Hi, Bill Crystal here. Welcome to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined again by my friend Aaron Friedberg, a professor

or maybe just recently retired professor of international relations at Princeton. We've had

many conversations, several conversations over the years, all of them very good, I must say.

But we had one just two months ago, and normally we don't bring people back quite as fast,

but we discussed, I think, in anticipation of the summit that was then scheduled what might happen and what the general state of U.S.-China relations were, it was, and also implications for U.S. foreign policy more broadly and the world situation more broadly.

But the summit happened.

It was pretty interesting, I think.

We both agree. And so I thought

it would be worth really getting you on here. What is it, May 19th, Tuesday, almost exactly two months

for our last conversation. And I really would love to talk about the summit, but also the broader

questions and raised by it and the implications of it. So, Aaron, thanks for, thanks for joining me

again. Thank you for having me and be back. So the summit was late last week, President Trump

there for a couple of days with Xi Jinping. What's your main takeaway? And then we'll get

us to some of the details and then some of the broader implications.

My main takeaway, I suppose, is there was not much of a dare there, certainly not in terms of deliverables, really very little concrete that was accomplished. I don't know that that's a particular

surprise. The thing that struck me was

that Trump's position seemed to be quite weak, and he played a weak hand poorly, I think.

The Chinese side got, I would imagine, most, if not everything that they wanted out of it.

And I'm not sure that we got much of anything, and we may have given up a bit, at least in

terms of appearances and prestige.

So it's kind of discouraging, and that made even more the case by Trump's remarks about

Taiwan afterwards.

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