I'm Charlie Sikes. Welcome back to the To the Contrary podcast. We start the week with Donald Trump once again threatening to destroy Iran, although it's not clear if he's going to follow through on that. And he seems to be laying the groundwork for an attack on Cuba while he's also in a slow motion way throwing Taiwan under the bus.

And of course, he is, as you all know, about to set up a $1.7 billion slush fund for his own personal goon squad.

Meanwhile, new polls show that Trump's popularity hits new lows after the last new lows that he hit.

So let's get into this sense of where we are at right now.

And joining me on the podcast this morning is our good friend Nicholas Grossman,

who is a professor of international relations at the University of Illinois and the editor of Arc Digital.

Nicholas, it's hard to know where to start.

So let's just start with your sense of the China summit.

Donald Trump returns, I think there was kind of a consensus that it was a meh summit,

that it was not a big deal.

On the other hand, if it turns out that this summit results in our betrayal of Taiwan,

like our betrayal of Ukraine, it will be a very big deal indeed. So your thoughts about what we saw

in Beijing and what we didn't see? Well, it did look like nothing really happened, which is weird in its own right,

that a American president traveling to China amidst a bunch of high-stakes international issues,

that should be a big deal.

And it really wasn't, you know, they flattered him.

He seemed really taken with the authoritarian pomp, and he kissed up to Xi.

And she talked about things like a Thucydides trap of the possibility of a rising power

and an established power getting into a war.

And I don't think Trump understood the reference, but that was more of a warning from China.

But overall, it could look symbolically like America's decline and China's rise.

China also has Putin coming there this week. And so she has America's president, Russia's

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