Current Account with Clay Lowery
May 18, 2026 · 30 min · 12 segments
As U.S. and Chinese leaders meet in Beijing, the future of the world’s most important economic relationship hangs in the balance. In this episode of Current Account, Clay is joined by Evan Medeiros, a…
Evan MedeirosGuest
Clay LoweryHost
That's my three main takeaways from my conversation with Evan, two things I'm looking forward to, and my one sports fact.
The first point that Evan made I thought was excellent, which was that summits seldomly solve major issues.
But what they do instead is they reflect the underlying dynamics between the United States and China in this case.
Second, he talked about the three things he was looking forward to, which is that they're gonna be aiming to try to keep stability between the United States and China.
And third, the importance of having guardrails so things don't go off into bad areas between the two countries.
What type of leverage and what type of vulnerabilities does the United States have and does China have? And that's an important dynamic going into this negotiation and summit, but also over the medium term, which leads me towards the two things I'm looking forward to.
By the time we release this, the summit will be over, but what are the reactions? How do we go forward? Have we created these guardrails or not? And the second is the point that Evan made about the divergence between the cyclical and the structural in the United States and China relationship.
It is a complicated one, but what we have seen over time is continuous deterioration in the US and China relationship with every now and then a cyclical stability.
Can that cyclical stability take over, or as Evan thought, it probably might not, and we'll continue to have this volatility going forward.
That's my three main takeaways from my conversation with Evan, two things I'm looking forward to, and my one sports fact.
The first point that Evan made I thought was excellent, which was that summits seldomly solve major issues.
But what they do instead is they reflect the underlying dynamics between the United States and China in this case.
Second, he talked about the three things he was looking forward to, which is that they're gonna be aiming to try to keep stability between the United States and China.
And third, the importance of having guardrails so things don't go off into bad areas between the two countries.
What type of leverage and what type of vulnerabilities does the United States have and does China have? And that's an important dynamic going into this negotiation and summit, but also over the medium term, which leads me towards the two things I'm looking forward to.
By the time we release this, the summit will be over, but what are the reactions? How do we go forward? Have we created these guardrails or not? And the second is the point that Evan made about the divergence between the cyclical and the structural in the United States and China relationship.
It is a complicated one, but what we have seen over time is continuous deterioration in the US and China relationship with every now and then a cyclical stability.
Can that cyclical stability take over, or as Evan thought, it probably might not, and we'll continue to have this volatility going forward.
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