Transcript | "Constructive Strategic Stability": Ali Wyne of the International Crisis Group on the Trump-Xi Summit
This week on Sinica, I chat with Ali Wyne, Senior Research and Advocacy Adviser for U.S.-China at the International Crisis Group, just hours after President Trump’s plane left Chinese airspace at the end of a three-day state visit to Beijing. We dig into the new framework Xi Jinping put on the table — what Beijing is calling 中美建设性战略稳定关系, a “constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability” — and ask whether it’s a genuine doctrine of mutual restraint or a rhetorical tripwire that future American moves can be characterized as having violated. Ali and I work through Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s morning-after media briefing, including his striking claim that the U.S. side now “does not accept” Taiwan independence — a notable shift from the standard American formulation. We talk about what Trump actually said on Taiwan in his Air Force One press gaggle and in his Fox News interview with Bret Baier, the gap between Trump’s account of Xi’s private remarks on Iran and what Beijing is willing to say publicly, and whether AI can serve as a durable basis for cooperation coming out of the summit. We also turn to the American domestic side: the bind Democrats find themselves in trying to critique Trump’s China engagement without out-hawking him, the generational data showing a striking gap in American attitudes toward China that transcends partisan division, and the question of when that shift in mass opinion actually starts to bite on policy.
3:46 — Big-picture takeaways: Trump’s stumble into a more sober appreciation of Chinese power
6:24 — The new Chinese framing: “constructive strategic stability” and what Beijing wants from it
10:21 — Unpacking the framework: Wu Xinbo, Sun Chenghao, and the nuclear-arms-control genealogy
14:52 — Doctrine of mutual restraint or rhetorical tripwire? The two readings circulating among China-watchers
18:04 — The Democrats’ hawkish trap: what a non-out-hawking critique of Trump on China would actually sound like
23:50 — Who in the Democratic political class is modeling the right posture
28:38 — The generational gap in American attitudes toward China, and why it transcends partisan divisions
33:32 — When the public-opinion shift starts to bite on policy formation
37:16 — Taiwan: Xi’s fire-and-water language, Rubio’s “raise, note, move on,” and what Trump said to Bret Baier
42:47 — Wang Yi’s “does not accept” formulation and the marker Beijing is laying down
47:32 — Iran and Hormuz: the gap between what Trump says Xi told him privately and what Beijing will say publicly
51:57 — Closing: where Ali ends the week, and the case for Chinese strategic patience 55:18 — Recommended reading on the summit: Ryan Hass in The Atlantic and Jessica Chen Weiss in the FT
Paying It Forward
Afra Wang, author of the Concurrent newsletter — one of the most thoughtful writers on Chinese technological development and what it tells us about broader socioeconomic shifts in China
Allie Matthias, senior research assistant at Brookings, for her recent essay with Jonathan Czin in China Leadership Monitor on the inversion of the “peak China” thesis
Mackenzie Miller, program manager of the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations
Kate Gross-Whitaker, research and editorial associate at the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF)
Recommendations
Ali:
No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain by Rebecca Solnit
A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan
Living in the Present with John Prine by Tom Piazza
Kaiser:
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad — a National Book Award–winning cri de coeur from a brilliant writer, in the same unflinching register as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me
Transcript
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from my soon-to-be-on-the-market home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. Listeners, you can support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at sinicapodcast.com. Please do subscribe so I can continue to bring you these conversations.
So, I’m taping this just a little over a day after President Trump’s plane left Chinese airspace, wrapping up a state visit that included many hours of direct engagement with Chinese President Xi Jinping. It was bad timing on my part that I wasn’t there in Beijing for the summit so I could, you know, maybe give you guys a better sense of Chinese reactions to it and how it felt on the ground. But hey, I did pay as much attention to it as I was able to from here. It wasn’t exactly Nixon goes to China in 1972. There weren’t major breakthroughs, no eye-wateringly large trade or investment deals signed yet, or announced yet anyway.
No board of investment announced. No dramatic changes in the American position on Taiwan that I can tell. No pledge secured for China to help the U.S. out of its jam in Iran and get the Strait of Hormuz open. After the first day, the two sides produced parallel readouts that read, as more than one observer had noted, like accounts of two very different meetings. Perhaps there’s still more to come. But so far, the deliverables list, as everyone has noted, is rather thin. You’ve got some Boeing orders, I guess 200 planes, a resumption of U.S. beef imports, I suppose a notional agreement that the Strait of Hormuz ought to be reopened, and that no toll should be charged.
Nevertheless, I rate the summit a success. It did what both sides really wanted to do, at a minimum, which was to extend the ceasefire in the trade war made last fall in Busan, South Korea. Neither side had its expectations set too high, and that’s a very good thing, I think. The vibes, the atmospherics, the optics, or the tone, or whatever you want to call it, that was all quite positive. And as far as I can tell, it’s all gotten high marks from all serious observers, whether Western or Chinese, importantly. What’s more important, I would say, than the relative paucity of deliverables is this tone.
They’re meeting three more times this year in D.C. in September, both at APEC in November in Shenzhen, and at the G20, which is going to be in Miami in December. What I think was really of lasting significance, perhaps, is that there was this sense of power parity that I don’t think has any precedent in U.S.-China’s symmetry. So yeah, Trump came into this in a relatively weak position, but Xi and the Chinese leadership didn’t rub his face in it and simply projected a firmness and nonchalance, a confidence that did, I think, much of the talking.
This wasn’t just Beijing’s doing, though. It struck me, especially given Trump’s remarks and what he said during his interview with Fox News while he was still in Beijing, that Trump’s own sense of China has fundamentally shifted, something that we’ve long kind of intuited but now have heard straight from Trump himself. Part of what’s larger and harder to evaluate is this new Chinese framing for the relationship that Beijing wants to anchor for the next three years and perhaps beyond. They’re calling it 中美建设性战略的固定关系, a constructive China-US relationship of strategic stability.
Now, parsing that phrase is already keeping people pretty busy, but unpacking it is really going to be one of the central interpretive questions, I think, for anyone who’s trying to understand the U.S.-China relationship in the next few years. So, to help me through all the complexities of the U.S.-China relationship and the summit’s aftermath, I am delighted to be joined by Ali Wyne. Ali is the Senior Research and Advocacy Advisor for U.S.-China at the International Crisis Group, where he analyzes U.S. policy toward China and works to introduce Crisis Group’s recommendations for easing tensions into Washington’s policy debates. Before joining Crisis Group at the start of 2024, he worked at Eurasia Group, the RAND Corporation, the Carnegie Endowment, and at State.
He is the author of America’s Great-Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition, which The Spectator named one of his books of the year in 2022, and about which I’ve had Ali on the show previously. You probably remember that. He is one of the sharpest and most temperamentally even-handed voices riding on this relationship today, and I am glad to have him. Ali Wyne, welcome to Sinica, or welcome back to Sinica, man.
Ali Wyne: It’s great to be back, Kaiser. Thanks very much for having me on.
Kaiser: Well, it’s wonderful to have you back, and thanks for making yourself available on the weekend. Sorry to take up your Saturday afternoon.
Ali: Of course. No, I wouldn’t want to spend it any other way.
Kaiser: Oh, you’re delightful. So, let me start with your big picture takeaways, just your two-minute top line take on what the summit meant before we dive deeper into the many other questions. I don’t know if you had any quibbles with the way I characterized it just now in the opening, or what your take was.
Ali: I think that your assessment is spot on. I had modest expectations, I think, along with most other folks who were monitoring the summit. I had modest expectations of the concrete deliverables that the summit would deliver. And indeed, as your opening remarks indicate, I don’t think that the summit produced any sort of eye-watering deals or major diplomatic breakthroughs. Nonetheless, it was very illuminating in two respects. And I think illuminating in one respect from China’s vantage point and then from America’s vantage point.
When President Trump made his first official state visit to China in November 2017, so almost a decade ago, the Chinese delegation expended a lot of effort trying to impress upon President Trump that President Xi was a geopolitical equal on the world stage, that China had arrived as America’s most capable and confident
