Rush Doshi

Gabe Gutierrez, Gabe, we thank you.

Here to discuss this critical moment for the U.S. and China, Rush Doshi is a senior fellow for China at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Alok Mehta, director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

He oversees projects and research on AI policy.

We thank you both for joining us.

Obviously, Julian and Jessica are two of them.

Rush Doshi, who was on our team and is sort of the same era, is another, and this is just going to be essential for the United States, for the government, for our society to understand however we end up seeing the nature of the challenge posed by China.

That's one thing that I came away from this conversation thinking.

And then the other is that there really is now, I think for the first time in a while, call it 10 years or so, a debate.

Beijing is trying to take over the position the U.S. has long held as the global leader, and they may be getting closer to achieving that goal.

To help us understand all this and set the stage for the summit, our guest is Rush Doshi, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the director of its China Strategy Initiative.

He's the author of the book, "The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order." He's also an assistant professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

During the Biden administration, Doshi was the deputy senior director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council.

In that capacity, he negotiated with his Chinese counterpart and helped arrange summits with China.

We recorded our interview yesterday.

Rush Doshi, welcome back to Fresh Air.

Thanks.

Tomorrow marks the 100th anniversary of John Coltrane's birth.

Tomorrow on Fresh Air, cybersecurity and AI safety concerns will likely be addressed at this week's meeting between President Trump and China's President Xi in Washington, D.C. We'll talk with Rush Doshi.

He helped arrange summits between President Biden and Xi and just co-authored a report on China's cyber threat to America's critical networks.

I hope you'll join us.

And I think when you look at where the world is today, that bubble has become... quite dangerous to the American way of life.

So the first thing that I think Washington needs to do is they need to find, look, find people like me or others, I'm not alone in this, that are out there suggesting, why don't we have a good faith debate? Put me in touch with Rush Doshi, whoever.

And say, look, let's have a conversation and talk about allied scale and why that may not work and what other options there might be.

But what you find is I will go on, I will have conversations and people will lambast me.

It's driving me crazy.

So this is sort of a programming note.

Would you ever be interested in doing a conversation with Rush, someone like Rush Doshie? Of

course.

That it's managing its own domestic issues, whether it's fiscal constraints or provinces competing with one another domestically.

Then there's another reading closer to, say, a Rush Doshi, which seems to read China as a player who's doing this very intentionally, not just for domestic reasons, but as part of a grand plan to first displace America from Asia and then eventually take over a dominant position.

I like Rush and I've known him for many years and we talk pretty regularly of a number of these issues.

I think the difference in sort of your analytical prism on China, you know, Rush's prism and people like him, you know, I don't want to single out Rush.

was going to say, Maria, I think to refer back to someone that Zach mentioned before, which is Kurt Campbell.

Kurt and Rush Doshi have a piece in Foreign Affairs that's just come out about how alliances survive.

Now, one of the things he points out in that article that I think rings true to me is that for a long period there, and particularly in the post-Cold War era, we spoke a lot about these alliances like the U.S.-Australia alliance.

and broader values elements in kind of focus more on soft power areas particular around you know um economics and trade around many multilateralism to improve the lives of people and to a whole bunch of things but when you strip all that away alliances or technical agreements now orcas is not an alliance it's a technology transfer pact it's a military technology transfer pact When you strip all that other stuff away, what are they about? Well, they're about the balance of threat and the concerns and risks around the rise of China have not gone away.

and who knows? There's been a lot of discussion in there.

I listened to a really interesting conversation on the Foreign Affairs podcast in which Dan Kurtz-Phelan interviewed Rush Doshi and Kurt Campbell and Mark Leonard on this very question, you know, can it come back? You know, Kurt and Rush have been big advocates of allied scale and...

now are positing that it won't be so bad, that things might snap back, not maybe like they were in the Biden administration, but that it's not quite so dire.

And, you know, part of me very much hopes they're right.