← PBS Washington Week with The Atlantic - Full Show
PBS Washington Week with The Atlantic - Full Show
Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, May 15, 2026
00:23:52
Full Washington Week with the Atlantic broadcast from May 15, 2026.
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- [00:02]
A
President Trump returns to Washington with not much to show for his two day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Despite Trump's praise for Xi and the big not at all spontaneous display of unity and warmth in Beijing, it's clear that China will not be using its leverage to help Trump in the Middle east tonight. How did America become so boxed in? Next. This is Washington Week with the Atlantic. Good evening and welcome to Washington Week. On his way back from China, President Trump told reporters, we've settled a lot of different problems that other people wouldn't have been able to settle. One thing that wasn't settled was China's support for Iran. Another unsettled issue, American arms sales to Taiwan and more broadly, American support for Taiwan. Just as Trump's backing of America's European allies is an open question, so too is his support for Taiwanese freedom. Joining me tonight to discuss the future of the planet, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at the New York Times. Susan Glasser is a staff writer at the New Yorker. Mark Mazzetti is a Washington correspondent at the New York Times. And Nancy Youssef is a Pentagon correspondent and staff writer at the Atlantic. Thank you all for joining me. The future of the planet will be discussed tonight. Peter, it seems like Xi Jinping got what he wanted out of the summit. That fair?
- [01:26]
B
Well, he was the host, he was the dominant figure here. Right. Trump was the supplicant in a way, coming to his territory, to his turf, and he didn't give anything away. As far as we know right now. You never know if there are secret agreements that we don't yet understand. But certainly Trump did not get a breakthrough out of it, did not get any cooperation on the Strait of Hormuz, did not get any large trade deal. And Xi got at least something of what he wanted in terms of Taiwan, some ambivalence, at the very least on the part of the president.
- [01:58]
A
Yeah. What could China do in the Strait of Hormuz?
- [02:02]
B
Well, they have a little impact on Iran, obviously. They, over the years have been one of Iran's bigger customers. And they could, in fact, play it either way. They could pressure Iran to come to the table and make some concessions, or they could in fact, supply them with weapons to help them fight the war against us. And that's the question there.
- [02:21]
A
You point to Mark Mazzetti like, he's the weapons supplier.
- [02:24]
B
He's the weapons supplier.
- [02:24]
A
We'll get to that question in a minute of weapons supplier. But Nancy, let me ask you. So playing on this, if you're Taiwan's Government right now. How are you feeling about America's commitment to your security?
- [02:38]
C
I think uneasy for a couple reasons. One of the things that emerged from this was the president was unwilling to even talk about Taiwan until he was on the plane headed home. They've been waiting for months for this $14 billion arms package. And we saw more ambivalence from the president about funding that and the unwillingness to sort of definitively say that the US Is ready to stand by its policy. President Xi was willing to definitively say that any involvement by the United States would lead to a clash. It was not reciprocated by the United States in its willingness to equally say that it would continue to defend its position. So I think if you're in Taipei right now, there's to be nervous. In addition, militarily, the United States has moved a lot of its naval resources to the Middle East. And so some of the defenses that we have had in the region, some of our commitment militarily has shifted towards the Middle East.
- [03:27]
A
And the US has also spent down some of the stockpiles of the missiles fired by these weapons systems, correct?
- [03:35]
C
That's right. So a lot of the air defense systems that we kept in places like South Korea, that we kept in the region, were moved over to the Middle east for the war in Iran. And it'll take years to rebuild those stockpiles.
- [03:47]
A
So, Susan, let me ask you about two even more important allies in Asia, South Korea and Japan. And you're watching Donald Trump not just these last two days, but watching Trump's general performance and demeanor when it comes to Asia. What are you thinking right now?
- [04:03]
D
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think there was an enormous amount of trepidation looking in advance of the summit on the part of America's allies. They've seen how Donald Trump has treated Europe. Nancy mentioned the air defense. South Korea has paid a large amount of money to be stationed with Thaad air missile defense system. Donald Trump had already, even before the summit, had to pull it out because of the war in the Middle East. And so I think what Donald Trump has made very clear is that no matter what's written on paper, no matter what laws are passed by Congress, there's no permanent commitments or alliances as far as he's concerned. And I think you also have to juxtapose these things. For the last decade, basically, Republicans as well as Democrats in Washington have been signaling to our partners in Asia. You know, now is a different moment. We see China as a much more significant long term threat. Our only peer Competitor, the major rivalry of the 21st century. Donald Trump, in just a few days, has sort of abandoned that position. And I think that in some ways, we're so inured to how radical and disruptive Trump has been to American foreign policy and domestic policy, that we kind of need to take a breath and say if any other president of our recent lifetime, Democrat or Republican, had gone to China and said the things that Donald Trump has been saying, we would be having major front page headlines saying, donald Trump reverses American Foreign policy in Asia.
- [05:28]
A
Mark, it does seem like she accomplished one mission, which is to convince the world that the Americans see China as their peer. Is that fair?
- [05:41]
E
I mean, President Trump was effusive in his praise of President Xi, calling him a great leader. President Xi reciprocated by playing YMCA by the Village People. And that made President Trump very happy. He was, as Peter said, it was sort of as a supplicant, and it was a very good show for President Xi. And as Nancy said, he sort of cast some doubt on the question of Taiwan. Right. President Trump just infused a little bit of doubt about weapons and the support of Taiwan, which is sort of this bedrock policy of the United States.
- [06:13]
A
Right. Going to this. I want you to watch. I want you to watch Trump talking about China. This is on the plane ride back about deference.
- [06:24]
F
Did you talk to him about the cyber attacks that he's done in the United States or the mss? I did, and he talked about attacks that we did in China. You know what they do? We do, too. I told them we do a lot of stuff to you that you don't know about. And you're doing things to us that we probably do know about, but we do plenty. It's a double. It's a double exercise.
- [06:46]
A
You've covered intelligence for years. Very unusual for an American president to say, yeah, they do stuff to us, we do stuff to them. They don't even know some of the stuff that we do. Wink, wink. That's going to Susan's point. We're not. We're still not used to seeing that kind of presidential behavior.
- [07:05]
E
Yeah. It's a theme over the last several weeks that the administration did not want to disrupt the summit, intelligence be damned, about what China was doing. Right. So we reported a couple stories about how China was. Well, it's a little murky exactly how many weapons have been shipped to Iran or the extent of the weapons shipments, but there are some plausible deniability. And there were shipments of missiles that have gone to Iran from China. The president and the administration didn't want to talk about this much. He wanted to talk about. Well, mostly been good on Iran.
- [07:37]
A
Okay, talk about your reporting a little bit on this question.
- [07:39]
E
Yeah. So we reported over the last few weeks that there is intelligence that China has tried to use third party countries to ship at least one large shipment of shoulder fired missiles called manpads that can shoot down helicopters, jets. We saw this in Afghanistan. And so this is China dipping their toe in the water in the military confrontation in Iran. And then the question is, of course, well, so what does China want? I mean, they're not, they don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon, but they don't want to bail the United States out of a mess that the United States is currently in. So they're going to make it hard. And as we saw the last couple days, they're not going to make it easy on President Trump to get out of this.
- [08:23]
A
China and Russia, generally speaking, enjoy when America goes on big adventures in the Middle East.
- [08:29]
E
Sure. And they are happy if this continues for some time. Not forever, but for some time. And of course, as we said, they're looking at this very, very closely with the drawdown and the munitions for what it really matters to them, which is Taiwan.
- [08:43]
A
Come back just from the perspective of an intelligence reporter, come back to this. The way that Trump presents information to the world. Yeah, we spy on them too. I don't recall presidents kind of flippantly and openly talking about this kind of tit for tat. It's not only revealing of information that probably shouldn't be revealed, but it also sort of goes to this in his own mind, kind of a moral equivalence, like, yeah, they do it to us, but we do it to them. So we're all pretty bad. Right.
- [09:15]
E
We recall the famous Putin meeting. Right.
- [09:18]
A
Helsinki.
- [09:19]
E
Right. In Helsinki, where he talks about the US Intelligence assessment on the Russia, on the election.
- [09:23]
A
So wait, just to remind people that that's when he said he doesn't believe us. He doesn't believe US Intelligence because Putin said it didn't happen.
- [09:31]
E
Right, right. And so Putin says it. So who are we to believe here? Right. And this issue now, maybe there's good reason to downplay and not spill out into public some really sort of hot intelligence operations going on. There may be some reason to do that. But as you say, there is a kind of equivalence that he's downplaying and making it kind of seem like it's no big deal. And we're talking about very significant cyber operations that the Chinese have been involved in.
- [09:56]
A
Right. Do we know if Trump brought up privately with Xi? Did the administration give any indication that they brought up with Xi this movement of Chinese weapons toward Iran?
- [10:09]
E
Not that we know of. And whether it was done behind closed doors, whether it was done in other bilateral meetings or, you know, in intelligence channels, we're not sure. We certainly know they weren't trying to make a big deal of it before the summit.
- [10:23]
A
Right. So go back to this point, Peter. How important is China to solving the Iran mess, for lack of a better word?
- [10:32]
B
I mean, I think the problem is Iran is important to solving the Iran mess. Right. We've talked about this now week after week, but the president is in a box. He needs to find a way to get out of it domestically in order to shore up his Republicans, who are facing a pretty tough midterm year. And yet he can't stop the war in a real way without something you can call a victory. And the Iranians aren't going to give it to them. They've made very clear. They feel like they can wait him out at this point. They do not feel like they have lost this war. They feel like the time is on their side and they're not going to simply say, yes, you're right, we're going to give up all of our nuclear programs just because you want us to.
- [11:07]
A
Right. Nancy, I want to talk to you about where exactly we are in the level of crippling of Iran's capabilities. But I have an even bigger question for the table for just something that popped to mind. China is supplying Iran with weapons to fight America. Iran has been in the past fighting, supplying drones to Russia to fight in Ukraine, a Ukraine that's supplied by Europe and America and so on. There's this cascade. Are we in World War Three? But we just don't know it.
- [11:47]
D
Susan, you know, it's interesting.
- [11:48]
A
This is an essay question. 50% of your grade comes from this answer.
- [11:53]
D
Well, you know, it's one of those moments in history. I actually wrote a column based on a conversation with Fiona Hill, the Russia expert, In September of 2022, Jeff, in which she and I were talking about this very question. And I wrote that she said it was quite possible we were already in World War iii. There was kind of a huge amount of freak out at that moment in time. But what she was suggesting is what you're suggesting right now, which is that the adversary alignment between Russia, Iran, China suggests a sort of, you know, call it an informal, certainly not a formalized axis aligning itself. It's what Joe Biden, you know, we don't talk about him anymore. But you know what Joe Biden used to talk about sort of the inflection point, the confrontation between democracies and autocracies. The difference here, Jeff, and that's why I underscored how radical Trump's rhetoric was in Beijing this week. The difference is that it is not clear at the moment what side the United States of America is on. And I think it's very important to underscore that, that the difference From September of 2022, when this, this question of World War III was already out there in, in, in the ether, is that the United States own role in shoring up our Democratic partners in the Middle east and in Asia and in Europe is no longer certain.
- [13:11]
A
Maybe that's why it's not quite World War 3 in the sense that it might be closer to World War III if America knew what side it was on and was more vigorous in confronting this axis of fill in the blank. I'm not going to hark back 20 years, but you know what I'm thinking. Well, but we don't know what the president thinks about this.
- [13:32]
D
Well, we also don't know what America after Trump is going to be like. I mean, you know, the United States wavered before entering World War II, and we sort of wrote the history of that America first movement, you know, out our collective memory, I think, because of, you know, the momentous events that followed. And so we don't know what follows Donald Trump. But I think the question is, were so many Republicans and Democrats wrong when they spent the last 10 years telling us that a major strategic competition with China, including military, economic, all domains that were they all wrong or is that still going to be the case?
- [14:09]
A
Right. Nancy, the Iran war itself, obviously the Trump administration believes that it has won the Iran war. Centcom, the military has more nuanced view of the various levels of degradation of Iranian armaments and defensive and offensive capabilities. But give us your global assessment of where we are right now.
- [14:34]
C
I mean, very simply, there are not any good military options on the table to resolve this conflict. Something like an aggressive restarting of military strikes on Iran doesn't guarantee a win because you could see Iran still carry out strikes on allies, on US Interests. A limited strike, a love tap, if you were, isn't necessarily going to lead to a different outcome. Waiting this out and just having a protracted stalemate isn't an option because of the impact on the world economic market. So you're the best outcome on the table right now. Is some sort of deal on the Strait of Hormuz and dealing with other issues later. But as Peter noted, the Iranians don't have an incentive to reach that deal at this point, according to the US Intelligence community, they believe that they can hold out and suffer the blockade that the United States is putting in for several war months, all the way up until the midterms, which means in some ways, they have checkmated the United States in terms of the timeline with which a deal can be reached.
- [15:37]
A
Does the US have theoretically, the capability of taking Iran, going all the way, troops, the use of troops, the use of weapons systems that we haven't used yet, or is that just not being discussed? Because there's no possible way that President Trump is going to deploy ground troops to create conditions for regime change.
- [16:02]
C
So ground troops don't guarantee a victorious outcome either. And so I think what's missing in this is tying those military tactics to a clear strategic outcome. More force, more troops, more attacks, in and of itself doesn't guarantee it. Now, does the US have the capability? It certainly does, but it comes with risk. It takes. It's a draining of resources. It is costly. And politically, it's risky because I don't think there's an appetite for it, particularly if the outcome leads to an extension, extended conflict, one in which not only the US but the world economy finds itself in a stranglehold because of the ongoing hostilities. And so that's why negotiations becomes the most palatable option. But how you reach that deal and how much you have to concede to Iran and its hold on the strait going forward is what makes it so complicated.
- [16:56]
A
So before the war, there was no Iranian hold on the strait. Now there is. And that's what's upsetting President Trump when he's confronted with the idea that he hasn't won. Is that fair?
- [17:08]
C
Yes, because that was their nuclear option. Taking the Strait of Hormuz. Remember when the United States assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the former IRGC leader, in 2020, they did not retaliate with this way. I think one of the lessons that they've learned is that the way we do deterrence going forward, the way we prevent the annihilation, we, the Iranians. That's right. Is that we hold economic leverage over the world economy, that the practices of the past were not a successful form of deterrence, which means they're not going to easily give up their control over the strait, because to them, it's essential now to their security.
- [17:44]
A
Trump just had a pretty remarkable exchange with Your colleague David Sanger, on Air Force One on this subject, I want you to watch this.
- [17:52]
F
What would the use be of repeating the bombing? You did it for 38 days. No, we did. And you did not get the political changes in Iran. I had a total military victory. But the fake news guys like you write incorrectly. You're a fake guy. I actually think it's sort of some treasonous what you write, but you and the New York Times and cnn, I would say, are the worst. On another war, you should know better this. Your editors tell you what to write, and you write it. You should be ashamed. If this is another war, I actually think it's treason.
- [18:28]
A
I want to make a small point and a big point first. His editors don't tell him what to write.
- [18:33]
B
They were very surprised to hear that today.
- [18:35]
A
They would like it, but they don't. The larger point I want to make, and please jump in on this, is that it's absolutely outrageous for Donald Trump to call David Sanger or any reporter treasonous. That's the worst thing you could accuse a person of being. He's a professional reporter, and he's a patriotic American. We all know him. And he's not, obviously, the first reporter to be attacked by President Trump even this week. One of the things that makes that encounter unusual is that he used the word treason. The other is that David Sanger is not a black female reporter, which is Trump's sometimes preferred target. But on the exact subject that we were talking about, this obviously triggered him in some terrible way.
- [19:19]
B
Well, look, he, in his second term, has been much more willing to go further even than he did in his first term in terms of the idea that anybody who questions him, who says something he doesn't like, who reports something he doesn't either accept or want to believe or knows is true, but doesn't want anybody else to believe, is now not just a bad reporter, not somebody who's a critic or the opposition, but treasonous. He is now using that term, treason and the other term, sedition, with increasing frequency in the last few months. He used it about our coverage, for instance, about his health. It's treasonous or seditious to even ask questions about his health. He said he used that now against politicians as well. Obviously. He accused six members.
- [19:58]
A
I think that was known and behind the Iron Curtain as the Ceausescu rule.
- [20:01]
B
Exactly, exactly. There were six members of Congress who dared to film a video saying to the military, do not follow illegal orders were then not just called. But actually, the Trump administration tried to bring charges against them, criminal charges against them. So I think what we're seeing is a real escalation in this second term about going after people who they consider to be enemies and that they consider to be providing information that they don't want to be out there or views to be squelched.
- [20:33]
C
Can I Just note, Article 3, Section 3 was written very narrowly because the Founding Fathers watched British monarchies make accusations of treason against their critics and the conduct of their monarchies. And so this was written precisely to not be used in this way. If you read Hamilton's Federalist 84, he talks about this, that it is such a high charge that it has to meet the definition of helping enemies during war. And that was written in the spirit of making sure that critics, that the First Amendment and the press's right and responsibility to critique was protected and wasn't abused in such a way that reporters would or critics would be called treasonous for pointing out valid criticisms.
- [21:18]
A
I want you all to watch one more quick clip of Donald Trump talking on these general subjects. This happened, this took place immediately after he was asked how Americans financial health might be affected by the Iran war.
- [21:35]
F
Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I'm talking about Iran, they can't have a nuclear weapon. I don't think about American's financial situation. I don't think about anybody. I think about one thing. We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That's all.
- [21:55]
A
Go Democratic. Democratic. Democratic. Ad makers are going to have fun with that. He was trying to threaten Iran in a kind of way saying, nothing's going to deter me. But that came out in a way that I'm sure people on his team were like, mm, that's not gonna help.
- [22:11]
E
Yeah. I mean, I'm not one to try to interpret what the president says or what he meant to say. Obviously, I think in a charitable way, you could say he was singularly determined to say, this is a national security threat and this is the reason we went to this went to war. And I realize there's economic pain, but this is worth it. Right. Didn't come out that way.
- [22:32]
F
Right.
- [22:32]
E
And as you said, for political reasons. Right. The opposition, the Democrats, will have a field day because it cuts to the very issue with this war, which is unpopular and is causing a lot of economic pain.
- [22:43]
A
Right. Peter, last 30 seconds. It's very, very hard if you're an adversary of the United States, to understand how serious Trump is about preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, for one thing, or defending Taiwan, South Korea or another where does that leave? Where does that leave our credibility? Where does that leave American credibility?
- [23:09]
B
Well, this is the problem, right? So presidents have, over the years, Republicans and Democrats insisted on or tried to maintain a certain discipline, a certain consistency in order to avoid misunderstandings, because misunderstanding in some ways is the most dangerous factor in international relations. Misjudgments, miscalculations about what somebody might do in X or Y situation. And I think in some ways, you could see how that plays out in Iran right now in terms of the miscalculations on both sides.
- [23:35]
A
Well, it's a fascinating conversation, but we are going to have to leave it there. I want to thank our guests for joining me and thank you at home for watching us. For more on how Trump's unpredictability may be making the US an unreliable ally, please visit TheAtlantic.com I'm Jeffrey Goldberg. Good night from Washington.