Two Superpowers Across the Table

interview from the New York Times. David and I have spent our careers interviewing

“some of the most interesting and influential people in the world which means”

we know when to ask tough questions and when to just sit back and listen. And now we've teamed up to have these conversations every week. We'll try to reveal something about the people shaping our world. And we'll get some great stories from them too. It's the interview from the New York Times. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams and this is The Daily.

For the first time in nearly a decade, President Trump will meet with

China's President Xi Jinping in Beijing. The meeting comes as Trump struggles to extract himself from the war with Iran and must now face off against China. The biggest threat to the U.S. is dominance on everything from technology to trade. Today, my colleague David Sanger explains what's likely to come of this meeting and we're pressingly but will not.

It's Wednesday, May 13th.

“Hey guys, can you hear me? David, we can hear you. Where are you right now?”

Good, good, good. I'm in my hotel in Beijing. I just arrived with several of my Washington bureau colleagues and we are all preparing for the president arriving

for his first trip to China in the second term. He'll get in on Wednesday night and

meet Xi Jinping in the next morning and part of Friday before he just turns around and goes right back home. Okay. So now that you're in Beijing, can you set the scene for us a little bit David? Like, what is the significance of this meeting between President Trump and Xi Jinping? Well, as initially conceived, Rachel, this was going to be the first of a series of meetings this year in an effort by the president to have something

of a rough, gross model with the Chinese after many, many years of tension. Last time the president was here, was 2017 and it was a very different situation. The president was treated with all the pageantry that the Chinese do very well.

The president Xi, I want to thank you for that incredible welcoming ceremony.

He had just been elected president to the surprise of China and the world and perhaps himself. Today I discussed with President Xi, the chronic imbalance in our relationship as it pertains to trade. He was just beginning to think about how China correlated with his economic policies

and his defense policies. The United States is committed to protecting the intellectual property of our companies and providing a level playing field. We're going to focus on China's rise as a major power. In the coming months and years, I look forward to building an even stronger relationship

between our two countries, China and the United States of America. But this time, he arrives under the cloud of the Iran conflict. You'll remember he was supposed to come here in April and put it off.

“And so I think fairly convinced that by mid-May, Iran would have already capitulated.”

And now, in Spain, he shows up with Iran resisting with other world leaders like Chancellor Meritz of Germany, contending that Iran has humiliated the United States, and with the Chinese themselves a bit mystified about why the U.S. was having such a hard time opening up a body of waters such as the straight-of-war moves or defeating a kind of second or third-rate power in their mind, like Iran.

And of course, all of some it's about optics, and while I'm sure there will be all the conference ceremony that goes with these, the fact of the matter is, he comes into this summit, looking a bit weak. Okay, so I understand that Donald Trump is walking into these meetings much weaker than in 2017, but as for the meeting itself, what do we know if anything about what they're

actually going to be discussing? Well, we don't know a huge amount right now, but the obvious in any summit that involves

is almost always a series of big purchases by China to be announced, and potential business

“deals, and memorandums of understanding, some of which will come to fruition, and some”

of which will not, but these are all sort of a well-hanging fruit of the relationship. I mean, this is what Donald Trump would do in any big summit meeting. And in some ways, those may be the easier of the issues to resolve, which isn't to say that any of them are easy. Well, can we dive into that a little bit more, like when you say low-hanging fruit, trade,

business, what are we talking about exactly? Oh, I tell you, this is Donald Trump, and his idea of the summit is to immerse with a bunch of business deals, even if they don't fundamentally change the nature of a relationship. And he said this one up just that way. And so, you'll hear a lot about the three bees, bees, beans, and Boeing.

Why beans, beef, and Boeing? Well, these are three big, distinctly American exports.

The Chinese have always bought American soybeans, although they can't bear overpriced.

They've long been dependent on Boeing, although now they're building some very good aircraft with their own, and beef. Well, they're trying to start up their own beef industry as well, but they're still buying some specialty American beef. These are always a little hanging through of these summits, because China needs to buy

summits this anyway, and the president wants to be able to go out and describe something that is an immediate deliverable to the American people. Right, the president doesn't need to fly halfway across the world to negotiate something that China was just going to buy anyway. I'm sure that you'll hear many announcements in the president will declare that these

were the biggest purchases ever, but they are fundamentally commodities. And that's where the two countries do business most easily. But, you know, one thing that I did not hear you discuss in your discussion of the three bees David was a pretty big tea that we've been talking about on the show a lot, and that is tariffs.

Where does that fit into all of this? Well, obviously, tariffs are a huge issue for the Chinese. China's been a big target of Trump's tariff regime, and I'm sure that it will dominate a lot of the discussion. But the fact of matter is, the Chinese were able to get President Trump to back down

some last year when in retaliation, they cut off rare earths and magnets, and so forth to the U.S. to demonstrate that they too have a bit of leverage here. And then came the Supreme Court decision, which forced the U.S. to pay back some of the tariffs that have already been collected, and now a Supreme Court decision is going after President Trump's ability to impose an increase in tariff on every country.

“So I think the decision can probably feel like he's already one half as argument before he starts.”

Now, there are some tariffs on specific Chinese products that certainly are a big concern to them. And here, the biggest example is Chinese cars.

You know, the Chinese during the President's first term exported about a million cars

a year. In this past year, they've exported around the world, 7 million, except to the United States, where they were barred, particularly by Joe Biden, who put 100% tariffs on Chinese cars. And that's a big source of complaint on the part of the Chinese. Okay, so China is going to want to push to get these cars into the U.S. do we expect

to deal? No.

“We do not, because I think everybody recognizes that China's carbon reduction capacity is”

posing a considerable threat to the American car makers, just as Japan did decades ago. But I think what's worth remembering here, Rachel, is these are the immediate trade tensions to take place between countries all the time, with our adversaries, with our allies. But what's frustrating sometimes around these summit meetings is that we all know there are much more fundamental devised between the two countries, divides that go to the heart

of the question of who will be the dominant economic power, the dominant military power, the dominant technological power for the next number of decades. And it's not clear whether any of those core issues in the relationship will come up

We'll be right back. I'm Julian Barnes.

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So, David, talk to us about those fundamental divides that are both at the heart of the battle for dominance between these two countries, and also potentially unlikely to come up in the meeting this week. Oriental's no secret for the past 10 years. The U.S. and China have been engaged in what sometimes looks like a bit of a death struggle,

right? Okay, there's made no secret of the fact that by 2049, he wants China to be the number one military, economic, political, and perhaps even cultural power in the world. And the question of how the United States is going to deal with the rise of essentially a peer competitor, the only country that can deal with us across the board in those

areas is the fundamental question. And you're seeing in some it's like this that this plays out in arguments about all kinds of specific issues. But the overall question is how do you deal with a country that's trying to displace you as the world's number one power?

“What are some of those issues David, walk us through those?”

Well, start with nuclear weapons, China had undermail and for many decades after, a minimum nuclear deterrent. It kept 100 to 100 nuclear weapons just enough to deter others from striking it. But when she came in, she almost immediately began a huge buildup that the United States didn't really become fully aware of until years later.

And today it has about 600 nuclear weapons. But the Pentagon has made to China will have about a thousand nuclear weapons by 2030 and will match the US and Russia by about 2035.

And why is this critical, because just a few months ago, as we discussed on the daily before,

the last remaining arms control treaty between Russia and the United States expired. And President Trump, I think, rightly said, it doesn't make sense to negotiate a new one in less China's part of that agreement. And the Chinese so far have said outright they have no interest in arms control or even discussing it until they have an arsenal, the size of ours that they wouldn't put themselves

in that kind of disadvantageous negotiating position. So President Trump said was in January and our lengthy interview with him, that he plans to bring up nuclear arms control if he's with President Xi, I don't think it's going to get very far. The Chinese just aren't ready to discuss it.

What they are ready to discuss is Taiwan and Taiwan's right to exist.

“And what specifically about Taiwan do you anticipate coming up in this meeting?”

Well, if you're paying, would like to do anything you can to show that the United States is becoming more open to the thought that China over time would take over Taiwan. He doesn't expect an invitation for them to do so, what he's looking for are some small wording changes that might make the Taiwanese more doubtful that the US would come to their aid.

Wording changes like, well, the simplest one that is described most often is that American officials usually say that they would not support Taiwan declaring its own independence.

In fact, it's got big diplomatic significance to it because oppose is means that we would

“take a specific view that we only feel China is the people's republic and that we would”

oppose any effort to go challenge that. Like the words themselves might seem like not that big of a deal, but in effect, they are a huge deal diplomatically. Right. And we just don't know how this is going to turn out.

One of his aims told reporters in a briefing over the weekend that he expected no change in the American position. But that's only true if the president doesn't feel it and of course we know he is bound to feel it. Which I can imagine is exactly what China is hoping for.

Yes. But what's really interesting is that Taiwan is one of the few topics that when you raise it with President Trump, he refuses to get fully engaged. It seems like there are a couple reasons why you might think that Taiwan would be higher up on the president's priority list, so to speak.

Like one that we haven't mentioned yet, of course, is the technology that chips that are related to AI that Taiwan is a big producer of. For that alone, you'd think that perhaps the president would be very keen to discuss Taiwan. Or else, he recognizes that the United States needs the output of Taiwan semiconductor corporation.

The world's most advanced semiconductor maker is facilities are overwhelmingly in Taiwan. Of course, the AI chips that are at the core of the Artificial Intelligence Revolution. Now, this could play both ways. You could imagine Jason Tang saying, "You know, I know how to deal with Donald Trump. I just guarantee him that he's getting his chips if he just doesn't care about the rest

of the island."

“I think for myself, and probably for a lot of other people, AI perhaps more than many of these”

other issues on the table feels really front of mind. The technology, it feels like it is racing out in front of our security, maybe even our understanding of it, and so are we imagining that we will see any kind of real action on this front from these two leaders at the meeting this week? Well, usually we found that these discussions between world leaders are pretty limited and pretty

superficial. During the Biden administration, it took months to negotiate a simple win or

two between the US and China in which the two countries agreed never to allow their nuclear

weapons to be directed by artificial intelligence programs. So, she seemed like a pretty basic thing, let's keep human beings running our looks. But the idea was to build on that and try to get some common understanding about not letting artificial intelligence make a life in depth decisions when it comes to autonomous weapons. And so there's sort of an understanding that we need a new form of arms control, but that

everything that we did in the nuclear age doesn't apply very well in the AI age, because it's not as if these are specific weapons that you can easily inspect or count or keep control of. So, these would largely be codes of conduct and very hard one force. And it'll be interesting to see if the two leaders even touch on this topic, or even willing to send their aids off to discuss it.

Basically, both the US and China are in this race to win the AI battle, and maybe because

of that, they don't want to do anything that would restrict their growth. But David, doesn't it feel like they each have at least some kind of vested interest in putting some kind of guardrails around the other one? You would think that it would be pretty obvious to both countries that they do need guardrails.

“But you'll remember that the Trump administration came into power saying, "One country”

is going to win this race, and it's going to be whichever country allows industry to do its thing unfettered. We're not going to bog down the industry a lot of roles early on." That attitude has changed just in recent weeks, and what's changed it has been the arrival of mythos, this anthropic version of its main artificial intelligence products, which

is declined to release to the public, because it is so effective at conducting offensive

of utility grants or other infrastructure, and then order up an attack that can also be useful

for defending that infrastructure. The Chinese are worried about mythos themselves, but presumably they are working on very similar kinds of war-language models, and it's probably only six months, eight months, maybe a year away before they have a mythos of their own.

“That should deeply worry the administration, and I think one of the concerns that many”

American China experts have right now is that the top officials of the Trump administration have been so distracted by what's happened in the Middle East that they're coming into this a bit ill-prepared.

Well, let's talk about that. How does the war in Iran fit into all of this?

This is not the condition for the summit that President Trump envisioned. When he put off this meeting by about six weeks, he assumed that by that time the war would be over, the Iranians would have capitulated, and the straight-up war moves would be open. None of the three things are the case. So are you saying that you think the war is likely to maybe take up more oxygen than

some of the other super pressing topics that you've described to us like nuclear weapons, AI, et cetera?

“I think we're going to see, or maybe hear about second hand, a lot of conversations”

surrounding the reopening of the straight and the ending of this conflict. The Chinese clearly want to get the straight opened without having to go intervene themselves, and they probably don't have the power to intervene very much. They get about 30% or more of their oil and gas moving through the straight-up war moves. So the Chinese have a huge economic interest in getting this resolved, especially because

their own economy wasn't doing so wonderfully before the war in Iran, and this increase in energy prices is killing a lot of Chinese enterprises. But for the Chinese, it's a little more complicated than just that. President Trump will undoubtedly ask them to stop supplying target data and technology to the Iranians, technology in the Iranians need for the missiles, for their interceptors,

and for generally pursuing the war. The United States also wants China to use its influence with Iran since it is such a big purchaser of Iranian goods to get the Iranians to open up the straight. And it will be really interesting to see whether President Xi, who is very cautious, but has a strong interest in seeing the war and might actually quietly intervene on the U.S.

to have with Iran. You know, David, you said at the beginning of this conversation that these summits are often about a demonstration of strength, back home, and that at this summit in particular, it does not seem like there's going to be much headway made on some of the thornyest and most urgent issues of our time.

So I wonder what you think will feel like a win to both of these men at the end of the day. I guess the question is, what feels like a win and what they can sell was a win.

“For President Trump, I think it's pretty clear.”

He always wants to emerge from these with a bunch of business deals and announced that

was indeed his goal out here as deal maker and chiefs. But as we discussed, that doesn't get at some of the fundamental questions. Including whether the Chinese, after Iran, view the United States as not quite as invincible as perhaps some leaders thought if they may be. For President Xi, it's something a whole longer game isn't particularly interesting

in the individual deals that come out if they help grease the wheels of diplomacy that's fine. But President Xi may want to demonstrate that he, in fact, is running a more stable power right now. That it is not invading other countries or following the war of the jungle as he said the other day in that veiled swipe at President Trump and that over time the world will depend on Chinese power, Chinese capital to rebuild and to establish new trading relationships around the world.

has a long-term plan that it's own.

David, thank you so much for making the time and I hope you have an easy trip. Thank you Rachel, it'll be interesting. We'll be right back.

“Here's what else you need to note today.”

Dr. Marty McCary, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, resigned on Tuesday after weeks of pressure and rumors that President Trump was planning to fire him.

Dr. McCary ultimately left over concerns about the administration's decision to authorise

“fruit-playered e-sickerettes, which he opposed, according to people familiar with the matter.”

And, Cash pretell, the FBI director, spared with Senator Chris Van Holland of Maryland

at a budget hearing over his conduct, including whether he ordered polygraphs of FBI employees to

find leakers and a report that claimed that he drank excessively in a way that affected his work.

“Patel, who has denied the report about excessive drinking and sued the publication,”

accused Van Holland of drinking, with Kilmar Arbrego Garcia and immigrant who the Trump administration mistakenly sent to a prison in El Salvador. Today's episode was produced by Jessica Childs Shannon Lynn, Adrian Hurst, and Anna Foley. It was edited by Devon Taylor, with help from Paige Cowett, and contains music by Chelsea Daniel and Mary and Lesano. Our theme music is by Wonderley. This episode was engineered by Alyssa

Moxley.