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Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

What Trump & Xi are Really Up To! with fmr White House Official Tom Wright

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Josh Szeps

Society & Culture, Education, Comedy Interviews, Comedy, Self-improvement

4.5905 Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2026

⏱️ 12 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Trump is in China, and you need to know what he and Xi are up to. What new world order are they creating? Today, Josh sits down with a senior US former national security official to understand how three men - Trump, Xi and Putin - are remaking the world. Tom Wright was a special assistant to President Biden and the Senior Director for Strategic Planning on the US National Security Council, where he helped to shape US policy on Ukraine, Taiwan, semiconductors, and the China relationship as it lurched from confrontation, to managed competition, and back again. Now, from the outside, he's trying to make sense of what Trump, Xi and Putin are building together, and what it means for every country they don't run (yet). Josh probes Tom about the night he learned about the famous Chinese spy balloon in US airspace, about President Biden's mental decline, the Kamala Harris campaign, and how medium-sized powers might navigate a brave new world. Tom is a scholar of international relations by training, originally from Ireland. He's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonresident fellow at the Lowy Institute and a contributing writer to The Atlantic. He joined Josh at the Uncomfortable Conversations studio during a tour of Australia to discuss the Trump-Xi summit, Putin in Ukraine, nuclear submarines, and why you shouldn’t buy a Chinese EV. His new paper for the Lowy Institute is ‘Inflection Point: Biden, Trump and the Future World Order.’ Our thanks to the Lowy Institute for facilitating this conversation.

Transcript

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0:00.0

The international order, as we've known it, has been effectively unraveled by Xi

0:04.8

Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in different ways.

0:08.4

And I think what we are trying to understand is what does this unraveling look like.

0:13.5

I think in many ways, the conditions that we see around the world are consistent with

0:18.6

a pre-war environment.

0:22.6

Now we have this new, you know, not new, but new administration in the form of Trump,

0:28.6

trying to stitch together this alternative worldview about the way that big powers should interact.

0:34.4

And as we mentioned at the start, being much more sympathetic to the kind of

0:39.2

attitude towards global politics that Xi and Putin exemplify rather than countries like the UK

0:46.6

and European countries in Australia what should we understand about the transition out of the post-war order that is being ushered in by the U.S.'s new sympathy for the way that China and Russia see the world?

1:05.1

In terms of where we're headed?

1:06.7

Yes.

1:07.6

What are we going into and how destabilized is what we have all grown up with?

1:12.6

Yeah.

1:13.6

I think...

1:14.6

So I think the international order, as we've known it, has been effectively unraveled.

1:20.6

You know, and I think it's been unraveled by three people, by Xi Jinping, Vladimir

1:26.6

Putin and Donald Trump in different ways.

1:29.5

I think she is the trade bit we spoke about earlier.

1:33.5

And the way most of that broke, I think, the trading system internationally, Putin,

1:38.9

it's the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and really the reemergence of major war in Europe with the view to

1:46.5

annexing additional territory. And I think with Donald Trump, it's really seeing allies more as

...

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