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Daniel R. Russel is a longtime American diplomat and White House advisor who served as one of President Obama’s senior aides on Asia and Pacific affairs, helping formulate the administration’s “pivot,” or strategic rebalance, to the Asia Pacific region. Russel studied at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of London, and in the mid 1980s worked as an assistant to the ambassador to Japan, the longtime Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. He also served at the United Nations, at U.S. embassies in Seoul and Cyprus, and as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague, Netherlands. He was also the consul general in Osaka-Kobe, Japan. In January 2009, he was named special assistant to President Obama and senior director at the National Security Council for Asian affairs. From 2013 to 2017, he served as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Russel is now Vice President for International Security and Diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York. What follows is a lightly edited interview.

Q: Before we discuss China, could you say something about how you came to work at the National Security Council? For much of your career you focused on other parts of Asia, is that right? 

A: That’s right. I’m not a board-certified, authenticated China specialist. My background is Asia. I speak Japanese, and some Korean, and I’ve worked on a range of Asian issues. But the reality of planet Earth has meant that by the time I became Obama’s special assistant, dealing with China was a very substantial part of my life. And for the United States, the impact and significance of China has only increased since then. 

Obviously, there are huge differences between Japan and China, but there are also some important similarities. And that early work taught me a number of powerful lessons that really stuck with me and continued to guide my thinking as a policymaker and as a diplomat. First of all, I started working for [former Senate Majority Leader] Mike Mansfield, who was really an extraordinary American and a great human being, who combined the sadly-lost trait of statesmanship and humility in a way that allowed him to both listen with great insight and great empathy, and also gave him the ability to persuade people. He was phenomenally persuasive. He was the antithesis of the Lyndon Johnson strong-arm politician. He persuaded people by inspiration. 

Anyway, Japan in the mid and late ’80s certainly looked like a juggernaut, bearing down on us in our rearview mirror, with its infallible manufacturing acumen and its unstoppable economic growth. Just step into the Wayback Machine and look at Donald Trump fulminating at, you know, the “yellow peril” that he then said bought Rockefeller Center and so on. And remember that there were members of Congress holding sledgehammers [in photo ops] smashing what used to be called a television set. So there was great consternation in most quarters of the United States about how Japan is number one, and what that meant; a sense of resentment about its rise. 

We could almost be replaying history but with Chinese-made goods going under the sledgehammer. What did this sense that the U.S. had a strong rival — and dare we say “threat” — say to you? 

I remember that feeling made an impression. I’m not suggesting that I subscribed to it. It certainly wasn’t the Mansfield approach, but it generated, in some people, hostile and fearful attitudes. But in other people, it generated a sense of urgency to compete; for the United States to up its game. And just in the way that Detroit was compelled, after years of complacency, to retool itself to produce higher efficiency, smaller automobiles, I think more broadly, the United States and the commercial, economic, corporate community, as well as in some respects, the U.S. government, was compelled to take stock and look at what we needed to do to be more competitive. 

Now, a big chunk of what we needed to do to become more competitive was to deal with the unfair, anticompetitive and protectionist measures that Japan had enmeshed itself in. But that was really the smaller part of the equation. A much bigger part of the equation was strengthening ourselves and upping our game. I don’t want to belabor it, but the other side of the experience that made an even greater impression on me was the sense of hubris and swagger among my Japanese counterparts. Not all of them, but some. And just as we had people in the United States having emotional reactions to this upstart — to a Japan that we had defeated and rebuilt — that was suddenly emerging as a looming peer competitor, there was an inverse syndrome in many quarters in Japan, which was suddenly saying, “Look at us. We did it. Maybe America’s time has come and gone. They’re not the 10-foot giants that we thought they were. At this steep, upward pace, two decades from now, we’ll be on the moon. The sky’s the limit. We’re unstoppable.” And lo and behold, it was not to be. So this really impressed upon me the importance of humility, both on the upswing and the downswing. You know, one’s fate is not preordained. And there is not a measurable correlation between success and the intrinsic virtue of a people or of a country. The fact that you are successful does not mean that you are better, because if it did, when somebody else is successful, and you’re on the skids, what would that mean? 

I felt like I had experienced both sides of this dimension. And so, today I hear something similar in the messaging of Biden, who by the way, was a protege of Mike Mansfield. This is something that I learned about on those endless flights to Asia on Air Force Two, when the politician who just never sleeps [Joe Biden] needed somebody to talk to and we would talk for hours. We discovered early on our Mansfield connection. 

Can we talk about that — about Biden’s ties to the late Sen. Mansfield? 

When [Biden] first was elected to the Senate, immediately after his wife and child died, he went to Mansfield and said that he had decided not to take his seat. And he told me that Mansfield persuaded him to take it on just a temporary, sort of experimental basis, just for six months or whatever the period was; just to give it a try. He then told me that from that point on, Mansfield was routinely calling him into his office — he was the Senate Majority Leader — with task after task, project after project, for Biden. He really loaded him up with work, to the point of being slightly onerous. So Biden had to go into his office on some regular basis and check in and report out and all that kind of stuff. And this was a lot of work. And, he said, months and months went by and gradually he abandoned the idea of quitting. He decided that he was going to stay in the Senate. 

Later, he said, he realized that Mansfield had not needed him at all. The guy was Majority Leader, he had an unlimited number of people, including senior people, that he could deploy to do anything. He was basically just keeping Biden as busy as hell to create some space for him to heal. And he was keeping close tabs on Biden to make sure that he was moving through his grief and so on. And in any event, this is something that Biden was tremendously grateful for; he was very loyal to Mansfield, and their relationship in the Senate from that point on was really a close and important one. And I, too, had become very close to Mansfield and stayed very close to him for the rest of his life. So this is something that Biden and I have talked about a lot. But the point is not to talk about me… sorry.

No, that’s interesting… 

… but I could hear during the campaign, and certainly, since the election, Biden’s determination to “build back better,” to start by getting our own act together, to compete by improving ourselves first and foremost. It was a very familiar mindset: a self-reflective and honest approach, combined with a firm conviction that America is capable of doing phenomenal things, that the United States has what is perhaps a really unique combination of strengths and assets that just need, I don’t know, the pixie dust of goodness and good leadership to unleash. That’s a very familiar mindset to me.

Perhaps I was hearing this because I was based in China at the time, but why was there a sense that this pivot under the Obama administration was actually hostile to China, and the beginning of an effort to “contain” China? Was there really a period after the announcement of the “pivot” where tensions began to rise? 

Things move in phases. The first phase, the kind of recovery phase or reconstruction phase, was one in which the messages that I heard from the Chinese reflected the kind of hubris and arrogance that I described some minutes earlier, what I had experienced in Tokyo. There was this sense that the financial crisis and the Lehman shock had demonstrated that the Emperor had no clothes [the Emperor being the U.S.], that these are the clay feet of the Western capitalist economy. China was weathering it; China had a sense that it was pulling the global economic train, and America had revealed a fatal illness. And of course, this was preordained by Marx and Hegel. 

But instead of being the expected gradual decline over the course of the century, this was clearly happening a lot faster than the Chinese could reckon with. And so there was a bit of smugness, a bit of condescension in that regard. But then Obama decided that the United States would sign the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation and join the East Asia Summit. They began to see the manifestations of the outreach to U.S. allies. They also saw the beginnings of the economic recovery in a manner and to an extent that they hadn’t reckoned with. And [Beijing] found it rather surprising, including the explosive growth of new digital companies creating insane wealth, seemingly out of thin air. So this is what Lee Kuan Yew [the founding and first prime minister of Singapore] was talking about as a sort of “black box” of American innovation and resilience. 

So, for the first two years or so, I’d say there was a phase in which the Chinese condescension towards us, and confidence in itself, was the sort of dominant theme. Meanwhile, the United States was getting its act together. At that time, Dai Binguo was the State Councilor and was Hu Jintao’s right hand man in the way that Xi Jinping does not have. And we had, of course, Yang Jiechi who was then foreign minister, and pretty soon Cui Tiankai became an ambassador to Washington. So we had a very substantial set of dialogue channels with the Chinese. 

I didn’t go on the first Obama trip to China — Jeff [Bader] did — and so I don’t really know all those stories. But I was around for many other parts of the dialogue, including what Hank Paulson had been doing, which was a fairly narrowly focused economic dialogue that we broadened to become a two-track, Strategic and Economic Dialogue. That’s when Hillary Clinton came in and Dai Binguo was her counterpart. But Dai Binguo also met with Tom Donilon as national security adviser and I was part of all those meetings as well as the Hillary Clinton trips and meetings. And look, these were really substantive strategic conversations. Now, I’m not discounting the hours of turgid talking points, especially with Yang Jiechi — the lectures and scripts that have fatuous claims of Chinese sovereignty over every country that uses chopsticks — but there were also some very real, impressive conversations, including with Obama. Now, that said, [dealing with] Hu Jintao was like talking to one of those animatronic presidents in Disney World. I mean, we just really couldn’t have a real conversation with him, because it was just a bunch of talking points in a suit and tie. But at other levels, particularly with Dai Binguo, we could.

I had heard Hu Jintao was quite a capable leader as he rose through the ranks. Some have remarked that perhaps he just didn’t have the power or clout as President… 

I don’t know. I’m not enough of an expert to answer that question with real authority. I think some of it had to do with personality. Some of it had to do with his operating style. Maybe he saw his role, perhaps, as sitting on top of the system and articulating the consensus of the [Politburo] Standing Committee. That’s the other factor. This was the era of collective leadership. Talking points represented carefully scripted and aggressively litigated consensus, aka the lowest common denominator among the warring factions within the band of nine. So it may have been that he was careful; there could have been a health dimension too, I don’t know, and maybe I’m exaggerating. There’s a lot of doctrinaire filler in Xi Jinping’s speeches today, so don’t get me wrong. But it was so rare for Hu Jintao to depart from the script. Once, Evan [Medeiros] and I were in a meeting where Obama was just kicking the shit out of the Chinese over North Korea. Hu Jintao had run through his talking points, and Obama had run through his, and then Hu Jintao’s response was something really mealy-mouthed — and Obama really just let him have it. And Hu was so disconcerted that he picked up his pencil and wrote a little marginalia on his notes right in front of us. And I remember Evan and I turned and looked at each other, wide eyed, like, “he moves… Oh my God.” We had never seen him make a note or do anything like that. Just that alone was shocking. Anyway, I digress. 

State visits by Chinese leaders to the U.S. were clearly very important, and there had famously been an awkward moment during the George W. Bush administration when the U.S. played the wrong national anthem. Can you say something about how Beijing approached such visits, particularly the summit at Sunnylands in 2013? 

There couldn’t be a visit to the United States by the president of China that wasn’t a state visit. And that was not limited, frankly, to the United States. Normally, when you get the president of China, you’re supposed to treat it like a state visit, with bells and whistles. Chinese leaders didn’t want the Chinese public to see the leader getting anything short of the Class A treatment, full of honors, because they would misinterpret that. And that made it complicated to organize visits to the United States by the Chinese president because there are a lot of reasons that a state visit isn’t so attractive or easy. We’re not France. We don’t do all that pomp and circumstance easily all the time. It has political implications as well. So it’s a complicating factor. 

So when, in the end of 2012, Xi Jinping became General Secretary, I had dinner with Cui Tiankai who was visiting Washington. He was then Vice Foreign Minister and over dinner, we discussed the fact that there was not going to be any opportunity for the two leaders to meet until APEC in November, or something like that. It was going to be 10 or 11 months. And it was just not feasible to organize a state visit. We didn’t want one. And we hadn’t accomplished things. We hadn’t gotten anything done yet with Xi Jinping; it didn’t warrant it. And Obama sure as hell wasn’t just picking up and flying to China. And that was the genesis; that’s where we came up with the idea of Sunnylands, an informal setting outside of Washington. 

Xi could not possibly come to Washington without it being a state visit. But could he go somewhere else, somewhere closer? Xi Jinping couldn’t be seen as having been summoned or being in some inferior position. But we both recognized that this opened the door to something that would be vastly less formal, and that would let them have a lot more time. You know, a leader can be in Washington for a state visit for two days, but only have 90 minutes of substantive, bilateral summit meeting with the President of the United States. And that was the last thing we wanted, because it takes 90 minutes for the Chinese just to sort of refresh the history of western colonial indignities. You know, clear their throats. So what I wanted was, “Let’s have two days and let’s not have the legions of officials, and dogs and ponies and elephants and unicycles. Let’s keep it really small and intimate.” I started off talking about Hawaii, but eventually the White House advance office settled on the Annenberg Estate in Palm Springs. 

So Cui Tiankai, who’s a hell of a diplomat and an effective and creative guy, ultimately was able to swing it. They invented a trip for Xi Jinping to Central America and they then added one stop en route because, it turned out (wink wink), that the U.S. president was going to be on the west coast. So Xi just dropped by on his way to Central America. They tied themselves up in knots, but they did it. 

And how did things turn out with the Sunnylands meeting? Was it a success? 

Well, it depends on your definition of success. We got a lot out of it. And we certainly had significant time with Xi Jinping at Sunnylands. And that was time both to take some soundings of him, take his measure, hear from him and to probe and pursue some of the issues. But it was also time for us to convey our strategic vision, our concerns, our messages as well. And he had serious people with him: Li Zhanshu, Wang Huning, Wang Qishan. It was a very serious undertaking. And it was very, very important. It gave us a head start in a number of respects. We garnered quite a bit of insight about him about where the Party was, and seemed to be going, where they were putting emphasis in terms of issues. And we were able to really say our piece. 

Now that said, did we convert Xi Jinping to a free market economy and an embrace of democratic values and human rights? No. Did we solve problems? No. And meeting with the Chinese leader creates its own problems. In this case, the Chinese were absolutely hell bent on fixing a four-character label to the relationship, the way that they hang banners on an overpass over the highway, for the 100 day campaigns. And that was something like “a new model of major country relations based on mutual respect, mutual interest and win-win outcomes.” As you can see, it’s deeply burned into my cortex.

[Sunnylands] gave us a head start in a number of respects. We garnered quite a bit of insight about him about where the Party was, and seemed to be going, where they were putting emphasis in terms of issues. And we were able to really say our piece. 

I’ve been told there was this determined push by Beijing to create a new type of Great Power relationship, perhaps one that could signal that the U.S. and China were now equal powers. Is that right? 

What you have just described is a conflation of two things, in my opinion. But you’re not wrong. One is the new model, the label — they were really wedded to that. And I don’t know why exactly. It would be a fascinating story to unearth. I think there are a number of components to it. One part of it, I strongly suspect, is that this was something that was decided — maybe Xi rammed it through and maybe this was his baby. I have no idea, but it had the feeling of something that they had agreed to internally and they couldn’t walk back without a big loss of face. So all the underlings were just beyond horrified because I said to them from the get-go, “No way are these words coming out of Obama’s mouth. It’s not that we disagree about creating a new model. It’s not that we oppose mutual respect. But we don’t do slogans. The President of the United States is not going to speak in Chinese. Okay? That’s Chinese. That’s your slogan. That’s not what we do. He will say what he means. And what he means is that the United States welcomes the peaceful rise of China, that is prospering, that has good relations with its neighbors, that is active in shouldering international responsibility. We are not afraid of a strong China. We have more to fear, frankly, from a China that became weak and unstable. Obama will say what he thinks, but he is just not going to utter your slogan.” 

Oh, man, those were awful battles. Now, there’s another level of explanation to it, which I suspect, although I don’t know, was that this was a construct that the Chinese wanted to market to third countries; namely, show that the U.S. and China have reached an accord — some sort of agreement where they have a major country relationship that by definition is more important than minor country relationships. And on top of that, everybody in Asia knows what “win-win” means. It means you’ve just been raped, pillaged, and plundered by the Chinese. So I think a big part of it was the Chinese signaling to third countries, like: “We got this. And you know what, when you’re in tears, crying for your American friends to come bail you out because Big Bad China did something to you, guess what? The Americans aren’t coming, because we’re the ones with the major country relationship.” I mean, that’s just a hypothesis. 

The second thing that we used to hear constantly from the Chinese was “the Pacific Ocean is big enough for both of us, right? So stop doing things that we don’t like. We’re not trying to drive you out. You’re welcome here. You’re a valued guest. You’re welcome to come to our Asia. And we’re not even saying that your Navy cannot occasionally make a peaceful sail around the western Pacific.” But basically what they were saying was, “It would be a lot better if you stayed on your side of the Pacific. And when you do come, you should be respectful of our rules, and our core interests,” and so on. So it wasn’t really like “let’s divide up the world.” It wasn’t exactly “stay out.” But in essence it was, “This is our sphere of influence. And we’d love to have you — but call before you come over. And don’t stay for dinner.” That kind of stuff. 

Many have suggested that U.S.-China relations began to deteriorate some time during the Obama years, and after Xi Jinping became General Secretary he began to change Beijing’s approach to U.S.; and that the Trump administration was just responding to what was already under way. Did you see that? 

No. I saw there was a substantial strain in the Chinese [Communist] Party system. And there was a view that, “The Americans are untrustworthy. They are hostile. They want to subvert and contain us. We’ve learned about this in our Marxist training since we were kids. We have no illusions about these guys. And we need to be stronger. We need to take what’s rightfully ours, etc.” But that was not the leading or the majority view. It was one strain in the mix of Chinese thinking. And we would hear it from some people. And we would read about it or hear about it third-hand or through other means. But the countervailing views — and it wasn’t just a binary thing; there were multiple views — but the countervailing views were focused on the need to build up China’s economy, on the important role that the United States had, and on the value of economic reform in China. 

There was admiration for some of the really amazing things that the United States does and had done in terms of standard of living, quality of life, innovation, technology, military might and so on. Many people in China, and in the Party, serious people who had strong ties, had respect and affection for the United States; they still had that kind of entrepreneurial, “let’s learn from the West” spirit, etc. So there were a lot of views. And one of the things that I saw in 2009, 2010 to 2011, were people like Dai Bingguo and Wang Qishan were winning the argument against PLA types or hawks who wanted to take edgy steps; who wanted to contest and get in our face and make trouble and do things that they knew would generate backlash and, at a minimum, alienate America. And so these people got restrained. And if you listened to what Xi was saying, in talking points and so on, it was not unreasonable.

In some areas, they were talking about economic growth, poverty eradication, reform, deleveraging, all that kind of stuff. And about dealing with pollution. And you know, “China’s a poor developing country. We need this; we need that. Can you help us here? Can you help us there?” 

I mean, the people I’ve worked with and worked for, were not dumb people. These are super smart people. And many of them, including Jeff Bader, have phenomenal experience and insight and depth on China. And other people like [Assistant Secretary of State] Kurt [Campbell] and [National Security Advisor Tom] Donilon and [Deputy Secretary of State James] Steinberg are really great people. So I don’t think that there was some inevitability to China’s trajectory that we misread, that we overlooked. We weren’t ignorant of the kind of hawkish contingent and their line of policy thinking. But we were seeing it held in check. 

I don’t think that there was some inevitability to China’s trajectory that we misread, that we overlooked. We weren’t ignorant of the kind of hawkish contingent and their line of policy thinking. But we were seeing it held in check. 

After Xi Jinping came in, we had gotten first of all from the Biden experience, a lot of insight already into how Xi Jinping was thinking. He was extraordinarily candid, in my opinion, in some of his very small exchanges with Biden, like over dinner and so on. It was hours and hours and hours. Biden is a very likable guy. And he’s good at, you know, he’s good at this. And so we saw a lot, or we heard a lot from Xi Jinping at that early formative stage. It was abstract and aspirational, but he clearly had a very strong sense of mission. This was somebody who clearly was seized with the importance of wielding power, not in a rigidly ideological way, as a Marxist, although he is very much a Marxist, but in advancing an agenda, an agenda at home and abroad. So we knew that this guy was very different from Hu Jintao. But there too, I did not predict that the anti-corruption campaign would be a perpetual movement. I thought it would be a six-month or a year cleaning house sort of thing. I didn’t anticipate that it would go as high or as hard as it did; not just Bo Xilai but Zhou Yongkang and so on. So the frame is incomplete. You know, there’s a great line in Shakespeare, in Macbeth, where he says to the witches, “If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not,” then speak to me. And that’s really it. It’s not that we didn’t see these elements; it’s that you don’t really know which one is going to grow; and how big it’s going to grow. 

Some scholars believe yet Beijing was waiting for the right moment to assert itself in a stronger way; that the Chinese authorities were gaining economic clout and leverage and the Americans and the West simply misread their intentions and ambitions. How do you see it?

It’s the perpetual debate about whether there’s this mastermind deep in the caves under Zhongnanhai plotting out 100 years ahead and all that kind of stuff. And it’s easy to be tempted down that road by the fact that the Chinese are so full of these sort of grandiose plans and slogans and 10-year plans and 100-year plans and so on. It kind of sounds that way. But there’s also a phenomenally opportunistic streak to the Chinese Communist Party. 

Look, certainly from 2009 through 2012, the hawks, the hawkish fringe in the Chinese policy community, were held in check. And that wasn’t part of a secret deception plan. That was because Hu Jintao and others were pulling them back and saying, “No.” I mean not always with success. And I’m not saying it was a knockdown, drag out battle. But in any system, you have competing interests, stakeholders with different perspectives, and the non-testosterone contingents within the Chinese system were holding their own pretty well; they were pretty influential until 2013. It didn’t change on a dime. Instead, a tremendous amount of energy was refocused to the internal Party rectification campaign, ideological purity and conformity, and anti corruption, and some other things like that. And we saw that coming, and we saw it happen. But as I said, the extent and intensity were not something that I could predict. 

What wasn’t visible right away was that in the course of unifying the PLA, strengthening the Party and strengthening Xi Jinping’s grip on the PLA and on the internal security system apparatus and on the propaganda apparatus, that Xi Jinping was saying yes to a lot of plans that had been on the shelf, but had never gotten approval before. And these plans don’t activate in a day. So things began, and they began incrementally, like reclamation activities in the South China Sea. It started with vacuuming sand off the bottom of the sea and piling it on top of an atoll. It wasn’t at all clear where that was going or how far they were planning to take that. 

This process steadily built up speed and momentum. And each year now, we see, particularly since the 19th Party Congress, a real acceleration. So maybe the first five years from the 18th Party Congress were really about consolidation. The second five years, perhaps you could say was about exercising some of the tools and some of the power; it’s certainly had a more outward bound dimension to it in almost every respect. Not only domestic, but Xi seemed to broaden his effort to extend power and control well beyond China’s perimeter.

You also served under President Trump, for a time. Can you talk a little about Trump administration’s approach to China in early 2017? 

I stayed for the first three months of the Trump administration in the vain hope that I could help [Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson & Company and [NSC director Matthew] Pottinger get their footing and get off on a good start and get it right from the outset. And I had a great relationship with Matt. He was replacing me, or he was taking a job that I had had. He called me the day that [then National Security Advisor Michael] Flynn offered him the job. And we met at the Shake Shack at Union Station for two hours for something like a crash masterclass on how to be a senior director of the NSC [National Security Council]. I was still in government. So we would talk on the secure phone once or twice a day about everything. And Tillerson also; he was not a very accessible, friendly person, but I was the one assistant secretary that he didn’t fire, the one career person. And I was the one assistant secretary that he would allow to brief him or allow in meetings to travel with him. So we could communicate to a degree, although it was clearly hopeless. 

The big issue was what to do about China? How to handle the Chinese? And the incoming people, the “Trump Tower,” as they were referred to — which meant Trump and Ivanka and Jared [Kushner] — they were mesmerized by China. And this is not all that unusual. China is big. China is powerful. China is rich. So like “wow, let’s make a deal with China.” Go back and look at videos and tweets from Trump himself about China. There is zero attack. I mean, he does his “goddamn China, China, China.” “The Chinese outsmarted us.” But there’s zero of the shrill [Peter] Navarro, [Mike] Pompeo kind of “China’s the enemy.” To the contrary. Look at his visit in November. Jesus. 

The fact is, the Chinese are clever. And you know what? Well, all your diplomacy notwithstanding, they’re pretty good. Cui Tiankai is a brilliant diplomat. Yang Jiechi, whatever you think of him, is extremely skillful. And if there’s one thing the Chinese know, they know an opportunity when they see one. And they sized up Trump and Jared and Ivanka and Tillerson and [Commerce Secretary] Wilbur Ross and half a dozen others. Now, I wouldn’t put Gary Cohn in that category. But he’s a money guy. He’s a finance guy. And finance guys love China. China loves finance guys like Hank Paulson, Steve Schwarzman. So the Chinese immediately wanted a meeting. “Why not bring your checkbook. Let’s have a meeting.” 

Jared was convinced that the gambit that had worked so well for Trump in New York real estate would work for Trump in international relations. The idea was that the irresistible tractor beam of The Donald’s charisma was of a force so powerful that it could, like, bend steel — and mere government officials couldn’t be expected to understand his magic power, so therefore: no point in listening to them. And so the word came that, here’s what we’re gonna do: We’re going to have a couples’ golf weekend in Mar-a-Lago with the Xis. And we’re not going to talk at all about business. It’s just purely social — meals and golf for the boys and the girls will go shopping. And at the end of the weekend, the two couples will be fast friends. And Donald will put his arm around Jinping as he walks to the helipad or whatever, and he will say “Have your guy call my guy. And let’s get together. We can do great stuff together. There’s a lot of business to work out. Let’s do it.” 

And then the next phase, they told me, was when the people in the Trump Organization would bully the company to get as much as they can get. And then there’s the final meeting between The Donald and the other CEO in which there’s two or three big issues left that the staff couldn’t work through, and The Donald just clinches the deal. That’s the “art of the deal”. And so this was basically their planned approach to Xi Jinping. 

I tried, through Matt [Pottinger], to convey: “100 percent, this is fucking crazy. This is a bad idea with capital letters.” Matt totally got that. Tillerson had his own reasons for not wanting just to have the two leaders alone. But there was no way he was going to go to bat to try to block this. He was pretty much a yes-man. We explain that Xi Jinping doesn’t play golf. That Xi Jinping doesn’t speak English. That the President should not do this; that Xi will not do that. 

The Chinese kept trying to come in and see Tillerson. And well, not just Tillerson. The Chinese would go and have a secret meeting with Jared. And then would go and have an official meeting with Tillerson. And they cherry pick what they wanted, and so on and so forth. So one of my first big missions was to persuade Tillerson not to just have one-on-one meetings with the Chinese ambassador. You have a whole State Department full of experts, right? These guys are not coming alone. Why would you cheat yourself out of professional support? I get you want to keep it small and all that, but trust your team. So it was just a miserable battle. And ultimately, the Trump people got the worst of both worlds.

They had Xi Jinping coming with a big entourage. Every cabinet member wanted to be in the game. So they all went down to Mar-a-Lago, if you remember, whether they were invited or not. There were these ginormous meals where nobody could hear because the table was so long. And they negotiated Trump down to a 20 minute one-on-one with Xi Jinping that, of course, lasted two hours; and they could never find out, what did he say? The Chinese had a note taker; we didn’t. And then, since there had been no real preparation, the Chinese came with their readouts and their lists and their agreements. Various Americans had their own lists — Wilbur Ross’s 100-day campaign crap — and none of it worked. It was awful. I’m sorry to be so anecdotal, but my point is that the Trump administration was not, not, not in any way anti-China. They were panda-huggers par excellence, beginning with Trump. I mean, whose granddaughter was it that was, you know, singing the Chinese national anthem, right? There was also Ivanka and her trademarks and Jared [Kushner] and his real estate deal with Anbang. 

So you mean the stronger rhetoric we saw after the pandemic got under way and with Pompeo wasn’t there in the early years, right? 

Yes, there was not a tinge of the kind of “violent overthrow the Chinese Communist Party” bombast that came later. That was related to Covid and to the election. It was only later that the hardliners were unleashed. At the beginning, it was a very strange mix of panda-huggers and panda-haters, but the huggers were dominant. 

So, now we’ve gone through a pretty difficult period with Covid and the deterioration in relations, name-calling, etc. This is perhaps the worst relations we’ve seen since 1989, or even the Vietnam War period. What can be done? How can the U.S. and China make this work? There is a real need for not just diplomacy, but solutions. What would those look like? 

I suppose you won’t let me get away with saying, “It’s complicated.” You started by asking a question about the Chinese perception of the rebalance as threatening and as a driver to their own kind of aggressiveness and assertiveness, or at least an alibi for those sort of moves. And with China, there is a dynamic – I don’t have quite the algebra formula that captures it precisely, but fundamentally, it’s a Leninist state and party. The Chinese leadership has a very Leninist relationship with power. You know, politically, culturally, strategically. They respect power and have contempt for weakness. So the manifestation of weakness on the part of the United States generates contempt as well as a certain assertiveness and aggressiveness. It’s opportunistic. There’s space, and they will occupy it. 

That phase in which the United States is regaining strength, as it did in the rebalance, generates anxiety in Beijing. And while I’m not sure what the right answer is, I recognize they respond negatively to that dynamic and it probably instills a sense on their part of being beleaguered. There’s a lot of victim mentality going on in Chinese leadership anyway: “They’re out to get us.” Some paranoia. It’s only when the United States demonstrates pretty credible and formidable power that China is normally inclined to back off to make concessions — to go-along-to-get-along kind of thing. And so both the decline in American power phase and then the early restoration of power phase, I think, are pretty fraught. At those times we have to be prepared for combative, confrontational, problematic, Chinese reactions and behavior. And I think it’s only until and unless the United States, as a competitor, is sufficiently strong in Chinese eyes, that we’re going to get that kind of equilibrium; that kind of balance that is more stable and more desirable. 

On top of that, as I alluded to, Xi Jinping has been extraordinarily successful in not only concentrating power in the Party state and in his own hands, but also in applying it and using it. And, obviously, the United States’ missteps have been a not inconsiderable part of why the Chinese advanced. We’re now seeing the global implications of China doing well, not just in COVID, not just in the economy, and not just in infrastructure export and so on, but in a lot of other areas. At the same time, we have been doing very poorly in a very public and conspicuous way. So the answer is — and I just coined a phrase here — to “build back better.” I’m half kidding. I don’t want to sound like I’m a shill for Biden — you know, I’m not working for him. But we have to get our act together. We have to do better ourselves. 

We’re all tempted to look at China policy through the lens, or along the spectrum of, tough to soft, right? But I don’t think that’s meaningful. What matters is being smart. And part of being smart is being united. I don’t mean the strategy of just recruiting a posse and ganging up on China with a bunch of other democracies; that’s only going to take us so far. But we definitely need to build international unity. And I think a prerequisite for building international unity is building some degree of confidence on the part of other governments, that we actually know what we’re doing, and that we are capable of doing it; that they would not be hitching themselves to a failing or less than competent partner. 

I don’t think the Biden administration is dragging its feet. I don’t think that they’re at a standstill there. They’re in contact. They talk to the Chinese. They did a call with Xi Jinping. And by the way, that call lasted two hours. Even with the Biden discount, you know that there’s a little more in that call than just “Happy year of the ox — oh, and by the way, stop picking on those Uyghurs.” But what Biden isn’t doing, and what they collectively are not doing, is rushing right into problem solving. That’s a rookie mistake. And these guys are not rookies. He’s dusting off the lines of communication. He’s laying down a few markers. He’s taking some soundings. But he wants to build the relationship with China back better and better, meaning a more balanced and more sustainable relationship. And my take is that he thinks that he needs to do it incrementally. He’s not rebuilding it overnight with a 3D printer. He’s restoring the foundation. 

The lion’s share of the work is on the home front. And that’s not just a slogan, because recapturing some of our competitive advantage in certain technologies, economically rebuilding, not just the base, but the foundation of our credibility is important. You’re a leader, not because you grab people and drag them by the collar; you’re a leader if people elect to follow you, or to align with you, because they want to go where you’re going. And they think that you know how to get there. You have to trust them and they have to trust you. So, I do think that they’re doing a little more than just uniting the democracies; a little more public declarative work on the lines of “we’re not soft,” and calling out the sins of China and so on. But this is politics, no question about it — and not limited to the United States, frankly. Look at countries like Australia, which is beleaguered and under the gun right now by the Chinese punitive economic measures; Japan, which is in a perpetual state of anxiety about abandonment. They and others are watching very closely, in part because Democrats in general, and the Obama-Biden group in particular, have been labeled by the Republicans, and by the press, as soft on China for so long; I don’t think it’s justified. But maybe for that reason, the Biden team is mindful of the need to restore and sustain some confidence among friendly countries. 

But it’s still relatively early days. They lowered the dial of hateful bombast — just sending Mike Pompeo back to Hoover [Institution at Stanford] did wonders on that score. They are working to get our own act together. Engaging with partners and allies. Showing up in international forums. Signaling, laying down some markers on problem areas — Taiwan or whatever — that we’re not rolling over, that we’re not walking back our fundamental interests and approaches. But they are playing it as a long game; doing the things in the early stages that you need to do in order to be able to do the things in subsequent stages that you want to do. 

My experience is that the U.S.-China relationship is all about the quest for leverage. You don’t get the Chinese to do things that they don’t otherwise want to do by tweeting, or for that matter, with 12 hours of Strategic Dialogue fanfare. It’s really about leverage. Now, I don’t mean, hitting the mule with a two-by-four. But you’ve got to have something more than just exquisitely scripted talking points if you’re going to get the Chinese to do things you want them to do and stop doing things that you don’t want them to do.

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