This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Batchelor.

This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batchelor. I welcome my colleague, Jack Burnham, the Foundation for Defensive Democracy, is watching China, especially the China that showed up in Seoul, South Korea in these last days,

for the APEC meeting, the so-called sideline meeting between the President of the United States

and the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.

Jack, a very good evening to you.

Thank you very much.

Your measure of the meeting turns on the word

truce, sometimes called ceasefire. Right now, that seems adequate. But what does it mean from

China's point of view? Why suddenly the wolf foyer is asked to go to the back of the room. Good evening

to you. Thank you for having me.

I think this meeting here is a truce and it is a ceasefire. And I think both sides see it as a way

of gaining some temporary stability in order to strengthen their positions. I think it's important

to look at what happened before the meeting to really understand what Chairman Xi and President Trump talked about.

You saw President Trump going into the meeting having very strong engagements with South Korea,

with Japan, with ASEAN and Southeast Asia.

And during all of those stops, he's able to get new trade deals signed, access to rare earth minerals,

which was a critical aspect, signing new agreements on AI investments, shipbuilding in the United States.

And so really throughout, even before he met with Chairman Shee, Trump was able to consolidate a lot of his position across the region in order to bolster the United States' strength, whether that be

manufacturing, defense, economic. Same for the Chinese leader. Going into the meeting, he had

just come out of a plenum on the next five-year plan around self-strengthening domestic production, building self-sufficiency.

And so I think both sides came into this meeting realizing that having a truce that can

easily be retracted should one or both sides break their obligations to one another.

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