In Asia, the United States is long on attitude, short on strategy. Re-upping this podcast deep dive I did last year into America's gathering policy failures in Asia. I pull the thread on several themes: 1. America's oversecuritization of its approach to Asia - to borrow the same metaphor, Washington is long on security and short on just about everything else. As I sometimes tartly put it, the United States is in serious danger of becoming "the Hessians of Asia." 2. Washington's strategic narcissism in filtering its entire Asia strategy through the prism of American competition with China. In other words, rather than trying to "get China right by getting Asia right," we are instead making every policy, initiative, and relationship derivative of America's own focus on Beijing. 3. Our collective national failure to adapt to an integrating Asia - one that is more "Asian" and less "Pacific" and more closely resembles its historical norm rather than the Cold War anomaly. 4. Our persistent inability to understand that Asian countries have domestic politics too - and how that, in turn, sometimes leads American policymakers both to misread Asian countries' interests and overestimate American leverage. 5. Why the United States isn't getting enough strategic traction EVEN in the Asian countries that are most ambivalent about the rise of Chinese power. When the mathematical operations that matter in Asia (and elsewhere) are addition and multiplication, it is strategically nonsensical to go long on subtraction and division. 6. What the Trump team gets right - for instance, about why Asian governments aren't attracted to a highly ideological American approach to their region - but then gets wrong in the execution and thus risks losing the strategic plot. 7. Why Washington won't be able to successfully ring-fence security cooperation by invoking shared fears of China while simultaneously coercing its allies and partners in the economic and technology domains. 8. Why China is more resilient than the United States thinks - but why Beijing, for all its strategic, political, ideological, and systematic differences from Washington, often shares American strategic narcissism. 9. How Beijing went from loathing sanctions to using them, copycatting the American architecture and, as I bluntly put it here, "learning from the best" - namely, Americans. Give the podcast a listen. The United States needs to approach Asia as it is, not the region of its wishes, dreams, and fantasies. pacificpolarity.substack.com…

Diplomacy is essential and there will of course be announcements from Xi Jinping's visit to Washington. But It is a bit silly to talk about "constructive strategic stability" when all of the things that have made the U.S.-China relationship unstable in the first place are not only still with us but are very much front and center. These include but are not limited to: (1) clashing security concepts. (2) competing views of economic self-interest. (3) obvious differences of political system and ideology. (4) domestic politics that make almost nobody on either side willing to take a risk for the relationship. (5) the shattering of past coalitions for productive relations. (6) little diplomatic substructure or institutionalized basis for productive relations. (7) lack of cooperation on global issues that might leaven the differences on bilateral and regional ones. (8) over-dependence on the personalities of the two leaders—and especially on an American president who is bucking the almost universally hostile view toward China in his own party while collapsing in the polls. Almost seven years ago, I wrote this essay for @CarnegieEndow on "Why the United States and China Forgot How to Cooperate." In many areas, prospective coordination between Washington and Beijing is a political problem, not an intellectual one. But the reality is, while people used to think that economic integration would mitigate security competition, security dynamics have instead bled back into flows of goods, capital, people, technology, and data. So many things that were supposed to integrate the two countries have actually divided, not united, them. And on the Venn diagram between what Beijing wants and what Washington wants out of the relationship, the overlapping middle has shrunk quite a lot from when I got into this business decades ago. carnegieendowment.org/posts/…

U.S.-China collaboration shrinks as more areas get securitized. On @CNBC, Evan Feigenbaum from @CarnegieEndow shares his outlook for the upcoming meetings between President Trump and President Xi. He highlights that President Trump’s transactional approach might give Beijing more opportunity to make demands. cnb.cx/4r15viW

I don't think it was in the cards for him to go after China under the legislation. The question for me has been whether he will go after India, which he may believe is a softer target possessed of far fewer retaliatory options. To be blunt about it, the zeitgeist of the past 15 months has been to try to coerce India (which for several months at the end of 2025, was tied with Brazil for the highest American tariffs imposed on any country) while demonstrating repeatedly that the threats to China are mostly rhetorical. Peter Navarro at one point called Ukraine "Modi's war." Nobody in the administration has ever tried to call it "Xi's war." And various of Scott Bessent's comments on the India-EU trade agreement and India's Russian oil purchases have gone down poorly in Delhi. This U.S.-China summit in Washington will have reinforced the suspicion in India that it is New Delhi in the crosshairs while Beijing keeps escaping U.S. scrutiny. If you rewind the clock to Trump's 2025 inauguration day, that is decidedly not what most people would have expected.

Four summit-level visits (two in each direction) in a single year is something incredibly unique. Normally, one would expect that this would yield a strategic condominium, or at least a LOT more measurable cooperation, but that hardly seems to be the case. That is partly because on the Venn diagram between what Beijing wants and what Washington wants out of this relationship, the overlapping middle has shrunk quite a lot from when I got into this business decades ago. So there really just isn't the growth of tangible, measurable government-enabled cooperation that you would expect from such a frenetic pace of summits. Form and function are diverging rather dramatically, compared to the decade of the 2000s, which I would describe as the high water mark of regional and global coordination between the United States and China. I wrote on that in this long essay for @TheNatlInterest when Trump was elected in 2016: nationalinterest.org/feature…

" ... will require safeguards against corruption and foreign influence" is the understatement of the century. The fact is, memories are short and nobody in Washington remembers anything that happened before last Tuesday anymore, but the U.S. government has been promoting U.S. investment in Central Asia (and to a lesser extent, the Caucasus) for a very long time. This isn't new and the current administration did not, in fact, discover the secret of fire—although the very interesting report that Rubio may be taking up to 100 companies to a C5+1 meeting certainly IS new and is a MOST welcome development if it leads to tangible investment. In the Bush years, when I was the deputy assistant secretary of State for Central Asia, we promoted all sorts of investment and co-investment projects—pipelines, roads, power lines, electricity generation projects, and much more. We also turned the U.S.-Central Asia TIFA, which was the only regional not bilateral TIFA the United States had, into a trade ministerial and brought business into the mix as our public-private partners. To put that a bit differently, we already had a C5+1 before there was the official "C5+1" but it was in the very tangible trade and investment domain, not among foreign ministries. One thing that has changed, I think, is Uzbekistan, which should be a consequential economy, attractive to American firms, but never was in those days because, to be blunt about it, it was run by Islam Karimov—a former Gosplan executive in the late 1960s, who didn't understand economics, markets, or Western business. Another is Putin's war on Ukraine, which has made Russia unattractive to multinationals and Kazakhstan more attractive as a place for headquarters, regional sales and service operations, and diversified investments. But the structural constraints on investment in Central Asia if you aren't Chinese and have a different risk premium are still very considerable. And China is all over the place in making diversified investments, not just in extractive sectors (think: Trump and tungsten) but increasingly digital sectors, renewable energy, diversified tech, services, and so on. And that's before we even get to the China-centric infrastructure and standard setting. Some historical perspective here: 2001-2009.state.gov/p/sca/rl…

It is a conceptual mistake to presume that competing with China at the frontier is the only issue, much less the end of the story of the future. Much of China’s tech policy and investment is directed at tech-enabled transformation of traditional industries and sectors, which will de facto lock in Chinese dominance. And for much of the world, including in Asia where U.S.-China competition is especially acute, the issue with AI is ultimately about use cases, e.g., AI applied to healthcare or service delivery or manufacturing, not the frontier per se. China is doing things on AI and tech in that space that matter hugely, I think. I wrote this @Forbes piece a couple of years ago on Chinese tech strategies under Xi. So-called “new productive forces” aren’t only concentrated at the frontier: forbes.com/sites/evanfeigenb…

“Great things happen in Chicago.” Fact check: true.

In 2020, stuck at home and bored stiff in the worst of the pandemic, I called up several former senior U.S. officials on Zoom and recorded “Six Crises,” a multi-chapter “video book” exploring how the United States and China—in six instances over nearly twenty years—managed to coordinate despite their deep-seated and intensifying strategic rivalry.. The camera angles are horrible, especially mine. And none of us except Mike Leavitt had quite figured out Zoom. But I called the project "Six Crises" to deliberately evoke Richard Nixon’s 1962 memoir of the same name. One premise was that countries don’t need to be “friends” to get meaningful things done. But my goal was also to explain how and why U.S.-China strategic competition was giving way to a kind of “managed enmity.” The six video chapters explored lessons learned for today’s crises, which in 2020 meant the growing COVID outbreak. The videos are with: - Hank Paulson, former Treasury Secretary (financial crisis). - Mike Leavitt, former HHS secretary and Utah governor (food safety crisis). - Tommy Thompson, former HHS secretary and Wisconsin governor (SARS crisis). - Susan Rice, former national security advisor (ebola crisis). - Jack Chao, former special envoy (malaria/TB crisis). - John Podesta, former White House chief of staff (environmental crisis). carnegieendowment.org/progra…

As Xi leaves Washington, flagging what @EvanFeigenbaum told me for my column earlier this week: A Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Asia during the George W. Bush Administration, he argued that China has found an “easy mark,” who is giving ground on sensitive issues such as export controls on U.S. chips and American policy toward Taiwan. Still, China is not aiming for a grand bargain with Washington anytime soon. “Their objective really is just to ring-fence the worst outcomes and park the Americans in a corner,” Feigenbaum told me, “and then pursue their opportunities for expansion of their influence regionally and globally elsewhere.” newyorker.com/news/global-no…

Xi Jinping officially invites @POTUS to China for the November @APEC Summit, and confirms his own visit to Florida in December for the @g20org

Recognizing that other countries have politics too is kinda sorta progress …

Striking contrast to 2015 when there was a sizable group of Chinese CEOs with Xi in Seattle, including Lu Guanqiu, Jack Ma, etc.