US-China Relations From the Inside
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Welcome to the Asia Chessboard, the podcast that examines geopolitical dynamics in Asia and takes an inside look at the making of grand strategy. I'm Andrew Schwartz at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Welcome to the Asia Chessboard. I'm Jude Blanchett, joined by co-host Mike Green. Today, we're delighted to be joined by Rick Waters. Rick is the Managing Director of Eurasia Group's China practice. But before that, Rick spent nearly three decades in the U.S. Foreign Service on a range of assignments from Asia Pacific to the Middle East. But really, a lot of his time was spent working on

China on Taiwan, including his final position, which was serving as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for China and Taiwan. Rick is joining us today from Singapore. We're going to pick his brain on a range of issues. What was he doing in 2001 in the embassy in Beijing? Impressions from travels around Asia today, as well as his assessment of the evolution of Chinese policy and strategy. Rick, thanks for joining us. Really great to have you on the podcast.

Yeah, great to be here. Great to see you both. So as always, a biographical question. I just gave a very potted history of your engagement in the Foreign Service, but especially your engagement around Asia, the Middle East. How did you get into the Foreign Service? And I think for folks like me who haven't served in government or in the Foreign Service, I'm curious...

How did you navigate that path of your career? You spent a lot of time working on China, a lot of time working on Asia. Was that happy accident or was that brute force? Yeah, well, I started off in the late 90s coming right out of Georgetown's graduate program. And I wanted to work on China issues. At the time, you had a couple of different routes. You could go into academia, you could go into politics.

think tanks, but probably at a pretty low level or government positions. And the nice thing about the foreign service is they give you a lot of training on the back end. So I was one of the few who wanted to go to China. At the time, the energy was much more in Europe. It was period of the Balkan Wars. It was still the heyday of the Europeanists pre 9-11. China was not particularly oversubscribed. So they said, hey, you want to go? We'll have you. And

One thing about the Foreign Service, for those who aren't familiar with it, it is kind of like a trade in the way that it approaches talent development. You come in, you do get some formal training, but a lot of it is the experience of meeting your cohort who come in with you or the mentorship of watching them.

more senior foreign service officers as they practice diplomacy in real time. So I was pretty lucky in my first tour in China. I got to work for former Admiral Joe Prier, who was the ambassador at the time, Jim Moriarty and Lauren Moriarty, who were two of the senior most China hands of their generation. And even my counterparts on the visa line back then, most of them went into fairly senior positions in government or academia in the years since.

So, Rick, you and I first met, I think, around 2015, 2016. You were in Embassy Beijing working as a political counselor. I want to use this opportunity to ask what your assessment of

China's trajectory and Xi Jinping was at the time. I think there's going to be a few rounds of this question. Mike will ask one as well, which is what did you know and when did you know it about where China was heading? I have impressions about where the collective group of analysts in China thought Xi Jinping was steering the economy, the political system. I'm curious what yours were then around that time. That was...

post third plenum, around the time of sort of Made in China 2025. But to me, the signal wasn't entirely clear. What was your takeaway from that period? Well, you know, Jude, at the time, we were all part of that movie. And I had actually, by way of background, I had stepped away from China for about eight years to work on Arab-Israeli issues, including during the period of the Arab Spring. So when I got back,

The China that I remembered after the period of WTO accession, during the heyday of the aughts, booming growth, messy governance, nobody quite knew what it would look like. I have to admit, I was a little bit shocked to see how much the system had reasserted itself. And we can talk about how much of that was systemic and how much of it was she, but it

I spent my first year back doing a language refresher and trying to travel through the country to figure out what is going on here and when did it start.

And I'll put in a plug for your book. I mean, I think your book on the new Red Guard helped me understand some of this actually was an extension of the domestic backlash to the reforms in the late 90s and early aughts and what that did to Chinese politics in a way that isn't completely dissimilar to our own. But I think we have to acknowledge that the role of individuals and particularly Xi Jinping were quite consequential. And you talk about that period of

I think the connection that I saw coming out of the Middle East in the Arab Spring was this visceral paranoia that the U.S. ultimate strategy in many of these regions was to bring down authoritarian systems with which it disagreed. And that paranoia

together with the Snowden revelations, you know, a little bit of poison from Vladimir Putin that filters into the Chinese leadership's ears, had created this very paranoid context that went beyond rebuilding the party into building out a comprehensive national security paradigm that was still in play today.

Today, I think when we look at the third plenum reforms or document rather that just came out three months ago, the focus on everything from energy security to food security, these are not new, but it's an intensification of this securitization impulse that I think goes back to that period in the late aughts.

When the party was collapsing and then around the time of the Arab Spring where the Chinese leadership became convinced that might be the ultimate U.S. intent. And what was your assessment then? And I want to ask you now a bookended question about your assessment now. But what was your assessment then of the quality assessment?

of the policymaking environment. I mean, you got an up-close seat in the embassy. Tell me if I'm wrong, but imagining then the access, it wasn't like what it was, I'm sure, in 2005, but I'm sure relative to where it is today, you must have had pretty decent access, conversations with academic scholars. Just give us a qualitative sense of what the policymaking process that you saw then and how well was it fit to be

handling the challenges China was dealing with in 2015, 2016? Well, I think it was undergoing an evolution. And I think it became most pronounced two years later when the party finalized the undoing of the old Deng Xiaoping bifurcation of the party and the state and kind of re-blended the two, elevated a lot of the coordinating functions back to party-level commissions. And I think this just created a lot of confusion in the system because a lot of the

Chinese system that I knew, we had become accustomed to expecting it to outperform, particularly on the economic side. And the ways it did this were not always by design. Sometimes it was a multipolar politburo where you might have a stubborn premier who had a certain idea, but people could go to somebody else and say, hey, you know, Lao Wang's a little bit off here. When it comes to his senses, let's try something else. And so it didn't always correct immediately, but it

I think that centralization of power and the shift in authority back to the party level from the state council, those two trends have changed decision making in ways that play out, not just in the economic space, but across the board today. And so let me now ask your assessment of where things are today. And if I could ask you both your

The hat you wore until last year as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for China. So very high level engagements. You've been in the room with Xi Jinping, but also now your post-state career where in many ways you might have an unparalleled level of very different access, which is through the private sector. Grade the political and policymaking system today. I think we all know the FT headline version that the economy is not going well. But what are you seeing at a granular level that you think is...

an important part of this story about why the policymaking process is working the way it is or not working the way it is? Well, I think by way of setting the stage, I think to be fair, we have to acknowledge things are just harder now. I mean, a lot of the low-hanging fruit, at least on the economic side, were harvested, you know, a decade or two ago. And so the problems they're dealing with now are really difficult structural problems, whether it's the fiscal system, which is essentially broken,

whether it's the shift away from a property bubble, which they at least recognize to new drivers of growth. So I think as an analyst, I try to be fair in assessing this is a different order of magnitude of challenge. But to your question, the decision-making process, you know, I think it has become more centralized, slower. There are debates, and I think we can talk about this a bit, about how good the information flow is to the top.

But what I see is a system that is running more slowly, that requires a lot more central approvals to take big decisions. And as a consequence of that, the bureaucratic structures are left to operate within the big decisions incrementally. And that's why we see so much incremental adjustments within big parameters. Or when they don't know what the senior leadership wants, there's a tendency to move towards...

in their political spectrum, the left. That is the more cautious, more kind of politically correct side of the debate. And so on issues from Taiwan policy to how they handle the U.S., if you're not quite sure what the boss wants, play it safe and be tough.

I want to kick over to Mike, but let me just ask a final question in this trench, which is there's an ongoing discussion here in Washington about Beijing's preference or Beijing's views on the upcoming election. And of course, we saw a piece written in Foreign Affairs by a very prominent Chinese scholar, Wang Jisuo, saying essentially Beijing's

Beijing just doesn't have a choice, doesn't have a dog in this fight. It'll take. It's sort of two types of poison. I'm curious what your assessment is of not necessarily who Xi Jinping wants, because I'm not sure we know that answer.

But at least the framework Beijing is using as it goes into this next election cycle, my sense is we're not going to have the same period we had of, let's say, January to April of 2020, where Beijing really wasn't sure where Biden was going to go. In many ways, probably thought Biden was going to be turning back the clock to Obama to some extent and then was pretty surprised.

with the policy coming out. What do you think their framework is now? Well, a couple of points on that. I think one, I do think the system is under instructions not to express a preference. It doesn't mean that a lot of people don't have individual views, but we know this in many ways, not least of which all the institutes have been tasked to figure out which of the candidates would be better from the perspective of their interests.

Second, I do think that most of the Chinese I talk to have come to a view that the differences between both of the candidates are more tactical than strategic. And so I think that does color the lens within which they view the U.S. election. But the third part of this is that I do find the Chinese are often reactive to what the U.S. thinks.

does, not just what it says. And so I think part of the challenge they're having in Beijing right now is in figuring out beyond the kind of campaign platitudes or the Republican platform, things like that. What do people actually plan to do on January 21st? Is it going to be a broad based 60 percent tariff meant to trigger a decoupling of the economies?

Or conversely, is it a bargaining tactic? Is it going to be modest gradual ramp up of tariffs, incremental adjustments of investment restrictions, etc., that do not preclude

having a foundation for subsequent negotiations. And I think because they don't know the answer to that question, they don't have channels to either side, they're left a little bit uncertain about what is coming, and that's paralyzing the system. So I think we're really not going to know the answer to this question until much later on, and it won't play out in terms of China's expressing a preference. It'll play out in terms of how they map out their response to whoever wins.

One final question, then turn over to Mike. Can I ask though, is your sense, and I'm going to simplify radically here, but in the first Trump administration on the trade war, for example, Beijing was calibrated to respond to tariffs in a way that tiptoed just up to the line, but they didn't want to escalate, right? They didn't want to see a spiraling of a trade war.

Let's imagine we have a second Trump administration coming in. Do you think that that sort of framework holds or, and this might be a leading question or one where my opinion is becoming clear, or they're going to have a framework where they're going to be much more comfortable voting?

responding in kind and escalating because the view is for political reasons first, I think just the idea that they're going to sit and take body shots, trade body shots from Trump is unlikely. But even in a Harris administration, I'm hearing from some Chinese interlocutors that there's just a new framework for

that is going to be much more comfortable inflicting pain on the United States than you saw in either Trump one or during the Biden administration. Yeah, Jude, I worry about this a lot because I think in the backdrop to what we're talking about is a conviction in parts of the Chinese system that the U.S. is building what they view as an Asian NATO in their backyard.

that trade and technology restrictions are ultimately about denying them the ability to move up the value-added chain in all areas to prevent their aggregate GDP from ever eclipsing the U.S.'s. And so they see it as a containment strategy. And I think what's kept a lot of those impulses in check is

are that for the past few years, the domestic situation has been really challenging. The COVID rebound never materialized. It coincided with a structural slowdown in the economy. And so they're not necessarily in a...

state where they believe they peaked, but they're in a state where they feel they need time to navigate a difficult transition. And I think these two tendencies in the system, one is the frustration about a containment policy, but the other is a feeling they need time to get their domestic house in order or intention. And that to me is going to be the big question going through the U.S. election. If they believe they have to react more than symbolically, which is all they can do in the tariff space,

I worry a little bit about the two conversations connecting. And for example, China looking to test this Asian NATO, the way they've been doing with the Philippines over the past few months, at some weak point as an asymmetric response to an initial move on tariffs by the U.S. Rick, thanks for joining us. Thanks for your service. Good to see another Georgetown grad hitting the big time, Hoya Saxa.

Were you MSFS, by the way, with master's? Yeah, I did the joint degree program. You save a year of tuition for those who are looking into it. Yeah, smart. This was before Victor Chanai started agent studies. You would have been a star agent studies student if we'd had it.

I want to pick up on the line of discussion you just had with Jude before winding back the clock and doing some history. You said earlier, and I hear this as well, that senior officials and thinkers in Beijing are worried about the U.S. is creating an Asian NATO. But, of course, the U.S. isn't really creating an Asian NATO. China is creating an Asian NATO. None of what Kurt Campbell and Jake Schlesinger and Tony and Austin are doing would be possible without a significant assist from

from Beijing. And look, the Indians would be much more reluctant to the Quad. AUKUS would not have happened with Australia. The Philippines would not be agreeing to base, not bases, excuse me, access agreements if it hadn't been for Chinese coercion. In your discussions and interactions

with thought leaders in China, which are harder. Do you detect any self-reflection on that point? Is it just not possible? Or do the thinkers in Zhongnanhai or in Beijing just discount it? Like, the U.S. is going to do what it's going to do. We're going to do what we're going to do. You would think in a serious strategic setting, people would reflect a little bit on why the other side, multiple players, are doing what they're doing. And I just don't see it. What do you see?

Yeah, Mike, look, and again, just to be clear, I was describing my assessment of their perception, not my view of the issue. This is a textbook response to the growth of Chinese power and the increasing use of that power in their immediate periphery to advance what are pretty maximalist territorial and other claims. And I do think that some in the strategic community in Beijing recognize that what they are doing is contributing. But I think generally the more dominant view is that

the U.S. is the puppet master. Most small countries lack agency. Manila and others are simply acting in accordance with U.S. whims. Eventually, even if the last few years have slowed the timeline, China and the East will eclipse the West. And therefore, time is on their side to achieve their objectives. And I don't find that in this environment, because so many of the

national rejuvenation goals are associated directly and personally with Xi Jinping, it's not a very popular topic to criticize frontally. So where there's debate is more on the margins. Is the latest incident at Second Thomas or Sabina internal Philippine coordination, or is this really Washington? You can debate that kind of stuff, but I don't think you can really take on first principles in the Chinese system.

I have to say that sounds right. And the interesting thing I'm seeing here in Australia, and I suspect it's true in other parts of Asia, is that when Wang Yi visits Australia, who does he see? He sees the biggest critics of the U.S. alliance system, former Prime Minister Paul Keating and people like that. When the Shanghai Institute or Kicker or Nanda scholars come to Australia, they'll see me because they know me. But generally, their itinerary is built around meetings with people who tell them

That the U.S. is the puppet master. They don't seek out. And by the way, that's not the mainstream view here, but they don't seek out the kind of mainstream security people who would tell them, no, we're doing this because you're bullying us. So there is a sort of selection bias I see that I don't think used to be true.

in how certainly Wang Yi or officials, but also think tankers from China are seeking truth when they travel to other parts of Asia. So it's a tough one if you're in the US government to know how you deal with that, but it's definitely a factor I see here. Not true in Japan. We find in polling in my center, we asked a question recently, is your government too tough on China?

4% of Japanese respondents in the public said too tough. So it's hard to find fellow travelers in Japan these days, but you know they're out there in many countries. So I digress a bit, but I find it fascinating. You said something else to Jude that also really caught my attention, and this is a little bit academic, I know, but you attributed a lot of the changes you saw over the last 25 years to

to reactions against reform in China, if I heard that correctly. And if you think about, as I do because I'm a Japan expert, Japan's turn to military revisionism and confrontation against the Anglo-American system, a lot of it was a reaction against economic conversion. The backlash in Japan, the militarism in Japan, a lot of it came from

after the high tide of convergence with the Anglo-American economic system and the Japanese system and culture couldn't handle it and neither could America and Britain. I just reflect on what you said and wonder if you think, was there some inevitability to this competition? Was it just almost predictable that there would be a backlash against reform in China, just as in the US and in Britain there was a backlash against globalization? Is there a larger systemic thing here you've

uncovered for us? Yeah, I don't want to take the comparison too far, Mike, but I think really Jude's book is one of the foundational references on this. Living through the period of the late 90s and the early aughts, my job at the embassy was a really unusual one. Basically, the leadership said, we never want to see you. Get out there, figure out what's going on in the country, and then come back and tell us how much of what they're telling us at the WTO negotiating table, the accession talks,

is real and how much of it is posturing, how much can their society absorb. And of course, that was an impossible task. But what I don't think I appreciated at the time was that the scale of dislocation in their system that was about to unfold between the Asian financial crisis, WTO accession, and that period of heady growth in the aughts was enormous. I mean, you were talking about tens of millions of people who were cast out of state-owned enterprise jobs and

The old iron rice bowl of security was smashed. And it tended to be concentrated in some of the pockets of heavy industry that were not, in terms of the social and political responses, all that different from what happened in the U.S. It was the Northeast. It was parts of the center. And where China's economy thrived and prospered tended to be other parts. It was the Hangzhous and the Shanghais and the coastal regions where export-led industries just boomed.

But, you know, I think looking back at it, a lot of that dislocation, the pace with which it occurred and the distributional consequences are really the underpinnings of policies like common prosperity. Say about them what we may, the income distributional consequences and the consequences of a very weak fiscal system.

that never really resourced social safety nets the way that they were probably needed at the time. All of that, I think, played out in political ways that we're just beginning to understand. And the mirror of that is what's happening in the U.S. or the U.K. or... Anyway, PhDs do not there, if they're ambitious, can do their dissertation on these macro trends, but...

It's fascinating. I also, if you could rewind the clock, how much would you do differently? I mean, you weren't going to strangle China's economic growth in the cradle. That would have led to extremely dangerous confrontation. But if you could rewind the clock over your career, are there things strategically you would have done different on China policy?

Well, I think there are a couple of thoughts. One, I think that the adjustment timelines were probably too accelerated. I mean, the notion at the time that people who were roughly our age were going to reinvent themselves in two years into a completely new skill set, that was completely unthinkable.

You're talking about China or the U.S.?

we should have had a big bang educational initiative of the order of magnitude of the GI Bill for the US. And I think China probably would have needed something similar. They probably would have needed to tackle the central local fiscal challenges, the social safety net issues in a much more proactive way. And I think that's why you're seeing even at the third plenum in July, this renewed focus on the issue because it's now become essentially a crisis.

So let me turn to the capacity of the U.S. government to do two things and get your wisdom. One is to manage competition and crises, and the other is to compete. So starting with the first one, you were in

China during the EP3 incident in April 2001 and I gather for the Belgrade bombing two years before that. I was in the White House just starting in April 2001 and I was at Council on Fire Relations, traveled to Beijing in the midst of the Belgrade bombing and sort of saw it from across the Pacific. But reflecting on that, how is our ability to manage crises with China? It was not great in either 99 or 2001.

I remember President Bush famously having to try to get Jiang Zemin on the phone. It had a profound impact on him, I can tell you, because he realized that management of U.S.-China relations, unlike almost any other country, or certainly more than any other country, depended on the Oval Office because the Chinese system just wasn't connected and transparent and accessible enough. But people like Randy Shriver, who was in state at the time and later in defense, and others have said, we're not much better off than we were.

23 years ago in terms of managing crises in U.S.-China relations. But what's your take on that? Well, I mean, two reflections on what happened before I come to what I feel about this today. I mean, first with Belgrade, you know, the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy. That was my first taste of not just the synthetic nationalism that the party has kind of created and cultivated through the system, but the organic nationalism that really does exist. I mean, within hours of that bombing, China

I was in the embassy at the time, an old building in the Jungelmann area, and buses started to pull up with students who threw rocks at the embassy and all kind of stuff. And it was, yes, it was organized to a degree, but this was real. They were channeling nationalism. The EP-3 crisis, when our EP-3 patrol aircraft and a Chinese fighter collided, and the Chinese pilot Wang Wei died, and our fighter...

went down at Hainan Island. That showed me for the first time the structural challenges in the Chinese system when it comes to dealing with a crisis. I mean, Mike, you'll remember this well. The channels shut down. There were some historical quirks, which is that I think Jiang Zemin was out planting trees that day, if I recall correctly, and then went on a trip. And so the system would go these long periods with no instructions.

And it would tend to be very shrill because that was the message they had been left with. But it was actually the logistics of getting to the leadership that was as much of a challenge as anything in the negotiation of the ultimate resolution of that incident 10 days later. So when you look fast forward to today, and we've all studied a lot about what has changed in the Chinese system, I tend to agree with Randy. The answer fundamentally is not that much. They are simply not going to allow...

unfettered back channels in a crisis or people picking up cell phones and talking to each other. It's a very disciplined system that will ultimately winnow down to one or at most two authorized channels. And the very way in which they approach crises is very different from us. The leadership tends to take whatever they know at the time back and develop the principles that will govern their response.

And only when they have reached a conclusion about those principles will the channel open up to discuss them with the U.S. And I don't think any of that has changed. I mean, we've seen it in smaller incidents in the time since.

And I think one lesson that I've taken away from it is that you really do have to find different creative vectors early on to shape that process in the Chinese system of developing principles. Because you'll remember well, when Colin Powell used the word accident, right?

instead of incident to talk about the EP3 crisis, that was a public signal that actually played a role we'll never fully understand in unlocking some flexibility in the Chinese system. And played a role in sending Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld through the roof, I can tell you. You would have been closer to that than I was, but I do remember that well. Yeah, I tried to stay as far away from that one as possible, but fascinating time. It hasn't changed that much.

How much of it is that the Chinese view of confidence building, of guardrails, is that it's not in their interests fundamentally? In other words, it's not just an organizational, cultural thing, that there's a strategic decision that keeping the Americans or whoever off guard, uncertain, is a strategic interest?

Well, I think that's certainly true that they have a view that the whole notion of guardrails, and particularly, I think, at various points, military to military channels, in the Chinese leadership's words, it's like putting a seatbelt on that lets you drive faster and more recklessly. So they're trying to find a balance between that and where I do think there's some convergence of interest, which is that it turns out Xi Jinping doesn't love surprises, particularly surprises that get you into trouble.

a possible war. And so I think it's the control instinct that is the basis upon which you can build some modest channels as the U.S. has done since the Woodside Summit last year in the military to military realm. But they can't be, I would just say it, if it were up to me, I'd get rid of the word guardrails and just reformulate them around how the Chinese can swallow them, which is avoiding things that you didn't order your military to do.

Yeah, I think whoever's running the next government has got to keep at it for the obvious reasons that you want some levels of crisis management communication, but also because our allies want it. Like you're not going to build alliances if they think you are reckless. So tough slog, but important. The other question for you before letting Jude take us home is about how you see the

ability of the U.S. government in particular to compete organizationally. There have been some modest reorganizational moves, the creation of China House in the State Department, ramping up the NSC Asia staff, things like that. But if China is the biggest competitive challenge of our time, you might expect sort of what you saw with NSC 68, complete and massive reorganization of the U.S. government to compete with the Soviet Union.

Or even after 9-11, the creation of Homeland Security Department, Homeland Security Council, all these things. So it's actually kind of modest in historical perspective, given the challenge. But maybe since you were inside China House and inside State Department, it's about all the reorganization we can handle right now. What's your reflection on that?

Well, Mike, I think to be fair, I think that any shift in the U.S. national security strategy of this magnitude was going to be an impossible task. I mean, when you think about how complex, multidimensional the China challenge is, entering into domains such as emerging technology, fiscal policy, touches on nearly everything. So part of the challenge, and I'm glad you mentioned the NSC 68 analogy, is that

As you know, the executive branch has become kind of an unwieldy beast.

And it's still running on a 1947 software system that doesn't really allow itself to deal with this newer challenge. So at one point, we do have to upgrade the software. But I think what many of us found is that in the interim, you can't just wait around. And was it state or the CIA, at DOD when Eli Ratner went over to do his kind of strategic review, or at Commerce where Gina Raimondo and her team have just built some new structures that

The common thread right now is that you're seeing the agencies themselves just take the initiative. They're building out structures. They are trying to realign around these priorities. And I would say that the good side of the ledger, the positive side, you have got new patterns of organization. You've got new talent that has come in. And I can't tell you enough about the people we were able to recruit into China House, but also the ones elsewhere in the State Department who were partners in the effort.

from their bureaus, from their offices. It wasn't meant to bring it all into one unified structure. But what I worry about, and I think this is where I would give both of the past two administrations essentially an incomplete grade, is that

I don't think a bureaucracy of this magnitude can operate on the software it has been given. And that's not just organizational software. It is strategic software. It's clarifying the basic premises that underline U.S.-China policy, giving, if not the answers, better frameworks to assess the daily tradeoffs, resource prioritization, regional prioritization, other

Otherwise, there is a little bit of a tendency to push this bureaucracy with its current software and have an everything everywhere all at once dynamic where 1,400 different bureaucratic structures, and that's an estimate Texas A&M came up with when they looked across the system. They all have their own expression of what a China policy should look like, and it's not always in exactly the same direction. So again, I don't say this by way of

criticism. I think it's just a natural reflection of the complexity of the challenge and the fact that we haven't yet gotten to the point of time that we did in the Cold War, where internal National Security Council directives and reorganizations really fundamentally reconfigured the U.S. executive branch to address the challenge at hand.

Let me ask, Rick, a final question. And Mike, I'd like to put this to you as well, because you've done some writing and thinking about this. Rick, we asked you to contribute an essay to a forthcoming report that brought together 20 or so folks to answer a question about whether at this point the United States needs to move toward a much more focused policy.

clear vision of what objectives it seeks to achieve vis-a-vis its relationship with China. I think most people listening to this podcast, this is a self-selecting group, will have read the foreign affairs essay by Matt Pottinger and former representative Mike Gallagher, making a point that we need to have a clear vision of victory and reminiscing about the Cold War as being an orienting point

As we think about that, I thought they actually fudged when you tried to get very specific on what their vision of victory was. But the question was asked, and I think the question is worth interrogating. So given what you actually were just talking about on the need to have better alignment across this now era,

mammoth bureaucracy, whereas during the early days of the Cold War, you could go to a Georgetown cocktail party and make some pretty momentous decisions without having to go through much. Just get the Dulles brothers to agree and you could do pretty much what you wanted. Where do you come down on this question? Is it, as some would say, this is about essentially finding an equilibrium, a steady state with no endpoint? An endpoint is impossible. It's the journey, not the destination. Or do you think we need to move the conversation and have much more

clarity within the government and outside of the government about exactly where we were seeking to steer policy vis-a-vis China. And Mike, I'd like to ask you the same thing, especially with your allies and partner hat. Well, Jude, I kind of back up to the basic stuff I learned at Georgetown and Mike can correct me if I'm wrong about this, but you know, strategy ultimately has to be an alignment of ends and means. Do you have the means to achieve given ends?

And I think that when I look at this question of should the U.S. have a regime-based definition of the ends it seeks, is it the CCP, is it the structure?

Or should it conversely have a policy-based definition of what those ends are? My own view is in a world in which most domains of this competition require alignment with allies and partners, you cannot sell the former. The coalition of countries that will align with us around a regime-based end state is zero.

And so in order to get third countries on board and also, frankly, to discipline our own bureaucracy and to cost out the means, do we have the means to achieve certain ends? My preference is much more for a policy based definition of the end state, even if you never get there. Because the point is, is that if you can't be clear about what you want, oftentimes the steady state formulations leave a lot of ambiguity.

That ambiguity then translates through the bureaucracy into Sometimes excess or confusion and I think it feeds uncertainty and hedging behaviors Among third country partners who say what at the end of the day are you guys trying to achieve? I mean, I know Mike has written on this and has a lot of depth in how parts of this region see the question the steady-state formulation to me it probably made sense at the time and

But I think it increasingly is becoming a liability and we need to move beyond that in our articulation of our China strategy as a nation. Mike, same question to you. I like Rick's answer and it is tricky. I often tell people when I'm talking to our allies that when you go to dinner at Restaurant USA, the menu has two set courses.

You can have a subtle China policy with no resources. Or, course B, you can have a China policy with resources and no subtlety. But you don't get a la carte. You have to choose in a way. And people sort of laugh and roll their eyes. And so it's tricky because what Mike Gallagher and Matt are arguing for is more urgency and more resources, basically. And it's hard to make that case if it's not existential. And it's hard to make the case it's existential without saying it ends with China ending

ending as a threat permanently. That goes way back in American history. On the other hand, if the strategy is based on, as Rick said, a realistic calculation of ends, ways, and means, those means require allies. And our allies are aligning with us generally pretty well, not the global South, as we've discussed in this podcast, but the major US allies are aligning well, but that will be much harder if the predicate is regime change.

So it's very, very tricky. And I think somebody smarter than us at some point will come up with a formula that captures the urgency, but wraps it around alliances. The best place to do that in some ways would be in NATO summits, in Osmonds with Australia, in US-Japan 2 plus 2s. That might be the best place to articulate it so that we're doing it with our allies. My sense is we're not there yet. The recent Quad summit was a really good example. They did not mention China once.

And yet all the deliverables around maritime security, which were the most significant, were all about China. So it's a task for diplomats, not just in Beijing, but especially in Canberra and Tokyo and Delhi. So homework assignment for someone listening.

Rick, it's early for you and you've got a busy day. I want to thank you for joining us, especially. I know you're on work travel in Singapore. This was a really fantastic discussion. I'm glad you're out of government so those of us in the public can now unlock some of the deep, dark secrets and insights that you've been building and honing for three decades. So it's great to have you on this side. Really appreciate your time. Safe travels and see you back in D.C. Great to see you both. Thanks, Jude. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Rick.

For more on strategy and the Asia program's work, visit the CSIS website at csis.org and click on the Asia program page. And for more on the U.S. Studies Center in Sydney, please visit ussc.edu.au.