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14 May 2026
Trump-Xi summit: Has America abandoned strategic competition with China?
On the eve of the upcoming Trump-Xi summit, Donald Trump’s approach to China looks less like strategic competition and more like a search for a deal. In this episode, Richard McGregor speaks with Lowy Institute Nonresident Fellow and former Biden White House official, Thomas Wright, about what the Trump–Xi summit reveals, why the 2025 tariff war ended badly for Washington, and how the Democratic Party is reckoning with its own foreign policy legacy. Wright also makes the case that the world now faces not one American foreign policy, but two — and must plan accordingly.
You can access Tom Wright’s Lowy Institute Paper Inflection Point: Biden, Trump, and the Future World Order here: https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/inflection-point-biden-trump-future-world-order
Featuring
Richard McGregor
Richard McGregor is Senior Fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute, and is a former Beijing and Washington bureau chief for the Financial Times and the author of numerous books on East Asia.
Thomas Wright
Thomas (Tom) Wright is a Nonresident Fellow at the Lowy Institute, and a senior fellow with the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Brookings Institution.