Hi, my name is Clark Packard. I'm a research fellow at the Cato Institute in the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies. Welcome to the Cato podcast. And I'm Evan Sanky, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Defense and Foreign Policy Studies Department.

Today we're here to discuss the U.S. China summit that took place between May 13th and May 15th.

I think, you know, I'll make some brief high-level remarks and then Evan and I will get into a back-and-forth conversation.

You know, I think the meeting itself, there were pretty low expectations. I think that in light of the low expectations, they were probably met. I think

it's worth noting that the Beijing state or Chinese state media essentially ignored it in large

measure.

You know, I think my general takeaway, and Evan probably or may disagree with me,

but I think that geopolitics essentially crowded out economics, and it seemed to me that Taiwan and Iran sort of dominated the conversation leaving trade policy

and tariff policy in particular sort of as an afterthought.

My sense is there's a lot of exhaustion in both Washington and Beijing.

These countries have essentially been in a tough competition

and having a lot of friction over the last maybe 10 years. And I think, you know, the major

takeaway is probably that there will be another summit and both sides sort of kick the can down the road.

So with that, what are your sort of basic takeaways from the meeting?

I think you might be right that in terms of the volume of words said and the amount of hours of

discussion devoted to political topics like Iran and Taiwan,

that those took up most of the air in the room. But in terms of actual deliverables, outcomes of

the summit, you know, it was widely reported beforehand that President Trump wanted China

to help turn the screws on Iran. It was widely reported that President Xi wanted President

Trump to say certain things about U.S. support or non-support for Taiwan. And it seems like,

you know, and perhaps more will come out, but based on what we know now, it seems like there was almost no movement on either of those issues.

One political area in which there was a surprising mention, we can come back to this later,

...