Episode 10: The Inescapable US-China Rivalry

that just took place.

There were five big issues on the agenda.

Number one, of course, was Taiwan.

Number two was Iran.

Number three was Ukraine.

Number four was AI.

And number five was the general trade policy.

patterns between the two countries.

So those are the five big issues that were discussed, some more than others, at this summit.

And I think there's almost universal agreement that in terms of reaching meaningful agreement on these issues, the two actors, the two presidents basically failed.

The...

The Economist had a story which took both leaders to task for passing up this wonderful opportunity to deal in a serious way with these five issues.

And it basically accused the two leaders of being irresponsible.

I think the language that The Economist used was that they were guilty of dereliction of duty.

Now, my view is that this is not true, that it was almost impossible for these two leaders to reach a meaningful agreement on the five issues that were at play.

The only exception to this, as I'll talk about, is the whole subject of trade between the two countries.

there i think there was possibility for some agreement and in fact you got some agreement but on the other four issues there was virtually no hope of getting any meaningful agreement and i want to explain why that's the case so the basic lay down of my talk will go like this first of all I'll describe what happened in Washington last week, and then I'll explain to you why I think things turned out the way that they did.

And then I'll conclude by making three remarks of a general nature that build on the previous discussion.

So let me start by just talking about what happened in Washington this past week.