00:00 Speaker A
President Trump touting progress following his call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, saying on Truth Social that the leaders discussed trade, Fentil, the need to bring the war between Russia and Ukraine to an end, and the approval of the TicTok deal. He went on to say the two will meet at the Apex Summit in South Korea, and that he’ll go to China in the early part of next year. Joining me now to discuss Ian Bremmer, Eurasia Group founder and president. Ian, it’s always good to talk to you and get your perspective on these matters. We did notice that stocks kind of came off their
00:41 Speaker A
highs after we started to get these headlines. I mean, you know, it’s all sort of very seems vaguesh from these two sides. What do you think came out of this call? What how productive was it?
01:03 Ian Bremmer
Uh, it’s a short call, um, and uh it shows that there is a desire to engage in serious negotiations because if you’re doing um a summit meeting, um, you want to have something that you’re going to be able to announce. Um, and so no one was expecting any breakthroughs on any of this. Uh but uh it’s very different. I mean, you couldn’t have a more different dynamic from where we were in the weeks after Liberation Day. The United States and China had essentially imposed a trade boycotts on each other, um, and were also looking at a significant decoupling in the near term.
01:44 Ian Bremmer
That is not where we are right now at all.
01:47 Speaker A
Well, so where are we exactly? And um, will the result of where we are be better than where we were pre-liberation day in the prior tariff regime.
02:02 Ian Bremmer
Um, I I think it’ll be more stable. So in that regard, it’ll be more predictable. And you know, in the in the pre-liberation day runup it wasn’t. People were expecting that there were going to be, you know, sort of big hits that the Americans were prepared to take or else to lots of other economies and of course, Trump has been, you know, quite hawkish on China in his first term, as was Biden. Um, there’s now a shift. Uh we are very close to announcing uh the details of what this TikTok deal is going to look like. That wouldn’t happen unless there was a summit meeting where the Chinese and the Americans are exchanging uh levels of confidence that they are going to improve their relations. The United States
02:51 Ian Bremmer
recently um reduced uh some of the expectations for a defense aid to Taiwan, making the Chinese quite happy about that. Um there’s been a lot of talk about restrictions from China um on the precursor chemicals for Fentil export and those chemicals are needed. So it means a much better capacity for the Chinese to know which customers they’re going to and restrict other sales.
03:22 Ian Bremmer
If that happens, that’s going to be a fairly significant piece of the tariffs that come off from the United States. So all of those things are in train.
03:34 Ian Bremmer
But that’s very different from saying that China suddenly is going to trust the United States. No, those summit meetings you saw with the Shanghai Cooperation organization as well as then with Putin and Kim Jong-un, that’s where China’s heading. It’s building an alternative where they’re telling countries around the world, you can’t trust the Americans they’re unreliable. You can trust us, work more with us. So clearly long-term, this is going to be about more decoupling and more fragmentation in what had been a more globalized environment.