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Josephine Ma

Dr Evan Medeiros is the Penner family chair in Asia studies and the Cling family distinguished fellow in US-China studies at Georgetown University. He has served as the National Security Council’s director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia, and later as special assistant to the president and senior director for Asia.
Medeiros was former president Barack Obama’s top adviser on the Asia-Pacific and was previously a policy adviser to Hank Paulson when he was Treasury secretary. He has also held senior positions at Eurasia Group and the RAND Corporation.
This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus. For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here.
What is your assessment of Donald Trump’s Beijing summit with Xi Jinping, and what will US-China relations look like after the visit?
I have been involved in three US-China summits, and more than a dozen US-China leaders’ meetings between 2009 and 2015, and I am confident in stating that these summits tend to reaffirm the underlying power dynamics more than change them.
The Trump-Xi meeting last week is no different – in fact it is the classic case of both sides using a summit to affirm current dynamics rather than change them.
This US-China summit did far more to reflect – not change – the existing power dynamics: a confident, strategically focused China that set the agenda and extracted a valuable framing concession (G2-ish); and a US side that came for trade deals, got soft commitments on purchases that should have been prearranged.
Then the US left with atmospheric warmth rather than structural change.
China and Xi are feeling very confident and that was further reflected in the summit.
That said, both got enough to be satisfied and are ready for the next meeting in September.

China has emphasised “constructive strategic stability” as the new framework for bilateral relations – what’s your take on that? Can the Beijing summit stabilise US-China relations through the end of Trump’s term?
China’s offering of this framing for the relationship is not new – they tried this with [Barack] Obama in 2013 – and, as before, it is a deliberate effort by China to set the terms of the relationship and to lock in certain types of behaviours.
The phrase and the broader summit atmospherics was also meant to confer a degree of status on China – that it has reached the level of equal partner with the US. This is what Beijing was hoping to achieve, and to many Chinese, it did.
I’m sure many Americans would disagree.
But it is a huge question whether Beijing can use this new frame for relations to generate stable relations between now and the end of Trump’s terms in 2028.
Both sides are trying to stabilise relations in order to buy time and this common goal was at the heart of the achievements of this summit.
My view is that the prospect for stable US-China relations through the end of Trump’s term is exceptionally optimistic.
At best, bilateral relations will enjoy stability through the end of 2026.
Recent history is instructive here. The recent summit may reinforce the truce reached at Busan in October 2025. It generated some narrow economic agreements and produced useful atmospherics, but the underlying competitive forces are too deep and wide to be contained by personal diplomacy indefinitely.
Xi just hosted Putin for a state visit and promised to visit North Korea. Trump says he will call the leader of Taiwan. None of those are stabilising actions.
As I argued in a recent article for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, there is also a real risk of a “snapback” to competition – if Republicans lose badly in the November midterms, if Democrats weaponise China policy heading into 2028, or if Trump simply concludes Xi is playing him, Washington could revert to intensive competition, but in a more dangerous form having allowed China to quietly improve its position during the detente.
Congressional opposition to Trump’s detente with China is growing.


Why do you say US-China relations are in a new and dangerous era, and what will the trajectory look like?
There are at least two good reasons to be sceptical that Trump’s policy of detente and Xi’s support for US-China stability will last.
First, the Trump administration has not merely adjusted the terms of China policy and opened some new channels of communication, but has quietly abandoned the competitive framework itself by effectively stopping most competitive actions in the hope for Chinese concessions at the summit.
Since Busan, the Trump administration has pursued a commercial detente at a time when anxiety about competition with China is growing in the United States.
Second, US concerns about Trump’s Taiwan policy persist even after the summit. He did not change declaratory policy as some feared. But he has said that US arms sales are a bargaining chip, implying that Taiwan’s security is tradeable.
This is having ripple effects throughout Asia. If Trump actually calls President [William] Lai [Ching-te], that will create a crisis in relations too.
How long can this be sustained in the face of persistent and consistent competitive pressures?
The nature of the competition has fundamentally shifted – from generally competing over relative capabilities to racing over positional power in global supply chain networks, with China’s weaponisation of rare earth controls in 2025 permanently altering the bilateral dynamic.
The current stability rests not on structural mutual vulnerability, as Cold War MAD [the threat of mutual assured destruction] did, but on shifting political calculations about costs.
When both sides believe they have escalation dominance and can impose unacceptable costs on the other, eventually one will be tempted to test that proposition.
US politicians are very focused on these issues and are legislating about them now.
You mentioned US concerns about Trump’s Taiwan policy. He has made a few comments since the trip – including that the US would not want a war far from home, that he does not want Taiwan to assume it has US backing if it pursues independence, and that he is still mulling over arms sales. Are we seeing a shift in the US position?
Trump did not fundamentally change US policy on Taiwan, such as altering long-held declaratory policy.
But Trump has clearly injected some ambiguities into US support for Taiwan, such as his discussion of arms sales as bargaining leverage.
This is a source of concern for Taiwan’s political leaders and policymakers throughout Asia.

What about the risks of military conflict in the Taiwan Strait?
The risks are elevated and ever present, but they are not immediate.
As Brookings Institution scholar John Culver argues, Xi sees the Taiwan issue as a crisis to be managed not an opportunity to be seized.
Xi’s recent purges of the PLA strongly indicate he is not preparing for war now but is looking to buy time to find more loyal and capable military leaders. Ultimately, Xi wants more and better kinetic options to coerce Taiwan. Xi is clearly hardening the Chinese economy for both long-term geopolitical competition and to make it more resilient if conflict breaks out.
The trends in PLA operations around Taiwan are quite worrisome.
Based on data from the Taiwan military, since 2020, PRC incursions into Taiwan’s ADIZ [air defence identification zone] have increased approximately 287 per cent and since 2021 median line crossings have increased approximately 222 per cent.
The PLA conducted encircling operations of the entire island on at least five occasions between January 2024 and February 2025.
Beijing’s language has grown blunter and more menacing. Its exercises look increasingly similar to a blockade, giving it the ability to seamlessly move from exercise to actual military operations.
Its grey-zone tactics have allowed it to put more pressure on Taiwan and further obscure the line between coercion and violence, in a manner that makes it hard for the US and others to help Taiwan.
Trump said tariffs were not mentioned during his trip and that Beijing wants to make its own chips instead of buying Nvidia’s H200. Has the US lost its leverage on tariffs, and how long can it use chips as leverage? What about China with rare earths?
The US-China trade war in 2025 fundamentally changed US-China power dynamics by focusing both sides on a race to reduce vulnerabilities and expand leverage. The focus of this race right now is US dominance of the semiconductor supply chain and China’s dominance of the rare earths supply chain.
The sources of leverage for both nations are time-limited, and the precise timelines will depend on the political priority, resources and innovative capabilities to reduce their exposure.
On chips, the US industry retains a lot of leverage due to its dominance of the software and tools needed to make advanced chips (and even some legacy ones).
But the Trump administration has already crossed a previously sacrosanct threshold by negotiating technology controls away as a concession to Beijing, which diminishes their credibility as a coercive instrument. While China’s semiconductor capabilities remain behind Nvidia in volume and yield, its 15th five-year plan calling for “extraordinary measures” to close that gap signals the trajectory.
On rare earths, US vulnerability is unlikely to be meaningfully reduced in less than three to five years at the earliest, but the irony is that China’s aggressive use of rare earth controls in 2025 accelerated precisely the diversification efforts.

Has the Iran war exposed US vulnerabilities and undermined Trump’s bargaining power with China?
It is probably too early to tell the net, long-term effect of the Iran war on US-China competition and strategic bargaining. But the Iran war certainly doesn’t help the US geopolitical position in the world.
The Iran war compounds the pressure on US strategic bandwidth.
The US is now tied down in another war in the Middle East with no end in sight, resulting in a diminution in resources, time and energy.
The stocks of key munitions were substantially depleted, and US military resources were diverted from the Indo-Pacific. The war and blockade has created a global energy security crisis, which is especially acute in Asia.
Chinese leaders know this and are using it to position China as a global source of stability and prosperity, especially among Global South countries. The fact that China has weathered the energy security crisis better than most only adds to Beijing’s confidence, and its efforts to use this moment to its advantage.
That said, US actions – the war, the blockade, and now the summit – are not the actions of a weak and collapsing hegemon, which is a common Chinese narrative.
The US military demonstrated extraordinarily lethal capabilities, including against Chinese-supplied air defence systems.
In addition, the US economy remains robust amid the war and the strategic benefit of US energy independence is on full display for much of the world to see.


How will the proliferation of economic warfare shape the world, and how can smaller countries respond?
The weaponisation of economic interdependence by the US, China and now Europe is fundamentally reorganising the global economy around strategic rather than efficiency-based business decisions, producing rising costs, redundant supply chains and persistent inflationary pressure.
This has become one of the biggest drivers of global economic fragmentation because the barriers to the free flow of goods, services and technology are mediated and moderated by geopolitically motivated government policymaking.
For smaller countries, and especially those in Asia, this creates both risk and narrowing opportunity.
No Asian country wants to choose between Washington and Beijing, and the astute ones will try to extract benefits from both sides through market access, investment and security commitments.
But Washington is already demanding explicit supply chain alignment as the price of market access in its agreements with Malaysia, Cambodia and Indonesia, and that pressure will only grow – meaning the space for strategic ambiguity is gradually closing.
Beijing will likely start to pressure smaller countries to do the same. As US-China tensions rise, so will the trade-offs and choices for countries positioned between them.
What are the implications of rising China-Japan tensions for the US and Asia?
Japan-China tensions are an underappreciated but strategically significant and even volatile dimension of East Asia’s security landscape.
Chinese military modernisation and assertiveness in the East China Sea has driven Japan to initiate the most significant defence build-up in its post-war history, including record budgets, counterstrike capabilities, deeper US force integration.
Beijing has responded with intensified naval and air activity around the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands and expanding economic coercion of Japan.
All these activities increase the risk of an accident or miscalculation and at a time when many allies and partners are uncertain about the depth of US commitment to the region.
The good news is that Beijing and Tokyo are increasingly adept at playing this game – economically, diplomatically and militarily.
The Chinese approach of “struggle but not break” applies to Japan as it does to US-China interactions.
Despite the recent tension over the new prime minister’s statements on Taiwan, China’s hosting of Apec this fall will likely require a moderate rapprochement to facilitate [Sanae] Takaichi’s attendance in Beijing, as occurred with prime minister [Shinzo] Abe in 2014, when China last hosted.


Will the Asia rebalance survive the Iran war and its resource demands?
The Asia rebalance is one of the least understood and widely mischaracterised policies in the recent history of US foreign policy. And it has clearly become a partisan issue as well, with most critiques coming from Republican analysts.
The Asia rebalance – from its inception in the early years of the Obama administration – was an expression of a strategic view that, first, US interests were substantially and increasingly tied to the future of the region and, second, more time, energy and resources should be devoted to the Indo-Pacific, as we now call it.
These two points are even more relevant today.
The Asia rebalance was explicitly about starting a process of “portfolio rebalancing” that would take time and would not be linear. No one in the Obama administration expected that it would somehow be “done” by the end of the president’s second term.
This was about starting a process not achieving a specific end state.
There have been notable setbacks, such as budget sequestration during the Obama administration that limited military activities in Asia and Trump’s withdrawal from the TPP [Trans-Pacific Partnership].
And now the Iran war, which is such a visible example of diverted resources from Asia to the Middle East.
But I remain optimistic about the Asia rebalance for three reasons.
The US is a global power and has decades of experience being one; it retains the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time and that is reflected in its daily activities financially, economically and militarily.
Second, just as some US resources in Asia have been diverted to the Middle East when needed, I fully expect the reverse to happen during the next crisis in Asia.
Third, the history of US policy in Asia is replete with examples of crises prompting major US policy shifts – the Asia rebalance at warp speed. The nature of the US democracy is to move fast and hard during a crisis. That’s not optimal and crises should be avoided, but a greater US role in Asia is a clear conviction – among US policymakers and business leaders alike.


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Open QuestionsStable US-China ties? It won’t last long, Evan Medeiros says

After Trump’s China trip, political scientist gives his assessment on Taiwan, trade leverage, the Iran war and Beijing’s tensions with Tokyo

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}After Trump’s China trip, political scientist gives his assessment on Taiwan, trade leverage, the Iran war and Beijing’s tensions with Tokyo

After Trump’s China trip, political scientist gives his assessment on Taiwan, trade leverage, the Iran war and Beijing’s tensions with Tokyo