How Xi is Outplaying Trump and Tensions in Northern Ireland

The Rest Is Politics

Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell analyze the Trump-Xi summit as a symbolic shift in US-China policy, with Xi appearing to gain diplomatic prestige while substantive breakthroughs remain limited. The episode

Key takeaways

• Trump welcomed Xi Jinping off the plane in Washington, a first since JFK greeted Harold Macmillan in 1962, but the summit produced little substantive breakthrough beyond trade truce signals.
• The hosts argue China holds strategic leverage over the US through rare earths and advanced semiconductors, with Taiwan's chip industry making it central to any US-China compromise.

Main topics

• US-China relations and the Trump-Xi summit
• Northern Ireland parades and the fragile peace process

Notable quotes

My vote's on Xi.

Conclusion

The episode offers a connected view of geopolitical stress points, from

Transcript preview

Speaker 7 (0:00) For 40 years, America's answer to China was engage with it, trade with it, invest in it, liberalize it, bring it into the international system. And then almost overnight, Washington seemed to reach a new consensus. Suddenly, 10 years ago, China was presented as the enemy in a new Cold War. And now, Xi Jinping has come to Washington to meet Trump. Red carpets, a state dinner, an extension of the trade truce. A major arms package for Taiwan has been put on hold. And Trump didn't seem especially interested in containing or confronting China. He seemed interested in getting along with Xi. So what's going on? Is Trump an outlier in an America which is still committed to confrontation? Or is American policy lurching back towards compromise? Because America no longer wants to be the global policeman of the order it once built. Speaker 1 (0:54) This episode is powered by Fuse Energy. Most energy companies are counting on you doing absolutely nothing. Not questioning what you're paying, not switching, just letting your tariff roll on, which is costing you hundreds of pounds every year. But the apathy goes deeper than our Speaker 7 (1:09) bills. We've almost given up on energy itself. We seem to all be accepting energy's expensive, the system's outdated, but that complacency is costing us. Speaker 1 (1:19) Fuse Energy does not accept that because the energy transition is not something that just happens somewhere else. Fuse Speaker 7 (1:26) is building an energy company which is designed to bring down the cost of energy. And right now, its tariffs are up to £100 below the Speaker 1 (1:35) Ofgem price cap. So switching isn't just about paying less, it's about expecting more from your energy company. And it only takes you three minutes. Switch to Fuse at fuseenergy Speaker 7 (1:45) .com slash politics. Use the code politics and you'll get a free Trip Plus subscription allowing you to hear all the extraordinary members content that Alistair and I are now producing for you. Visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions. Speaker 1 (2:03) This episode is brought to you by NordVPN. And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. Speaker 7 (2:17) There you go. I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creef. And of course, the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN and it was a little reminder. of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks. Speaker 1 (2:41) Well, I think you're not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this, or should I say Fiona managed to do this? I'm incredibly proud of you. That's Speaker 7 (2:49) a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com slash restlesspolitics. That's... nordvpn.com slash restispolitics. And the link is in the episode description. Speaker 7 (3:13) Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. So, amazing range of listeners' questions today, touching on some incredibly serious issues. We begin with questions around US and China, that great G2 confrontation after Trump's meeting with Xi. We're then going to talk about some of the very troubling news that's come out of Northern Ireland with the parades. We're talking about Ethiopia, which has broken into war again. We're talking about the Brazil elections, that huge country where Bolsonaro's son seems to be in the running. And then we'll finish with a bit of lighter stuff around the Bayer tapestry and Alistair's hero, one of his many heroes, Jürgen Klopp and his positive vision for German patriotism. Speaker 1 (3:59) Holly, what do we actually learn from the Chinese president's visit to Washington? What was going on beneath the surface? And who do you think came out on top? My vote's on Xi. Well, I think, firstly, Speaker 7 (4:14) not a great deal happened at the summit. So people who thought it was going to be a great breakthrough on AI safety would have been disappointed. But I think the summit is really important for what it represents about US-China policy, given these are the two most powerful, wealthiest economies in the entire world. And what it shows us is that Trump may be the outlier now. US-China policy. Basically, as everybody I think will have picked up, the US was very, very pro-engagement with China from the moment of the Nixon goes to China 1970s right the way through the 80s, 90s, 2000s, China joins World Trade Organization, right the way through to the middle of Obama. The idea was that engagement, basically the bet was would make China more liberal. and a better player in the international order. And then at the end of Obama, beginning of first Trump, there was a really dramatic change where almost all the China analysts in the US switched from being pro-engagement to suddenly portraying China as the enemy in a new Cold War. And the great consensus emerged, Democrats, Republicans, that China was the enemy and needed to be kept down. And then what we've seen in this summit is something really startling. Who knew? The very Donald Trump who presided over a government that was one of the most hawkish on China, that massively cut all connections with China in the first term, now seems in the second term to be much more friendly towards China than any of the major figures in either the Republican or the Democratic Party. Over Speaker 1 (5:52) to you. Yeah, and there are lots of reasons for that. One of them, let's start by suggesting that actually he comes at this with a... a more strategic and intelligent mindset than we often give him credit for, that he understands that China is in a very, very dominant position in relation to rare earths, that the US military and the US administration are going to need an awful lot of them, not least because he's going to need them for the Iran war, which shows very little sign of slowing down. But I also think there is another point which he does. genuinely seem to have a lot of time for dictators. We're talking at a time when he seems to think his priorities are to launch yet another attack on Canada, which he'd done recently, and also to comment on the bail conditions that are put upon suspects in anti-terrorist, counter-terrorism cases in the UK, at a time when Vladimir Putin has just whacked a load of bombs on a medical facility bang in the middle of Kiev. So I think that, you know, there was one thing, the whole trip, I think I agree with you, there wasn't much of a substance that came out of it. But the pageantry and the kind of the gift to Xi of something that he could sell very, very powerfully back home. I think I'm right in saying that this is the first time ever that an American president has been to visit, has been to welcome. the visiting head of government or state off the plane since JFK did that for Harold Macmillan at a time when Britain was the great power. So that's him basically saying that China is the great power. And, you know, we said last week that of the two big events on the foreign policy agenda going on last week, UNGA, the United Nations General Assembly, was deemed to be less significant than this meeting. And yet... Very little came out of this meeting. And it's interesting you used the word truce. I think there is a bit of a truce in relation to trade. Now, is that about getting through the midterms? Is that about just him worrying that he's got to get these rare earth deals sorted out before then? And then I think my final point, before I go back to you, Rory, is just what was said or was not said about Taiwan, because there were very different readouts. The Chinese readout of the meeting gave the impression that Trump was inching towards their side in relation to Taiwan. The American readout said absolutely nothing about Taiwan. Speaker 7 (8:26) Well, the Taiwan thing, I think, is maybe the moment where everything gets most revealed. The American support for Taiwan is... a sort of historical accident in some ways. As Trump himself has pointed out to the fury of many, Taiwan is many, many thousands of miles from the United States, and it's only 70 miles from China. And the diplomatic compromise has circled around language about Taiwan being part of China. Of course, to remind people, it was simply a contiguous island with China for most of its history. And it ended up under a separate government because the nationalist government fled there when the communists took over China. The US ended up being anchored around there partly because of its presence during the Korean War. And the US increasingly saw itself as a Pacific power. And the Chinese may not have liked it, but their economy was so tiny compared to the American economy through the 50s, 60s, and 70s. I mean, as I keep saying that everyone's incredibly bored, the Chinese economy was still smaller than the Italian economy in 2004. Speaker 1 (9:35) Nobody's bored, Rory. Nobody's bored. Nobody's bored with that. Nobody's bored with that. That is really interesting. Nobody's bored. Don't do down your facts. Don't do down my facts. Speaker 7 (9:45) So the Chinese had to put up with the fact that the US was effectively behaving around the coast of China as though this was American home waters, despite being, you know, what is it? Almost 9,000 miles away. And a lot of the things that the Americans would have thought was completely unacceptable in Cuba, you know, the Americans were always complaining that the Russians and Chinese can put spy stuff in Cuba to spy on the Americans. Of course, the Chinese feel with Taiwan, right? Here's the sort of forward American intelligence base right off the coast of China. So there was a natural sense that if you put that together with the fact that Xi Jinping, like most Chinese nationalists, see this as an inherent part of China and something should be coming back to China, that they would begin to challenge what the US was doing there and say to the US, how much national interest have you really got there? And the answer from the US used to be, or at least since Taiwan became a democracy, we're standing up for this democratic government. We're standing up for the rules-based international order. And that's why we're going to spend a lot of money defending Taiwan. But the question, of course, that Trump raises is given that he doesn't seem in Ukraine to care very much about standing up for democracy as the rule-based international order, why would he continue indefinitely doing that in Taiwan? And will Trump inevitably, as he moves away from the idea that America is the global policeman standing up for global democracy, conclude that actually Taiwan could be part of China if it weren't for the fact that it had 90 % of the world's advanced semiconductors, chips. Speaker 1 (11:19) They've got 90 % of the world's advanced semiconductors. China's got a chokehold on rare earths, and he's probably worrying about that much more than he is about the democratic or otherwise future of Taiwan. There was even reports flying around that he'd asked Xi in these meetings whether China would like to buy. weapons from the United States. Now, I don't know whether he's aware of that. That is against the law in America. Now, I know he doesn't care too much about the rule of law, but if that is true, that is kind of mind-blowing. And again, suggests that he feels himself to be in a very weak position vis-a-vis China. We would have said two years Speaker 7 (11:59) ago, the one consensus right across Democrats and Republicans is that China is the great competitor, strategic adversary. to be less polite, an enemy in a new Cold War. I've been very interested in this because I know a lot of these people. For example, Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher, who I know quite well, were key figures. Matt Pottinger, particularly in Trump's first administration, framing a very, very much more confrontational policy towards China. Mike Gallagher was a congressman who ran the congressional committee on the Chinese Communist Party. And they were writing articles that were celebrated throughout the American foreign policy community, which were much more sort of almost rude and brutal in the way they spoke about the Chinese government and came pretty close, although they backed off of this in the end, suggesting that what they were going to try to do is hold down China till there was regime change, till the whole thing collapsed. And even the more polite academics, people like the American ambassador Nick Burns in Beijing, was saying, in the long run, this is a question of who rules the world, and we would rather have a world ruled by America than ruled by China. In that context, Trump going into this kind of new relationship, if indeed it is a new relationship, is really interesting. And I suppose my question to you is, do you think that this means that possibly in two years' time, US-China policy might move back towards engagement, and that this moment of confrontation Was something started by Trump and ended by Trump? Or is Trump an anomaly? And that when he goes, the US will get back into a much more confrontational attitude towards China? I Speaker 1 (13:39) mean, it's very, very hard to read that because so much of that would depend on who follows Trump. But I do think there is an emerging new attitude to China that most of the American political establishment doesn't like, but where Trump seems very, very comfortable. And I think that's what came out. And then we talked about going to the airport. the sort of the pomp and the pageantry, which Xi Jinping loves to show off. He was treated as the only really comparable head of state or government. There was literally none of the talking down to leaders, which Trump normally does. He does something where he talks down to them. If anything, he was showing respect. I also thought it was, we very, very rarely see Xi Jinping laugh or smile. other than that sort of, you know, the Winnie the Pooh smile, that if you go on the internet in China and Google Winnie the Pooh, everything has been erased because you're not allowed to say that he looks like Winnie the Pooh. But he did actually smile and almost, I'd say, chuckle when Trump was showing him the array of photographs of previous presidents, where, of course, he's put Joe Biden as the auto pen. Now, I think Xi Jinping was... laughing or finding that amusing, not because of an insult to Joe Biden, although he didn't necessarily like Joe Biden very much, but I think that was to him a moment of, this guy's really not all there. This guy is actually quite easy to deal with. I just have to flash him a bit, smile to him a bit. It's very hard to, even if you read the White House readout of this meeting. It's very, very hard. They can point to a bit of coal export. They can point to a couple of deals. But there's very little in this that you could say merits the idea that this would be projected as the most important foreign policy meeting of the year. Although they've got two more coming up quite soon, of course. He is going to go to China and Xi is also coming back to the States for a bigger multilateral meeting. Speaker 7 (15:38) As Tony Blair would say. We don't want in all of this to under-emphasize why the US foreign policy establishment is so suspicious of China. Because in some ways, China is a much wealthier, more successful version of Putin's Russia. Like Putin's Russia, it's pretty paranoid about the West. It believes it's being encircled. It's very worried about color revolutions. It's got no desire to liberalize. It doesn't really want to be a constructive player in the rules-based international order. It's got wounded pride. It sees itself as having a right to great power status. And of course, it does engage in industrial espionage. It's got some pretty phenomenal capacity. It engages in economic extortion of its allies. The problem is that that story was easier to sell during Biden because the US was better at presenting itself then as the great example of democracy. I mean, Nick Burns' whole story, you'd rather be ruled by a world ruled by America than China, doesn't feel the same after two years of Trump. Because now people say, well, okay, you're accusing China of doing economic extortion, you know, so bullying Australia by stopping imports from Australia. But wait a sec, aren't you bullying everybody around the world with your own tariffs and protection? And you're accusing China of undermining the rules-based international order, but there are you trashing the UN, turning off the aid system, lining up with autocrats. So it's difficult or more difficult than it was for the US to create the alliances that it needs, or at least to create them around