Trump-Xi Optics Overshadow Substance, Gewirtz Says

Just curious about what you make of any sort of actual progress between the relationship between The US and China. Is there any indication that it's gotten better after yesterday's dinner and today's festivities? Well, I think it's important to remember that for president Trump, the point of this visit is the pageantry. It is the optics. He has not entered this time that he's spending with Xi Jinping with a big long list of substantive deliverables that he's hoping to secure. He is really hoping to project this image of his relationship with Xi Jinping being positive, and I think he has succeeded by that metric. But the reality is that for The United States and China, there is a long list of substantive challenges to work through from trade to technology to Taiwan, and that there has been very little time even in their schedule for them to sit down and do subsonym work, on those topics. And instead, they've been showing off the helipad, touring the White House, touring the National Archives. And so the net effect of all of this is that The United States is giving Beijing these tremendous optics. But in exchange, it's not clear to me that we're getting much of substance that, you know, sort of for core US interest. Julian, I'm a little surprised you didn't mention Iran there in that in that long list because China's role in aiding Iran during this conflict seems to be, I don't know, a a very big part of this relationship and an idea that maybe something The US and the president need to address with with Xi Jinping. Absolutely. And it should be on the list. And, you know, it's quite surprising because in the lead up to this summit, as as you would know, the focus from the treasury department, other parts of the US government was on trying to see what they could do to turn up the pressure on Beijing a bit without going for sanctions or some of the steps that might disrupt the trade truce to try to put pressure on Beijing's close relationship with Iran. But it does not seem, at least from we can tell publicly, like president Trump has made that a priority during this visit. So it's surprising that it hasn't been more salient throughout. And candidly, you know, with a different leader, you might see more pressure, but I get the sense that president Trump does not wanna do anything that might, you know, kill the vibe, so to speak, between him and Xi Jinping. Could you say apply that same logic to to to Russia and Russia's invasion of of Ukraine? Absolutely. I mean, I think we've seen very little interest from Beijing in doing more to help bring that conflict to an end over many years now, And president Trump certainly does not seem to wanna put the pressure on Xi Jinping. There have even been reports that if president Trump travels to China a second time this year to go to Shenzhen for a multilateral meeting later that Xi Jinping will host, which they very much hope he will, that one of the things Xi Jinping will dangle is a trilateral meeting between him, Trump, and president Putin of Russia, which I think would be an extraordinary misstep, though it's exactly the kind of thing that president Trump seems inclined to do with these two leaders who who he regards as peers of his on the world stage. Julian, digging into tech and AI a little bit, the Taiwan challenge for this administration. Given TSMC's role in the build out of AI infrastructure, its relationship with NVIDIA, and many other companies, what does the president need to do? Or I I guess the better question is what leverage does China have with with regard to the AI ecosystem? Well, it's really important to remember that when it comes to broader US China AI competitions, this is an intense competitive dynamic. The United States has the world's leading frontier labs, but China is working intently to catch up both in diffusion across the economy and at the frontier. But The United States does have one major leverage point, which is those advanced chips that you were just describing, which are essential to training the best models in the world. So as Beijing looks at this landscape, it's trying to build that capability domestically within China, but it's making slow progress. They cannot produce enough domestically to meet all the demand for compute there. So Beijing sees this as a really challenging spot that they're in and one where decreased tensions, stabilization between The United States and China is good for the growth of their AI sector. Sector. That's the core frame. And I think one of the strange things looking at last night's state dinner is that you see people who are on many different sides of this question. You obviously had Jensen Huang of NVIDIA there who's hoping to sell more chips to China, but you also had folks from leading American tech companies, Frontier Labs there, who are hoping to stay ahead of their Chinese competitors.