Welcome back to a Friday dispatch podcast. I'm your host Sarah Izger joined by Steve Hayes.

And this week we are talking to Danielle Pletka. She's a senior fellow in foreign and defense

policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. She focuses on US foreign policy generally

and the Middle East specifically. You see her work on the dispatch and in a whole lot

of other places. Plus if you aren't listening to her podcast with A.E.I.'s Mark Tisen, it's

called what the hell is going on making sense of the world. And that's probably where we

should start.

Let's dive in. Danielle, the US had its first bilateral meeting with China in Alaska this

week. And it appears that it was contentious. Can you give us sort of a 30,000 foot of

what is going on? What the hell is going on?

Exactly. Now you know why we picked that name. It basically covers every situation. Look,

this is even worse than what you described. This is the first meeting between our new national

security adviser Jake Sullivan and our new Secretary of State Tony Blinken with their

Chinese counterparts. And what you're talking about, which is that it became contentious,

is that it fell apart during the photo op. Right. It was staggering. They had a four minute

scheduled photo opportunity. The United States came out with a pretty tough condemning statement

about China. And the Chinese retorted with a 17 minute litany of everything the United

States has done wrong from Beijing's perspective. They then went back and forth. This entire

ridiculous exercise that would be three inch headlines if Donald Trump or president

was took place over an hour and degenerated into a back and forth that frankly we would

have sort of been comfortable seeing in the 11th grade recess parking lot.

Okay, well, I didn't get to have recess in 11th grade and I'm sad about that now. Whose fault

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