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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and now the Joe Biden presidency.

We will be looking at how a 78-year-old president will change America and we'll be asking if normalcy, which is what he promised to bring, has returned to American politics. The answer, of course, is no.

I'm joined today by Michael Oslin, who is Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. And we're going to be asking if the Biden administration

is tougher on China than the Trump administration was. Michael, I think it's obviously a bit early

to say whether Biden is tougher on China than Trump.

But we know that today, the Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is meeting Chinese diplomats in Alaska.

And a lot of the talk around it, or a lot of the briefing around it has been that it's going to be, it's going to be a tough conversation.

And it's as early days and they're not expecting to make great progress. This is perhaps somewhat surprising to a lot of us who believed what the Trump campaign said about Biden in 2020,

which was that he was going to be something of a China patsy. Do you believe that the Biden

administration is really standing up to China,

or do you think there's a lot of hot air? Well, as you said, Freddie, it's great to be back with you.

It's early to tell. I think the consensus in America has changed fundamentally and permanently.

That doesn't mean that, you know, every administration from now on is going to take a

position as strong as the Trump administration did.

But I do think that I'd be very surprised if you found any American politicians and policymakers

going back to, let's say, the pre-2017 model of

relations between Beijing and Washington. And this, I think, would have happened if Hillary Clinton

...