. And he's the guy I call to make sense of anything related to senior level Chinese engagements with the U.S. president. I've invited you on the podcast today because Xi Jinping just made his first visit to Washington in 11 years. And our two governments came home telling noticeably different stories about what actually they agreed to on trade, on Taiwan, and what even call AI, and sorting out what it means. I can think of no better person that I'd want to talk to about it. So before we dive in, can you get our listeners just a little bit more on your background and how you came to watch Xi Jinping Speaker 1 (1:57) for a living? So the way I got into the China business is a little bit circuitous, but really what got me into national security affairs in the first place is that I grew up in New Jersey with a view of the Manhattan skyline, a real bridge and tunnel kid. And 9-11 happened a week after I showed up at my college campus. And so that was obviously a transformative moment for me. And I think for a while I thought I would be like many in our generation, including you, Julie. I thought I'd be a Middle East person and go hunt bad guys in the desert. But what happened was, as I went on in my education, what I really realized was that I was more interested in great power competition. So I guess you could say I was into it before it was cool, going back to the early 2000s. And that's kind of what got me hooked. I think what got me into the China business was that I realized that no matter how much time I would study this, I would always be impressed by how much I didn't know. And I think that's been a big part of what's kept me going. In terms of the Chinese leadership. I was at the mercy of our bureaucracy. I knew when I showed up at the CIA that I would be doing something related to Asia, hopefully China, because that was my background. I had studied the language. But I didn't know until I walked into the bubble and got sworn in that I was going to be following China's leadership. And just by happenstance, I started just weeks after Xi Jinping became vice president of China. So it's just good luck. Speaker 2 (3:13) Yeah, it sounds like it. I mean, you and I had the similar story of 9-11, and you apparently just stayed on track, whereas I was like a squirrel, you know. I was like a dog following the squirrel, chasing it wherever it went. I can assure you I have many squirrel-like moments, Speaker 1 (3:30) too. Speaker 2 (3:30) But I finally got back to what I really wanted to work on, which was China, just in time for us to get to work a little bit together. But that's great. Appreciate that. So let's start with your expectations going into this summit. So I watched a bit of what you'd written and spoken about. And, you know, you said you had pretty low expectations, I think, for an extension of what you call the gentleman's agreement. Can you walk us through that? Yeah, I mean, it was driven by... kind Speaker 1 (3:56) of two main factors, right? I think, especially as a former NSC staffer, just at a very mundane level, it was very hard to detect any signs of kind of meaningful discussions since the last summit, right? There were a couple of engagements, but Ho Lee Fung and Secretary Besson, who had the lead on these issues, hadn't had any in-person meetings until just the week before the summit. You had the Executive Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhao-shu come in the middle of August for a pretty abbreviated trip. So really, like, These trips, I think your listeners should be aware, they just require a painstaking amount of effort, right, and work, and especially with the Chinese, right? I have often joked that, you know, planning a summit with the Chinese is like wedding planning, but really, it's like wedding planning with the worst possible in-laws you can imagine, right? Like, they don't like the food, they want to haggle over everything, so it requires a tremendous amount of preparation, and that just didn't go into this, right? So I think just at a mundane level, there just wasn't the runway to adequately prepare for a lot of this. And then I think structurally, I don't think that there was a real focus from the administration on this set of issues. I mean, the decision making, as you all know, has become so centralized and so personalized on foreign policy in this administration. The old National Security Council, as you've written up, as we knew it, has kind of been blown up. And I think more so on China issues than any other suite of issues. Trump is his own China desk officer, right? You don't see people like Wyckoff or Kushner or these other characters anywhere involved in it, right? And just from a bandwidth perspective, I think to the extent President Trump is focused on foreign policy issues, it's really Iran as the first and probably second priority, Ukraine and Russia, you know, kind of a distant third. And then I think China's number four, right? And so I think that was part of why I just had very low expectations, just because you didn't see the focus from the US side. on getting its act together ahead of the summit. Speaker 2 (5:48) Yeah, so John, I mean, I want to get a little bit more on this council that was involved in national security, of which you speak in the previous administration, and help just tee this up just a little bit more on how you would contrast with how this administration, you know, prepared for this summit. Speaker 1 (6:07) Yeah, I mean, when I was on the National Security Council, I mean, the preparation that would go into this would start months ahead of time, right? And you're negotiating with the Chinese over every aspect of this, the content, the sequencing, how this is going to go down, especially since, you know, in the Biden administration, we didn't do any state visits, there was no visit to Beijing, or to the United States by President Xi, except until the end of the administration, you're often meeting in third country, right? So it's a question of who is technically hosting whom, because then you get to control the agenda. And I just wouldn't underestimate the level of detail. to which we would negotiate things, right? How long are those opening pleasantries going to be? Are they going to be 30 seconds? Are they going to be a minute? That sort of thing. And all of that fell to us. And then in terms of the substance, you know, there was more of a bottom-up process about, you know, what kind of decisions needed to be made ahead of this meeting, right? Not just about the summit itself, but, you know, the broader geopolitical dynamic and everything else that's going on, which I think, especially in this instance, is such an important part of... of the story here too, right? It's not just about the summit. It's about the things that we're not talking about because the summit has sucked up so much of the oxygen in the room right now. Speaker 2 (7:17) Yeah. So if we were still so fortunate to have you writing the PDB on the summit, you know, how Beijing might perceive the outcome objectively, how we all did, the scorecard of a summit like this, what would you write? in terms of what was agreed with the deliberables, the optics and anything else? How would you measure who came out ahead? Speaker 1 (7:39) Yeah. So there's two facets to this, right? There's the way I would have thought about it going into the piece. And this is kind of my natural starting point anyway, right? As a former analyst, how does this look from Xi Jinping's perspective? What is she looking to get out of this meeting? And I think the main thing that I would really emphasize and that I was emphasizing before this meeting is that she's not really looking for anything in particular in terms of tangible. deliverables coming out of this meeting. He really wants to do two things in a meeting like this. I think, number one, from an optics perspective, he wants to position himself and China by extension as the United States' peer and as Donald Trump's peer, right? So by that metric, I mean, I think it's very clear from what we've seen. Check. He got that in his face, especially with Trump going out to Joint Base Andrews to personally greet him. And I think the other thing that Xi is looking for, it's less about the particulars. It's more about just buying time and space and relief from U.S. pressure, right, from the variety of competitive actions that were undertaken earlier in the Trump administration going back to the Biden administration, right? So there's not really an affirmative agenda that Beijing is looking to accomplish here, which I think gets back to the first question, too, about why were there so few concrete deliverables? So I think by both metrics coming out of the summit, I think Xi got what he wanted, right? Even though the gentleman's agreement that we talked about has only been extended till January, I mean, we'll see what happens with that. But I think they are making a calculation that given everything else that the Trump administration has on its hands, they're not going to want another cycle of escalation for China to yank on the rarer supply chain again and create the pain that it would cause for U.S. companies and the broader U.S. economy, which is already facing a variety of headwinds in this moment. So I think if you're grading it afterwards, that's what I worry about, too. And this was, you know, this was never our job at the agency to assess and appraise, you know, how the U.S. did coming out of this. But now that I'm out in the wild, I do have the liberty to do that, as you know. I worry about this. I struggle to see what we really got out of this summit, either in terms of the optics, which I think were. Not strong, right? There was a lot of bonhomie at a moment when there are a lot of big issues on the table that were largely left unaddressed, including the explosion of anxiety in our own country about artificial intelligence. And yeah, in terms of the substance, I don't really know what we got substantively out of this meeting, except for, you know, you're going to get a two-month extension of the gentleman's agreement on rare earths, which I think my understanding is that's going to... alarm many in the business community because it doesn't allow them enough time to really prepare and do what they need to do to inventory and stock up. And so, yeah, so it's really challenging for me to see what were the positive aspects that came out of this meeting, especially because I think part of what Beijing's doing, I already see evidence of this, is that as they're pulling the United States in closer, they are pushing our partners and allies much harder, right? And we saw that after the first encounter between the two presidents. in Busan, South Korea last year, or just a month afterwards, there was this big kerfuffle with Japan, right? And they've been pushing the Japanese pretty hard. And again, we were seeing it with this summit that at the same time, just as Xi is wheels up from Washington, there's a note in my inbox about the Southern Theater in China, the Southern Theater Command, starting a military exercise around Scarborough Reef, right? Right at the same time on the heels of this. Speaker 2 (11:01) So they see this as an Speaker 1 (11:02) opportunity to push and to probe and see what they can get away with, with our allies and partners. Speaker 2 (11:07) You also host a rival podcast, which I will not hold against you, The Beijing Brief. But in that, you actually warned a few months ago about something called the Constructive Strategic Stability