Transcript | "The China Debate We're Not Having" | Part 2: What the United States Wants

The Johns Hopkins SAIS ACF Conference, April 3, 2026

Transcript courtesy of the fantastic CadreScripts. Image by Keya Zhou. Listen in the embedded player above!

Transcript

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, where we bring 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 Beijing.

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I am just back from Hong Kong, had a fantastic time there, really, really packed, had an event at the Asian Society, a talk at Hong Kong University that went really well, and lots, lots more stuff that happened down there. Saw a lot of old friends, made some new ones. And, of course, huge shout-out to Brian Wong, who organized this Hong Kong Global AI Governance Conference that was just really fantastic. Well, because I just got back and because I have a really packed calendar this week with talks for the British Chamber of Commerce, Schwarzman College, the Yenching Global Symposium, which is being held, I am moderating one panel there and appearing on another.

All of this before heading back to the States just after the weekend for still more talks. I’ve got a talk at the Virginia Military Institute, I’m really looking forward to; at UPenn with Neysun Mahboubi at the University of Chicago. And new episodes will resume once I get some of that behind me. So, this week, I’ve got the next installment from the fantastic conference convened by the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs, which is abbreviated ACF, at the Johns Hopkins Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, or SAIS, that was on April 3rd. The conference was called “The China Debate We’re Not Having: Politics, Technology, and the Road Ahead.”

Last week’s show featured the introduction by Jessica Chen Weiss, the inaugural head of ACF, and of course, the David M. Lampton Chair in China Studies at Hopkins SAIS. As you all well know, she is simply one of the smartest and most articulate voices in the U.S.-China discourse and has been invaluable in providing great analysis, really modeling how to talk about the complexities of the relationship in a way that is morally guided, is deeply informed, is empathetic and fact-based and, of course, effective for being all those other things.

The organizing premise of the conference was something, as I said last time, that resonated really deeply with me, that much of the prevailing policy conversation rests on underexamined assumptions that we need more rigor, more humility, and more intellectual honesty if we’re going to navigate this moment well. With the generous blessing and active encouragement of the organizers, Jessica, foremost, this week I’m sharing the audio from the second panel, which was called, “What Does the United States Want?”

That’s the question we really need to be asking, and I think it pairs very nicely with last week’s panel, which was, What Does China Want? The question that’s probably asked more often and maybe even too much. Jessica and her team have put together a fantastic panel that features Leslie Vinjamuri, who is president and CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Jonas Nahm, Andrew W. Mellon Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS, a leading voice on China and the environment, who just came out recently from the administration.

Matt Duss, who is Executive Vice President at the Center for International Policy, and a very, very important voice. And Katherine Thompson, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. All of this was moderated by the excellent Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, James Steinberg, who also served previously as Deputy National Security Advisor in the Second Clinton Administration and as Deputy Secretary of State under the First Obama Administration. So, enjoy the conversation as much as I did, I hope, and I will be back soon.

James Steinberg: Well, thank you all for being here. I regret other duties kept me away from the morning session, but I hear it was very lively and informative, and I’m delighted to have the opportunity to chair this one. Because we have so much to talk about and because we also want to give time for all of you to participate, I’m going to dispense with the usual introductions. You’ve seen the biographies and so you can read them for yourselves. And I want to go directly into this panel.

Just to frame this a bit, I think one of our goals here is we’re obviously focused on the U.S.-China relationship. But we all are practitioners of strategy, and in thinking about this, it was, I think, important to recognize and to think about U.S. and China in the broader context of U.S. strategy. And so, the question posed for this panel is what does the U.S. want? But what I want to do to begin with is to open the aperture a little bit to sort of think about, what is it the U.S. is looking for more broadly in terms of its grand strategy?

And how does that affect what we are looking for, what we expect in the bilateral relationship? We’ve got a great panel who can bring a variety of different perspectives on this. We’re going to begin with Matt. We’re sort of looking at the broad lens here. I love the idea, Matt, that I started. Starting on my far right, we will start with Matt. So, Matt, over to you.

Matt Duss: Thanks very much. Great to be up here with everyone, and great to see all of you. Thanks for inviting me. So, to get to the question — what the United States wants — the United States does not know what it wants. We were in a moment right now where the, you know, to state the obvious, the old consensus has come apart. I think that memo first landed with Trump’s election in 2016. There was a brief interregnum in 2020, where it seemed that, you know, at least if you asked Joe Biden about it, we got through this weird anomaly, this hiccup of Trumpism, and now we’re