Welcome to the President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States.

I'm Jim Lindsay, Director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This week's topic is the APEC Forum in San Francisco.

With me to discuss the upcoming meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation

2023 Forum is Matthew Goodman.

Matt is Distinguished Fellow for Global Economic Policy

and Director of the Greenberg Center for Geo-economic Studies

at the Council on Foreign Relations. Before joining CFR earlier this fall, Matt was Senior

Vice President for Economics and the Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic

and International Studies. From 2010 to 2012, he served as Director for International Economics

on the staff of the National Security Council.

One of his duties in that job was helping President Barack Obama prepare for a variety

of global and regional summits, which included the APEC Forum, which the

United States last hosted in 2011 in Honolulu. Matt, thank you very much for joining me.

Delighted to be here. Thanks, Jim. So, Matt, let's be given sort of the big picture question.

We're going to have this meeting in San Francisco

later this week of APEC. What exactly is APEC? Well, that is a good question. Some have called it

four adjectives in search of a noun. It needs the word forum in there somewhere. But seriously,

it's an important little organization that was founded exactly

30 years ago, or at least at leaders level. This is the 30th anniversary of the summit that President

Clinton hosted in Seattle. And it's been working kind of pick and shovel work to promote

regional economic integration in this critical area covering, you know, the United States

...