Trump’s Indo-Pacific Strategy: A Conversation with Mr. Ivan Kanapathy
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I'm Bonnie Lin, Director of the China Power Project and Senior Advisor at the Center for Strategic International Studies. In this episode of the China Power Podcast, we're discussing the first Trump administration's policies towards the Indo-Pacific region and exploring how President Trump and his team may build on or change those policies. What informed these policies and what do they tell us about future priorities?

How will a second Trump administration impact the U.S.-China relationship? Mr. Ivan Kanapathy joins us to answer these questions and more. Ivan Kanapathy is a senior vice president with Beacon Global Strategies. From March 2018 to July 2021, he served on the White House's National Security Council staff as director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia, and deputy senior director for Asian Affairs.

From 2014 to 2017, Ivan worked at the American Institute in Taiwan, representing U.S. interests and advising military and security issues in Taipei. Earlier in his career, he spent a year studying in Beijing and traveling throughout China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia as a U.S. Marine Corps Foreign Area Study Fellow. He later led the development and implementation of the service's Global Security Cooperation Strategy and policies at the Pentagon. As a naval flight officer,

Ivan accumulated 2,500 flight hours and served three years as an F/A-18 weapons officer and tactics instructor at the U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School, better known as Top Gun, and deployed to the Middle East and Western Pacific five times,

earning several combat awards and decorations. He holds an MA with distinction East Asian Security Studies from the Naval Postgraduate School, a BS in Physics and Economics from Carnegie Mellon University, and an AAN diploma with highest honors in Chinese Mandarin from the Defense Language Institute. Ivan, thank you so much for joining me today. It's great to be here, Vaughn.

So you were in Taipei and at AIT in late 2016, and also there during the first year of the Trump administration. How did Taiwan and other U.S. allies and partners respond to the election of President Trump in 2016? Well, so I was there for the election in 2016. I stayed about, I think, just a few months into President Trump's first term. So I left in mid-2017.

We have to remember that in 2016, earlier, Taiwan had its own election and kind of had a big changeover of power to the opposition party also. They had gone through eight years also of a party in the KMT, the Kuomintang Party, nationalists that

had pursued a policy that had inched them quite a bit closer to China. And in 2016, the Taiwanese people themselves firmly rejected that and elected the opposition party, which was more leaning away from China. And so in the United States,

With our election at the end of 2016, I think there were some folks in Japan and in Taiwan, where I was, that were, I think, cautiously optimistic that the United States would follow Taiwan's lead and really also Japan's lead with Shinzo Abe in power there for a few years at that point of being a little more cautious and standoffish with China. To be fair, at the working levels and out

at the embassies themselves, I don't think the Trump administration's policies really came to bear during those first few months or even really during that first year though. So I think really a lot of continuity is what we saw out there.

And what's your sense this time around with the recent elections in which the American public not only elected President Trump, but President Trump won the popular vote? Yeah, I think that, you know, the folks in Asia now know what they're getting because the world has lived through this. The American people certainly have lived through the governance of President Donald Trump for four years previously, as has the rest of the world.

They have, you know, obviously some concerns, but I'm sure they also have some aspirations about what they might see. I know that, you know, in places, generally speaking, like Taiwan and Japan, as I mentioned before, but even others, you know, at the end of President Trump's first term,

the Taiwanese people in polling actually supported Trump over Biden in 2020, which may surprise some people. And of course, in Japan, there was a lot of hesitation about some of the policies that the United States had followed during especially the last few years of the Obama administration. And in fact, President Trump, I think, was very welcomed in his own personal relationship with Prime Minister Abe.

was so important in such a good and deep relationship. So I think folks in Asia are generally hopeful. There are obviously some concerns about trade policies, tariff policies that have come out, and I'm sure we'll touch on those here in a minute.

Definitely. We'll definitely touch on trade and tariffs. But before that, I want to talk a little bit about at least your understanding of what was the overarching Trump administration's policy towards the Indo-Pacific. I know you were on the National Security Council by 2018.

And then at that time, there was already a classified strategic framework for the Indo-Pacific, which was declassified in 2021. So as you look at this framework now, of course, three or four years have gone by. But do you think the framework still largely captures the tribal administration's approach to the region? I do, Bonnie. And look, to be fair, I think that this, the Indo-Pacific strategic framework was not

you know, wholly original. I think it obviously in concept borrowed heavily from Japan, Shinzo Abe's own concept of a free and open Indo-Pacific, you know, a concept that he had coined really years before that. And in some ways, I think you could argue that it was the next step toward fulfilling what Secretary Hillary Clinton had talked about during the first half

of the Obama administration when she talked about the pivot and then the rebalance, right, which then became the rebalance, but I think was not really pursued during the later years of the Obama administration. And so it was sort of a return to that

policy direction, which was to focus more on our allies and partners in the region and maybe de-emphasize in a lot of ways, right, the relationship with China. And, you know, the Trump administration obviously took that even a step further and redefined the relationship with China as a competitive one, which again, we can talk about more.

And do you think as you look at in the Pacific region now, that a second Trump administration would have a different policy than the first one? Or do you think there will be significant degrees of continuity? I think there'll be a lot of continuity, Bonnie. I mean, obviously, I can't speak for the second Trump administration. But I think in general, there's an emphasis on

one, burden sharing, which sometimes can be a concern, but I think it's something that can really only be done with strong alliances to really pressure your closest friends to do more for our collective security, to invest more in it. I think

that you'll see continuity there. But I think you'll also see some differences because the first Trump administration, we were wrestling with a couple of countries that had really lost faith in us. When you think about where the Philippines was and where maybe South Korea was under those administrations of Duterte and President Moon, respectively, they had come to lose faith in us maybe because of

previous policies that maybe we didn't have staying power in the Western Pacific. And now with President Marcos in the Philippines, President Yun in South Korea, I think you've got some very pro-US and we've seen the Biden administration do a great job of taking advantage of those sentiments. So

So I think just kind of fulfilling the overall strategy, I guess in some ways we're seeing that strategy kind of be fulfilled over the last few years. As you mentioned, there's obviously a lot of opportunity for the next Trump administration with some of our key allies, such as the Philippines, Malaysia.

more open to a stronger relationship with the United States. Do you think as the second Trump team looks to the region that they will have different objectives from the Biden administration? And if so, in what areas?

I'm not sure the objectives are that different, right? In the end, you know, in a simple way of summing up the goals of our national security strategy, and really you could take the word security out of it, our national strategy is to grant or generate security and prosperity for the American people. I mean, that's sort of the main purpose of U.S. policy and wrapped within that U.S. foreign policy. And so a lot of things...

that I think the Trump administration would pursue maybe more aggressively, but I don't think in a different direction, would be to try to level the playing field, for example, in trade, right? That's definitely a focus for President-elect Trump is the trade area of policy with the goal, of course, of bringing back U.S. manufacturing or building up U.S. manufacturing and maybe U.S. exports, which I think you saw a lot of that articulated by the Biden administration also.

And so that filters its way into really all the foreign policies that you'll see from, I believe, the next Trump administration. Thank you, Ivan. I do want to turn to China, where I think we'll probably spend quite a bit of time on. So in my previous podcast, I hosted Rick Waters to get his sense of how China assessed the first Trump administration. As you know, Rick was in Beijing for a good portion of that time and then at State Department.

He mentioned that it's his view that Chinese experts saw significant changes in U.S. policy towards China in the first four years of the Trump administration, from the initial Mar-a-Lago meeting in 2017 to the trade war. And then finally, he said that Chinese experts assess that U.S. became much more angry at China from 2020 onward due to COVID-19 and other factors. As you look at the first Trump administration's China policy, did you see these different phases or this evolution over time?

Yeah, I think there was an evolution. Now, to be clear, we're the Trump administration and I wasn't there the first year, but the Trump administration was really pivoting away from a very different policy that had largely existed for multiple administrations. Right. And that was sort of a hedging strategy that really more weighed and focused on engagement. Right. And sort of hedged against some of the more dangerous things that might happen.

But it was really focused on hoping to change China, quite frankly, through engagement, primarily economic engagement, but a lot of other kind of societal engagements.

It was a big change in that first year. I think there was a lot of strategy writing that happened, and it happened actually quite quickly if you look historically with the national security strategy coming out during the first year of the Trump administration. But also during that first year, some negotiations with China to try to fix some of the fundamental imbalances in the bilateral economic relationship. Those negotiations...

did not result in some of the changes that previous administrations had also pursued. But the difference was that the Trump administration by the end of 2017 decided that rather than continue to just pursue negotiations alone or dialogue alone, that it needed to seek leverage to continue those. And that's when in early 2018, right, we start to see the tariffs come on and which would instigate the trade war.

So there is sort of this gradual escalation. First with the tariffs, I think by 2019, we're starting to introduce some other measures to tackle some of the policies of China that we viewed to also be unfair in addition to just the pure trade regime. And so you see a broadening of the use of export controls in ways that were quite novel. You start to see in 2019 and into 2020 investment restrictions

outbound investment restrictions even, right, on portfolio investment and in some retirement funds, the Thrift Savings Plan and things like that, and really going on into even some immigration restrictions to curb the theft of intellectual property in science and technology as we get into 2020, which, as you mentioned, a lot of these policies were accelerated and spurned in 2020 because of China's response to our outreach

about COVID and the initial spread of COVID. And it was also spurned, some of these policies, by China's imposition of the national security legislation onto Hong Kong, which was also mid-2020. And so there is sort of this increase in tension as you go along, as you described. Yes.

And as you look at what was discussed within the Trump administration during the last year, were there unfinished tasks or additional initiatives or policy items that the administration wanted to push through but ran out of time to do? So I think we actually got quite a lot done during the last year.

you know, six or eight months of the Trump administration. And I think really set the table well for the Biden administration. I think to answer your question, though, there's always more that you'd like to do, that policymakers want to get done, and for various reasons, maybe have not. But I think that the record of the first Trump administration is quite impressive. I think now, with the second one, things have evolved even further in the U.S.-China relationship.

And there would be a lot more that I think a second Trump administration would look to tackle also. Could you unpack that a little bit? So obviously, as you mentioned, a lot has changed in the last four years, including China has become more powerful. And depending on how you look at it, more aggressive and coercive against its neighbors. So in this context, from your perspective, how might this shape the approach of the next administration towards China?

Yeah, so I would definitely agree with you that China has become more aggressive and more coercive against its neighbors. And I would say also against, you know, the United States and other partners outside of China's neighborhood through maybe economic aggression and things like that. But I'm not sure I agree that China has become more powerful. I think that a lot of the steps, a lot of the policies put in place by the first Trump administration, you

have actually contributed to China becoming less powerful relatively to the United States. If you want to use one measure, if you just look at as a percentage of global GDP since the end of the Trump administration or since the Trump administration, the United States has continued to climb and China's

as a percentage of overall global productivity has declined. And so there's that aspect, but I think the more important aspect is what we started with, which is the aggression and the coercion. And China is still a very large player and can therefore swing its weight around and cause quite a lot of damage regardless.

And in terms of China being more coercive and more aggressive, what are the broad lines of thinking of how to deal with this greater challenge, greater threat that you're hearing? I think the big lines of thinking is that the United States really needs some clear leadership, I would say. And by that, just leadership.

very clearly articulated. I think we're still have fallen into this trap in recent years of talking about a hedging strategy where every time we discuss that China has this great potential to do damage to us, right, has the will and the desire and the capability to create a new world order or what have you. And then the United States almost always seems to follow that up with, but now we're going to cooperate with them on

climate on, you know, mill to mill and some AI rules or what have you. And I think it's a very confusing signal to the American people, but also to, you know, U.S. government implementers and policymakers and exactly what we're trying to do. Secretary Blinken, I think about a month ago, published an article in Foreign Affairs sort of raffling

and talking about what the Biden administration had accomplished in foreign policy. And he lists right at the beginning of that article, and I think it's accurate, right? I would agree with him, but he says these competitors, and he lists them, principally Russia. I think then he says with the support or the partnership of Iran, North Korea, comma, as well as China. And so of those four, he's clearly listing China as the fourth competitor.

I think some people would argue that, you know, as far as national security threats go, that the Biden administration, based on the resourcing, the time and effort they put in, would put climate ahead of all those. And so maybe China's fifth for the last decade.

few years. I think a Trump 2.0 administration is going to come in and flip that priority on its head and China's going to be number one. And I believe that it would be very clear to all the government bureaucracy that China is the number one challenger, threat, and therefore not just the government, but also the American people. And that, you know, we really need to kind of mobilize if we're going to compete effectively.

And Ivan, when you talk about a hedging strategy, it seems to me it also linked to some of the public debates we've seen recently, also featured in Foreign Affairs, of the view of managing competition, I think, proposed by Rush Doshi versus the other views that we've seen from Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher about the need for the United States to win the competition against China. And it seems to me that Senator...

Marco Rubio, who might be our next Secretary of State, Representative Mike Waltz, who is likely to be our next National Security Advisor, are more in favor of winning the competition than managing the competition with China. But I wanted you to weigh in on this and where you think this falls within the next Trump administration.

Yeah, I would agree with that. Again, I can't speak for Senator Rubio or Representative Walz, obviously, but I would say they would answer that question in the affirmative if you pose it to them. But I think maybe more...

Clearly, is that they would pursue a policy of competition, strategic competition and deterrence, but they would not define deterrence to include what some on the other side would argue it would need to include assurances or reassurance.

I think that Senator Rubio, Senator Walz probably view some of these proposals and we'd have to look specifically at what the action is, but probably view some of these proposed assurances really as a form of accommodation and some would even argue possibly appeasement and that China

response to those in ways that a lot of authoritarian aggressors would not by backing down, but instead by by asking for more that they perceive it really as weakness. And so I do believe that that's the case. I think, you know, the Republicans in general view that

The pursuit of assurances with Vladimir Putin contributed to his invasion of Ukraine. The pursuit of assurances and therefore letting up, right, on sanctions, for example, on Iran led to aggression from Iran and its proxies over the past year. And so I don't think that they're going to seek sanctions.

that type of approach when it comes to China. And so, yes, I think they would agree essentially with Pottinger and Gallagher, as you quoted. And just to make sure that I understand what you're saying in terms of assurances for China, that largely includes a range of efforts, including dialogue with China, providing guarantees that the United States won't do X, Y, and Z. Is that what you're generally referring to?

So, yeah, I don't think the policy, you know, from a spoken standpoint, changes significantly, Bonnie. I think the United States still maintains a policy that we're not going to, you know, support Taiwanese independence, for example, or something like that. But

But I think it's sort of in the actions or the inactions that one might choose. Like, you know, I mean, it's almost like if you give something to China, then they typically ask for more. Just as Xi Jinping reportedly said to Biden, well, it's not good enough for you to say you don't support Taiwanese independence. I want you to say you oppose it. You know, and that's sort of the typical result. I guess one example you might raise in that instance. But the idea of, you know,

Not sending, you know, a high level official to Taiwan or not selling weapons to Taiwan, which is sort of, you know, approach we saw for many years during the Obama administration as a form of assurance. Right. And really what they are is a sacrifice of actual real hard deterrence.

Thank you. And on the point of Taiwan, I think the Trump administration sold more arms to Taiwan and one of the largest packages to Taiwan during the first term. I do want to move to allies and partners. And again, feel free to bring in Taiwan or other key allies and partners. Going back to the 2017 strategic framework, it lists one of the top U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific is to, quote, enhance the credibility and effectiveness of our alliances. And I think that's

Quite important to point out because there's quite a perception among some quarters, both in D.C. and abroad, and this is perhaps amplified by Chinese propaganda, that President Trump will weaken U.S. alliances and partnerships, and this would lead to the further decline of the United States. During your three years on the Trump NSC, what did you see as major or important Trump policies vis-a-vis our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific?

Is this perception that President Trump is not for allies and partners aligned with what you saw at all in the first administration? No. So look, in my view, I think President Trump is for allies and partners. I think his relationship with

Abe in Japan, for one, as I mentioned before, is, I think, well known how close it was from a personal standpoint. But really, I think with all our allies and partners, I think what he sought was not to have free riders and that free riding is not the sign of a strong alliance at all.

It's a sign of a very imbalanced and I would argue weak alliance and that a strong alliance is where everybody chips in and does their share. And that's exactly what President Trump was pursuing. And I think he did it out of the goodness and the belief that the alliance needed that buttressing underneath it.

in order not to wither. I would argue that we talked about the Philippines, we talked about South Korea, how the Philippines after 2012 Scarborough incident really had almost no faith in the US alliance. And so I think that was turned around, that belief was completely turned around during the Trump administration. For example, Secretary Pompeo, after many years of the United States not wanting to

wanting to do this, Victor Pompeo came out and did declare that, yes, our treaty does apply in the South China Sea, you know, to the armed forces and state vessels of the Philippines. And yes, like you said, there was a huge amount of arms sales to Taiwan. And that's the kind of burden sharing, quite frankly, because it shows that Taiwan's willing to spend more of its income on its own defense. And obviously, in addition to free and open Indo-Pacific, we had

really great relationships with we redid the free trade agreement with Korea created digital trade agreement with Japan on the issue for example I commend President Biden you know with the Camp David trilat but President Trump did trilats with

you know, Presidents Moon and President Abe on the sidelines. I think he did at least three of them on the sidelines of multilateral events. And really, again, just based on who was in power in those countries, I think that was the best we could have hoped for at that time. And I think on the issue of multilateralism, it also seems that in addition to the trilies that you mentioned, the Trump administration was also quite supportive of the Quad.

Yeah, that's right, Bonnie. I mean, I don't know if folks know the history, but the Quad was an idea during the Bush administration, the second Bush administration, that was killed off, I think, right around the end of it because, frankly, members of the Quad were wary of angering China. So this is one of those things that I would list in the reassurance category, right, where we're actually –

you know, doing things at China's bequest that maybe aren't in our own interests. That quad was not revived through the Obama administration, but it was revived by President Trump, kind of built up from, you know, an assistant secretary level all the way up to the secretary's level. And of course, President Biden did elevate it all the way to the leader level, which is great. But that's why I absolutely expect that to continue. AUKUS,

If you haven't heard, former Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison has said publicly that this whole thing was driven and started during the Trump administration. It was started by Australia, obviously, but the idea for it in Australia reached out to the UK and all this, the idea and germination of AUKUS was again the result of Trump administration policies.

So given this focus on strengthening allies and partnerships, to what extent do you think a second Trump administration would support what the Biden administration calls the latticework of alliances and partnerships? Do you think there'll be a lot of support or interest in continuing this work? I think there will be continuity in the things we've talked about, including Quad, AUKUS, the trilateral with Japan and South Korea, some of the other mini laterals, if you will.

would also, I think, continue. I'm not sure. I can't predict. And I have some skepticism about things like IPEF, though. I think the larger frameworks, the bigger, that kind of inch more from bilat-trilat toward true multilateralism. There's some skepticism for that among the Trump administration. At least there was the last time around. I would expect that to continue.

And Ivan, why is that the case? Why is there more appetite for smaller multilaterals than larger ones? So overall, and it stems primarily in the trade, but I would suggest this applies more broadly,

That overall, there's a real hangover, quite frankly, from the WTO and the experience taught to us by China in that, you know, one bad actor of scale can kind of bring down the whole thing and create it. You know, where it's regarded, I think, on the right as quite a huge failure. Yeah.

And so entering into multilateral where you need a lot of times consensus-based decisions to fix or change anything or even kick somebody out, which means it's impossible, right? These experiences in a lot of multilateral organizations the United States is involved in have been really, really soured. I think a lot of folks that I worked with back in the first Trump administration.

Related to the topic of working with our allies and partners, another concern that I've seen in a number of articles is

But also in some discussions with some of our partners is that there's a worry that a more hardline Trump administration policy towards China the second time around could put countries in a position to have to choose between the United States and China. And some countries might not want to choose and might instead want to work with other middle powers. What is your view on this? Is this something that folks who could go into the second Trump administration are thinking through or worried about?

Yeah, I thinking through, yes, worried about I'm not sure that that's the right thing. I look in my view, and again, I can't speak for everyone or anyone in the second Trump administration, but I could tell you in my view that China is.

is and has been engaged in a Cold War with the United States, probably since the end of the previous Cold War. And so therefore, I think a lot of the action China takes is forcing third parties to choose. It's kind of not just the United States for obvious reasons. So there are things, and you remember in the first Trump administration, a big push to ask our partners not to

bring in Huawei 5G infrastructure, right? Telecoms infrastructure, right?

That's asking someone to make a choice, saying, no, buy the Western stuff. Don't buy Huawei or ZTE from China for, well, a host of reasons. But that is literally asking people to choose. And I think going around saying we're not asking you to choose when we are might actually be less helpful than we think it is. Third countries need to make choices. Sometimes choices are hard. We are obviously not...

fully aligned. There are so many irreconcilable sort of goals and efforts between the United States and China. And I think we're in this great power competition type of scenario. And third countries are going to have to deal with that. I will say this, Bonnie, that sort of a lot of the predictions that

that we're going to go into multilateral world at the end of the Cold War. We had our unipolar moment and now it's fading. I was just looking at this recently in 1991, the end of the Cold War, the United States represented, our economy represented 26% of the world's economy. This year, the United States economy represents

26% of the world's economy. So I think, again, using that as a rough measure, I don't think the United States has lost a lot of ground. We did in between for some years, but we're actually on the rise. And so I think it's important, you know, the whole middle powers discussion, I think, has actually been happening for a while. I have a firm belief in, I guess, in U.S. primacy, at least among the free world.

Fascinating. And Ivan, that's a good segue to touch more on economics, tech and trade. I do think the larger picture backdrop that you painted that the United States is still in our prime, we haven't declined, is a useful one to think through.

particularly as we look at some of the campaign promises that President Trump has made, which include imposing 60% tariffs on Chinese goods, but also lower levels of tariffs on other goods that could directly impact U.S. allies and partners. And you alluded to this a little bit earlier. So one of the tensions, it seems, that the first Trump administration had to balance was between the America First campaign

economic agenda and the goal of strengthening our alliances and partnerships. How did you see that work out in the NSC? Like what had to give and what were folks willing to negotiate on? I think I saw it most starkly maybe

With the trade team on issues occasionally with Taiwan or maybe with Vietnam, right? In fact, at the end of the Trump administration, I think we threatened to launch a 301 investigation on Vietnam, for example, which might have harmed some of the more geopolitically oriented goals. I will say this, though, Bonnie, that I think there's another –

The misnomer, I guess, at least in my view that I'll cast out there is that the TPP was sort of doomed to failure for a host of reasons. I think the China WTO experience was one of the main ones. We have to recall that Secretary slash Senator Hillary Clinton, who ran the

in 2016 also ran against, you know, President Obama's TPP. Had she won and then had to fulfill her campaign promises, which, you know, maybe she would or wouldn't, then she also would have allowed it to die. But it had already essentially died with Congress at that point, who had no indications that they were ever going to ratify. So President Trump ran against TPP and didn't do it. But what we did do, remember what the first Trump administration did was impose tariffs on China.

And so rather than bringing down trade barriers on our allies and partners, right, in the region across, you know, and here in the Western Hemisphere, instead we raised, you know, we couldn't do that, but we did is we raised barriers with China, which again, if your goal was to create that diversification, if you look now historically starting from, if you start from 2017, just as before the trade war starts,

It was tremendously successful. The numbers just don't lie. I think we imported 21, 22% of our goods into the United States. We're coming from China before the trade war.

We're now half that, I think. We're below 13%, 12%, maybe less than that now of our goods are being imported from China. And the primary reason for that is the tariffs on China. And so the goals, the sort of supply chain diversification that would help our geopolitical goals of engaging more economically with the TPP nations, that actually happened.

It happened. It's been successful. And we didn't have to sign the TPP to get that, you know, if that was one of our main goals, which I think it was.

So I actually would push back on folks that think that these were in tension. I think in a lot of ways they were in concert. And looking back, I can't predict in the second Trump administration what a 60% tariff and then 10% across the globe, if that happens, would lead to. But I will say that all the projections across Washington and across New York City, they didn't turn out the way that

Most people thought they would, and they turned out in a way that I think was quite counter to what a lot of the academics and the think tanks and the folks that really questioned the tariff approach. Fascinating. So basically, you're saying that because we imposed tariffs on China, it made the goods from our allies and partners more attractive, because relatively speaking, they were cheaper.

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. I think from a trade perspective, I would say that's very hard to contest when you look at the data.

Interesting. Okay. I do want to touch on technology, which I know you focused quite a lot on both in your time in the Trump administration, but also afterwards. As you look at what the next Trump administration might do on the technology side, what do you think are some of the major things that might come next? And what are the major areas of concern from the folks who might be advising or in the current Trump circle right now?

So I think that on technology, I have to really acknowledge the Biden administration in the area of leading edge AI, right? Leading edge semiconductors, which are used to build AI accelerators, that kind of technology. So sort of the hardware that feeds into the most advanced artificial intelligence industry.

They've done a reasonably good job of trying to prevent that from reaching China's hands, where they could then use it for not just military purposes, but human rights abuses, all kinds of basically things that are counter to our interests.

I think what we need to see next is a focus, a broadening of that. I think we're going to have some problems with legacy semiconductors and overcapacity, in other words, an oversupply of that that will create dependencies on China for technology. If you assume that, which I think is accurate, that chips are sort of the new oil, right? The lifeblood of the global economy that we can't afford to have companies driven out of business, you know, those in our country and in allied countries.

I think we have to look very hard at biotech and where we are relative to China and things like, yeah, I think those quantum, obviously, we're already kind of moving slightly forward on those type of technologies and how those technologies can be used in ways that counter American interests. So I think you'll see a lot of that policy being debated heavily and probably resulting in

probably some more restrictions and maybe less collaboration on the science and technology front than you see now between the US and China. Great. Thank you, Ivan. So in the interest of time, we will need to wrap up our podcast, but I have one final, I guess, set of questions for you. And that relates to what you were talking about earlier. You mentioned the problems with hedging and

and how our prior approach was too focused on cooperation. As you look at a second Trump administration, to what extent do you think it's still possible to cooperate between the United States and China? And relatedly, you mentioned Mill Mill earlier. To what extent do you think it's beneficial for the United States to continue to have military-to-military engagements with the Chinese?

Those are great questions, Bonnie. So I think that we should be pursuing, rather than cooperation, I think what we're really looking for is positive sum competition. A lot of the competition is zero sum, but some of it can be positive sum and it might look like

The space race between the US and the Soviet Union where we're operating separately in parallel, but that we're driven by the idea of competition to do more and to innovate. We don't need to cooperate in order to innovate. I could see that in the fields of AI and biotech and also green technologies. I could see that we don't need to cooperate anymore.

to, you know, work on climate issues. In other words, we can compete and probably be more effective in solving or mitigating climate issues by having this mentality of a positive zone competition, I guess. I think we still need to have deconfliction. So whether you want to call that cooperation, maybe you could label that, you know, to make sure, you know, our ships and aircraft, for example, aren't running into each other. We need to have

sort of surveillance and ways to talk to each other. So there has to be channels of communication, for example, pandemic surveillance and understanding what's happening and things happening in China that could influence the United States and vice versa. On the mill-to-mill question, I'm not a big believer that our mill-to-mill discussions are going to

create a reduction of risk, frankly. I think that we need to have leader-level communication. So at the president's level, and maybe probably at the principal's level, meaning at the cabinet level. But I think, you know, that's where decision-making really happens in China. And, you know, the idea that if the PACOM commander has regular contact with

his counterpart, the Eastern Theater commander, let's say, that if an incident happened, that he could pick up the phone and call him. I just don't think that's accurate and true. I think we will still need to kind of go to the top. And so I don't see that that reduces risk or allows us to respond more rapidly having these discussions. I do think it's important to have things like

the MMCA. And so some mill to mill is important, but that's a very operational level mill to mill to again, where I would put more under the area of deconfliction rather than cooperation.

Thank you very much, Ivan. And first recapping what the first Trump administration did and using that as a basis to help shed some light on what might be possible in a second Trump administration. I also know that it's very hard to predict what might happen next. But what you shared today, I think it will be a useful benchmark for shaping how folks might think about the next Trump administration. So thank you very much, Ivan, for joining me today. Really appreciated your insights.

No, it's great to chat with you today, Bonnie.