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ExclusiveStable US-China ties? It won’t last long, says Evan Medeiros

After Trump’s China trip, political scientist gives his assessment on Taiwan, trade leverage, the Iran war and Beijing’s tensions with Tokyo

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Josephine MaPublished: 6:00am, 25 May 2026Updated: 6:08am, 25 May 2026

Dr Evan Medeiros is the Penner family chair in Asia studies and the Cling family distinguished fellow in US-China studies at Georgetown University. He has served as the National Security Council’s director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia, and later as special assistant to the president and senior director for Asia.

Medeiros was former president Barack Obama’s top adviser on the Asia-Pacific and was previously a policy adviser to Hank Paulson when he was Treasury secretary. He has also held senior positions at Eurasia Group and the RAND Corporation.

This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus. For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here.Advertisement

What is your assessment of Donald Trump’s Beijing summit with Xi Jinping, and what will US-China relations look like after the visit?

I have been involved in three US-China summits, and more than a dozen US-China leaders’ meetings between 2009 and 2015, and I am confident in stating that these summits tend to reaffirm the underlying power dynamics more than change them.

AdvertisementThe Trump-Xi meeting last week is no different – in fact it is the classic case of both sides using a summit to affirm current dynamics rather than change them.

This US-China summit did far more to reflect – not change – the existing power dynamics: a confident, strategically focused China that set the agenda and extracted a valuable framing concession (G2-ish); and a US side that came for trade deals, got soft commitments on purchases that should have been prearranged.

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