Joe Biden

“It will be essential for Washington to get back to business in 2025 and show the level of global economic leadership it is still capable of achieving.”

TAG Senior Advisor Dr. Evan Medeiros joins a conversation with Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times, and Jude Blanchette, head of the China program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“It’s literally been one disaster after another,” said Evan Medeiros, a professor at Georgetown University who served as a national security official in the administration headed by President Barack Obama. Xi’s third term, which began in March 2023, “has been full of policy failures and challenges”.

“Is this meeting going to improve the relationship? The answer is no, but that’s not the objective – the objective is to frame and contain the risks of it worsening,” said Kurt Tong, a former senior US diplomat in Asia who’s now a managing partner at the Asia Group. He characterized the results as “relatively small” deliverables.

Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the United States for the first time in six years this week, announcing with U.S. President Joe Biden a range of new collaborations between the world’s two biggest economies.

Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping emerged from their first meeting in a year betting that a handful of small victories will arrest a surge in US-China tensions that has unnerved neighboring nations and threatened global economic growth.

Wednesday in San Francisco, President Biden met face-to-face with Chinese leader Xi Jinping for the first time in a year. The two leaders are announcing agreements on military communication and a crackdown on the Chinese chemicals used to make fentanyl.

Tong, a former U.S. ambassador to APEC and consul general and chief of mission in Hong Kong and Macau, expects no big agreements from a Biden-Xi meeting. However, he said it would be “extraordinarily important.”