This week President Donald Trump heads to Beijing for a high-stakes summit with Xi Jinping - the first U.S. presidential visit to China in nearly a decade. But this isn't 2017 all over again. China is stronger, America's alliances are under strain, the war in Iran has scrambled the chessboard, and the stakes run straight through Taiwan, AI chips, rare earths and critical minerals, and the supply chains the world depends on.

Hosts Ray Powell and Jim Caruso are joined by Michael Sobolik, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of Countering China's Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance.

Michael unpacks why Trump may be arriving in Beijing with less leverage than he wanted, why the Iran war isn't the "four-dimensional chess" anti-China strategy some Washington commentators imagine, and what Xi Jinping's "Christmas wish list" could look like - from a public U.S. statement against Taiwanese independence to economic offers that sound like wins but could deepen American dependence on China and spook America’s Indo-Pacific allies.

He also warns about the AI race hiding in plain sight: selling advanced chips to China, he argues, can mean "equipping your adversary with a weapon they don't know how to make themselves yet." As for Chinese electric vehicles manufactured on American soil, he calls that "TikTok on wheels" - a potential extinction-level event for U.S. and Japanese automakers and a national security nightmare.

Michael flags one summit topic getting too much attention: setting AI rules, which he thinks is likely to yield very little substantial fruit. He also emphasizes another getting too little: political prisoners. Human rights, he argues, isn't just a moral add-on, it's strategic pressure on a Leninist regime that fears its own people, and one of the most overlooked sources of American leverage heading into Beijing.

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👉 Sponsored by BowerGroupAsia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific

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