Edge of Ruin: Mike Lampton and Wang Jisi’s Warning on U.S.-China Relations

Summary

Sinica Podcast: "Edge of Ruin: Mike Lampton and Wang Jisi’s Warning on U.S.-China Relations"
Host: Kaiser Kuo
Guest: David M. Lampton
Date: March 19, 2026

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Overview of the Episode

In this timely and sobering episode, Kaiser Kuo is joined by renowned China scholar David M. Lampton to discuss a Foreign Affairs essay co-authored with Wang Jisi of Peking University. The essay, "America and China at the Edge of Ruin: A Last Chance to Step Back from the Brink," sounds the alarm about the perilous trajectory of U.S.-China rivalry, warning of self-reinforcing dynamics that may lead to accidental conflict even if neither side truly desires it.

The conversation explores the genesis of the essay, the shared perspectives (and subtle disagreements) between Lampton and Wang, the lessons of the original Cold War, and urgent recommendations for policymakers. The dialogue is candid, deeply informed by decades of scholarship, and unmistakably personal, as Lampton reflects on generational memory, lived experience of conflict, and what's at stake for future U.S.-China relations.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

How the Essay Came Together

• Genesis of Collaboration
  Lampton recounts how decades of personal and professional connections with Wang Jisi naturally led to the essay, springing from shared alarm about deteriorating U.S.-China ties:

  "I sort of said to Wang Jisi, aren’t you worried about the trajectory of US China relations? Haven’t we learned something from the first Cold War? And are those lessons applicable to our current circumstance?" (04:46 - Lampton)

• Seamless Co-Authorship
  Most of the argument was hammered out together. Distinct sections, like American and Chinese perceptions of Cold War costs, had more obvious individual input (07:38).

Strategic Dangers: Repetition and Escalation

• Mutually Reinforcing Rivalry
  The paper posits that both sides have fallen into strategic rivalry so intense it becomes self-fulfilling—deterrence is becoming harder as new domains (cyber, space, AI) multiply the risk of accident or miscalculation:

  "Deterrence is becoming progressively more difficult to maintain... We are expanding the competition way beyond what existed in the Cold War to space, cyber, AI..." (16:49 - Lampton)

• Core Concern: Accidental War Is More Likely Than Deliberate Conflict

  "The greatest danger may not be deliberate war, but accidental war triggered by crisis, miscalculation, or escalation dynamics that neither side fully controls." (Host paraphrasing the essay, 01:57; Lampton expands at 39:53 & 41:01)

Lessons from the First Cold War

• Both authors are deeply influenced by the immense human and societal toll of the original Cold War:

  "Don’t forget the enormous costs that were made when we made a mistake the last time, in this case, the first Cold War." (16:11 - Lampton)

• Lampton’s Vietnam War experience and Wang’s memory of the Korean and Vietnam wars, as well as the Cultural Revolution, provide urgency to their caution against repeating history (18:23).

Narrative Traps and Securitization

• Each Side Now Sees the Other Through a Security-Lens
  Beijing sees the U.S. as bent on containment and subversion; Washington frames China as systemic challenger. The narratives ossify into “operating systems” for policy—fueling cycles of mistrust and action-reaction escalation:

  "Do you think... one side is more trapped by its own narrative than the other?" (26:30 - Kuo)
  "We each have macro security and national development strategies that are unacceptable to the other..." (26:30 - Lampton)

• Interdependence as Vulnerability, Not Prosperity
  Both sides are abandoning former economic mutual benefit in favor of viewing ties as strategic risk:

  "We have moved so far away from comparative advantage that we’re alienating everybody in the system." (34:52 - Lampton)

Prospects for Stabilization

• Is There a Real Window for Stabilization?
  Given internal and external pressures—including the U.S.-Iran war—Lampton sees a narrow opportunity for stabilizing steps, if only to establish “guardrails” and prevent further deterioration:

  "We see a small opportunity to make limited moves. We’re not talking about nirvana here. We’re talking about turning the rudder of the ship and getting it onto a more stable course." (54:07 - Lampton)

• Practical Steps: "Low-Hanging Fruit"
  Reopen consulates (Houston, Chengdu), restore people-to-people and academic exchanges, let more journalists and scholars in, and resume military-military dialogue (57:10 - Kuo).
  But, as Kuo notes, “are these measures proportionate at all to the problem that you yourself describe? ... or are they just kind of palliative care?” (58:14)

Taiwan: Paradoxically, A Place to Start?

• Counterintuitive Argument
  Although Taiwan is the most acute flashpoint, Lampton suggests it’s also the most logical site for stabilization—drawing on U.S.-China cooperation during the George W. Bush era as precedent:

  "If Iran and Ukraine show anything, [it’s that] little guys can resist. And so I think the Chinese might be happy with reassurance..." (64:29 - Lampton) "At this point, kick the can down the road's positive." (67:17 - Lampton)

• Words Still Matter
  Despite skepticism in D.C. that reassurance means much, Lampton insists declaratory policy and rhetoric still impact perceptions and risk calculations (67:54).

Overconfidence vs. Desperation

• Strategic Overreach is the Greater Risk
  Of two perils—overestimating one’s strength vs. acting precipitously out of perceived decline—Lampton is more worried about the former:

  "I'm worried about us each exaggerating our own power." (71:53 - Lampton)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Human Stakes

  "As veteran scholars in the United States and China, we have lived through nearly six decades of fluctuation... and loathe the possibility of another generation entering a new Cold War." (14:28 - Kuo quoting essay)

• On Early Encounters with China

  "He saw it through the lens of children's books that his aunt had given him from her time in the United States..." (10:01 - Lampton on Wang Jisi)

• On Leadership Lessons

  "You can't load all the deficient policies of the United States on China." (39:31 - Lampton)

• On the Next Generation

  "There are going to be many more retirements out of the ranks of senior people who had deep experience, and a lower replenishment rate... We need national capability to recognize that importance and deal with it..." (74:47 & 80:55 - Lampton)

• On the Perils of Overreaction

  "I’m worried about us each exaggerating our own power. That’s what I’m most worried about." (71:53)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Collaboration with Wang Jisi – Motivation and Methods
  04:46 – 09:09
• Emotional Tone and Generational Stakes
  14:28 – 21:43
• Cold War Parallels and Accidental War
  22:52 – 44:29
• Mistakes and Securitization on Both Sides
  45:23 – 51:59
• Analyzing the Current Window of Opportunity
  52:31 – 56:11
• The Problem of Palliative Policy
  57:10 – 58:43
• Why Taiwan Might Be the Place to Start Fixing Things
  62:35 – 67:17
• On Leadership Change and the Importance of Replenishing China Hands
  74:47 – 80:55

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Book & Person Recommendations

• Paying It Forward: Rosie Levine
  Lampton recommends Rosie Levine, executive director of the US China Education Trust, noting her work building bridges and training the next generation of China hands (82:31 – 85:31).

• Book Recommendation:
  Raider by Stephen R. Platt, a biography of Marine Major Evans Carlson and his connections with China’s Communists, is recommended for its insights into leadership, ideology, and U.S.-China ties (85:41 – 91:41).

• Additional Recommendation (Kuo): New Yorker piece by Chung Ch, “How China Learned to Love the Classics,” on the renaissance of Greco-Roman studies in China (92:26 – 92:36).

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Tone & Personal Reflections

The episode is marked by sobering urgency but leavened by Lampton and Kuo’s trademark intellectual clarity and humanity. Lampton’s personal experiences—military service, decades of mutual engagement—infuse the conversation with gravitas and a palpable desire not just to diagnose, but to avert disaster for the next generation of China-watchers and policymakers.

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Summary for New Listeners

If you haven’t listened, this episode is an essential overview of how two of the most respected U.S. and Chinese scholars assess the gravity of U.S.-China tensions—and, crucially, the human cost of allowing rivalry to drift toward crisis. It’s especially valuable for its lessons from history, honest reckoning with current policy errors on both sides, and pragmatic ideas—however limited—for stabilization. Lampton’s career-spanning perspective offers depth, empathy, and a reminder that the stakes are not theoretical: they’re measured in generations, lives, and the future of the international system.

Transcript

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[Kaiser Guo]

Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, economics and society. Join me each week for in depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Wohl, coming to you this week from my home in Beijing. Sinica is supported this year by the center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Sinica Podcast is and will remain free. But if you do work for an organization that believes in what I'm doing with the show and with the newsletter, please do consider lending your support. I am still looking for new institutional support. The lines are open. You can reach me at synecapodmail.com or just at kaiser quo gmail.com and listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying [e-mail] seriously, do help me out. I know there are a ton of substacks out there. Every couple of days I'm compelled to subscribe to yet another one. They do start to add up, but I think this one really does deliver serious value for your hard earned dollar. So do subscribe. Help me to continue to bring you these conversations and my writings. Today we are going to tackle one of the most consequential questions in international politics right now. Whether the United States and China are drifting into a conflict that neither side actually wants and what can still be done to arrest that drift. My guest is someone who has spent decades thinking about that problem decided to David M. Lampton Mike is one of the most Distinguished scholars of U.S. china Relations in the United States. He is Director of China Studies Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University's Pauli Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, sais, and is the author of a long list, really far too long list, of influential works on Chinese politics and foreign policy. Regular listeners will remember his last appearance along with Tom Fingers to talk about a terrific paper that they had in the Washington Quarterly about the two modes in Chinese politics and how the perception of external threat is such an important factor in determining which mode Beijing enters. Mike joins me today to discuss a new foreign affairs essay that he co authored with Wang Jisi, the prominent Chinese scholar of international relations at Beida at Peking University. The essay is a serious warning about trajectory of the US China relationship and a plea for what the authors call a new normalization. It has the rather ominous title America and China at the Edge of Ruin, A Last Chance to Step Back from the brink. The two of them argue that the United States and China have entered a phase in which strategic rivalry is becoming self reinforcing and that the greatest danger may not be deliberate war, but but accidental war triggered by crisis miscalculation or escalation dynamics that neither side fully controls. With President Trump scheduled to come to China in just three weeks, and in light of the US And Israeli war on Iran, which was just launched two weeks ago, I thought it would be a great time to bring Mike on to talk about this important piece. Unfortunately, Professor Wang Jitsu was not able to join us today, so Mike will be speaking for himself and where appropriate, about the thinking behind their collaboration. Mike Lampton, welcome back to Seneca.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Good to be with you, Kaiser.

[Kaiser Guo]

It's so wonderful that you could join and thanks for getting up early. Let me start not with the argument itself, but with the collaboration that led to this piece. The piece doesn't read like a routine co authored journal article. It reads much more like an intervention. Also, like two very senior scholars, one American and one Chinese, trying to throw a rope really across a widening chasm and pull it back together? I mean, how so how did this come together? Was there a particular moment when one of you, when Wang Jisi or you reached out to the other and said more or less, you know, we need to say something now.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Well, this was a project that surprisingly enough, was easy for both of us, I think, to write. And that's because I think we came to the conclusion there was so much we agreed about. So in this age of contrary analyses in both our society, we found a great deal to agree about and thought we ought to share that. The background was that actually there was a book by Debbie Davis and Terry Lautze, a set of biographies about various Chinese and how they had interacted with the United States over time. And I wrote the chapter on that on Wang Jisu. So for the last couple of years, Wang Jisu and I had been interacting I did a series of interviews with him and I go to China frequently and we see each other. And so with that deep background, on one of my last trips, I've been there three times in the last seven months, I sort of said to Wang Jisi, aren't you worried about the trajectory of US China relations? Haven't we learned something from the first Cold War? And are those lessons applicable to our current circumstance? Because frankly, I see, and I think you do, the trajectory of US China relations moving in a very dangerous direction. And we found, we agreed and we had a framework of basically lessons. Where do we think we are lessons to the past? How do they apply to the current time? And in light of this, what might be some positive steps that we have given that President Trump is going, as we now believe, to China in about two weeks, and then what might they be able to do in the context of that trip? We don't have great expectations for what might be accomplished, but we think positive steps can be made and there is an agenda of future meetings. So this isn't the. You'll notice the title said A Last Chance, not the Last Chance.

[Kaiser Guo]

Right, right. That definite article would have made it even more dire, but so on. Delighted to hear that there was very little area of disagreement between the two of you, but I am going to press you on whether there was any. But before we get to that, how did the actual collaboration work? Was there a sort of tacit division of labor or an explicit one even? Were there sections of the finished piece that were more recognizably yours and others that were more Wang Jisa's, or was it one of those pieces where the argument was just kind of jointly hammered out until the voices became inseparable?

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Well, I think in the end, it's basically inseparable. I think the place where it's most clearly one or the other is where we talk about, say, American perceptions of the costs of the first Cold War. And given it was about American perceptions of the cost of the first Cold War, I played a heavy role in that. But I think one of the interesting things, particularly for a Western audience, is the discussion of the article about how the Chinese, at least some Chinese, saw the costs of the first Cold War from their viewpoint, and particularly talking about the costs of the Korean War and the Vietnam War. And that was, I think, recognizably Wang Jisu. So I think that's the sort of clearest, most separable part. The bulk of it is we just essentially one of us took a first cut at a at a sort of outline, a detailed outline and intellectual argument flow draft. And then we just went back and forth, dropping and adding and modifying and so forth. Be hard to say exactly how many drafts we had, but I think it was probably less than five or six all. Also, of course, you have editors along the way that add. So by the end, it's, I think, for the most part, it reads as sort of one mind at work.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yeah, I would agree. I think it very much does. And that's why I felt the need to ask, because it wasn't always clear. Another thing that wasn't always clear, even in the sections that are about Chinese costs, perceptions of cost during the first Cold War. One thing that I would say about your work overall lifetime of scholarship on China, is that you exhibit fantastic cognitive empathy. I think you understand how China is apt to perceive and to react to different things. That's what makes you, I think, so good. And I think probably the same is true of Wang Yisu. But let me ask you about him in particular. How well do you think he, for example, would be able to sort of articulate in good faith the American position as it was, say, during the Biden administration or how it was during the first Trump administration? Do you think that he's can sort of feel things from the American side?

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Well, this goes back to that biography I mentioned, I did for the Davis Lautz volume. And I think, and I don't want to attribute views to Wang Jisi too much when he's not here to sort of correct or take the rough effigies off. But I think if you read that article about his biography that I did, his family had extensive connections to the United States. His family, his mother, his aunt and so forth. And he talks with great feeling about how he came to first perceive and understand the United States. He saw it through the lens of children's books that his aunt had given him from her time in the United States and so forth. So I think he's, you know, I don't know the extensive biographies of everybody in China in the America field, but he strikes me as having had the deepest and longest exposure to the United States. And also he had a very famous father who was a linguist and paid great attention to language. And what's always struck me about Wang Jisi is the detail and command he has of the English language. It's really exceptional. And I don't think you have that kind of command of language without having a deep and underlying sense of the culture. So without prejudice to others in China who study The United States. I'm unaware of anybody who has that level of cognitive empathy, so to speak, or at least understanding as Wang Jisuo. And I think you can see that that's true. He makes extensive trips throughout the United States. He's taught courses at various American universities, gets high student ratings. So I think he exceeds me in empathy and understanding.

[Kaiser Guo]

That's a tough bar to clear, but. But an excellent, excellent response there. I'm really eager to go and read that biography. It's in the Lauts volume.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Terry La and Debbie Davis. Free Debbie Davis.

[Kaiser Guo]

Okay. And the. Debbie Davis and Carrie la. Okay, fantastic. I will, I will rush out and get that. But were there areas where you did disagree in the back and forth in the iterations of the essay? Were there, you know, there had to have been a couple of points of tension about, about diagnosis, about tone, maybe about how alarmed we should sound about, you know, what's politically possible. So what were. If there, if, if there are any that you, you, you could identify, what were some of the disagreements and, and how did you work them out?

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Well, actually, the, the one area where we might have had some disagreement, I don't know because we didn't talk about it much, was on the title. My own view is that I am very alarmed, but the title is. I tend to want to modulate emotion. That'd be my general impression. I don't think the title was Wang Jisoo's either. I think Foreign affairs gave it, but I think we both probably felt this expressed a degree of alarm that we wanted to convey at this minute, whether we would have chosen we had another title, our working title. But the prerogative for the title goes to the publisher, of course. And so we never really had a discussion, but I imagine we might not. We would have maybe ratcheted down the title a little bit, but it does convey the danger and I think, the direction in which we are going. And it calls for, I think, building a new consensus, not a quest for just redux and engagement, but trying to understand what are the central disputes and strategic images each of us has and how can we work on that in the new context? We're not going, I think we both agree, back to some nirvana of if that's what you think it was. Engagement. Yeah.

[Kaiser Guo]

I mean, one thing that struck me, it didn't surprise me, given how deeply you have both experienced this whole era of US China relations individually. But what did strike me is that, you know, this is no bloodless policy essay. I mean, there is a real generational Human tone in it throughout. You write one passage. As veteran scholars in the United States and China, we have lived through nearly six decades of fluctuation in the bilateral relationship. And you go on that you loathe the possibility of another generation entering a new Cold War. That is not standard foreign affairs language. What personal experience for you sat behind that phrasing? I mean, for those of us who have not read your wonderful memoir.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Well, let's put it this way. There's often, I think, an assumption that commitment and emotional, normative commitment to an end state is inconsistent with objectivity. And I think in sort of the spirit of a doctor, they use scientific method and data and analysis to render a judgment about what the problem is. And you want that to be detached. On the other hand, you went into this field with a commitment, presumably to cure disease, make things better.

[Kaiser Guo]

Right. To make the patient well. We understand. We agree on the end state. We want the patient to be well.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Right, Exactly. And so when the patient isn't well, you have your empathetic reaction to that situation, but you want objectivity. And I think we were striking to say, here's the disease, folks, here's the problem. And don't forget the enormous costs that were made when we made a mistake the last time, in this case, the first Cold War. So I think you. I hope you see two things in the article, and that is one, objective analysis by two people who agree about a lot about what the problem is.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yeah, yeah.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

And then secondly, given that, don't forget what the problem. The costs of the. And we go extensively into our shared analysis, really, of what the costs were. And also I think part of objective analysis is to point to the gravity of the situation. And I think our core intellectual point on that is that we have moved over the last 20, 20 years about. From a policy, both of us, of reassuring each other to a policy of deterrence. And our basic point is deterrence is becoming progressively more difficult to maintain. We have a proliferation now of nuclear weapons. China's increasing its stockpile of both delivery vehicles, warheads. The United States is renovating and probably increasing its warheads and delivery vehicles. We are expanding the competition way beyond what existed in the Cold War to space cyber AI. We are also, as we never did with the Soviet Union, competing for domination of industries of the future. And if you wanted a sort of graphic illustration, just go to Getty Images. Look up Elon Musk where he's wearing a T shirt saying occupy Mars.

[Kaiser Guo]

Right.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

We are in a serious space race with China. So I think we have a commitment to greater tranquility. We're never going to have an absolutely tranquil relationship with China, but we've got to keep the competition within bounds and it's tending towards ever more difficulty in management. So I think you see this twin, I hope you see an objective analysis. Here's the problem. But don't underestimate what the downsides are going to be if we continue down this road. And you asked what was it about our background that made us sensitive? And I don't really presume to speak for Wang Ji Sood. I'll give you my conclusion about what part of his motivation may have been and a little more on mine in my own case. I was a medic in the army in the Vietnam War. And of course, I grew up in the 1950s in California. All of my generation, you know, we have shooter drills in schools now. We had duck and cover drills when I was a kid growing up, you got under your desk and hope you didn't see a blinding flash of a nuclear detonation. And so when I was in the Army, I was down at Fort Sam Houston and in the burn ward and there were lots of burn casualties in the Vietnam War because of helicopters crashing and exploding and so forth. So to me, the Vietnam War was intellectually, you know, a huge mistake, I thought. And I was in the position of seeing the human costs of that mistake. And that's why I always thought you have to devote attention to objective analysis of what the problem is, not group think among leaders and so forth. So in any case, I have this twin commitment to understanding what. Why we were in the situation we were, but having to deal with the. The outcomes really of that misguided policy. So I would say it's complicated, but that's the basic storyline, I think, to Wang Jisi, of course, he, he pointed out in the article is that the. Intellectually, he certainly saw the human costs of the Korean War for China. And he also talked about the costs of sending 350,000 people over time to North Vietnam and the costs of the Cambodian and Laotian wars as well. So he pointed to that. And also of course, the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution and so forth. He spent time out in the countryside and saw what the costs of alienation from the United States were and so forth. So I think we both mixed a desire to understand why are we in the situation we are with a desire to make sure that set of tragedies didn't happen again.

[Kaiser Guo]

When you talk about the downsides, often of course you reference this to the first Cold War. You've already mentioned the first Cold War several times. And I think it sort of compels me to ask what you think of this idea that we are now in a state of Cold war. Again. I mean, very early on you write that what began as hedging behavior has, as you just said, hardened into mutually reinforcing strategic postures that assume long term hostility as the organizing principle of policy. I mean, that's an extraordinarily strong sentence and it suggests something more than just competition, more than mistrust, even more than just strategic rivalry in the ordinary sense. It reminds me very much of something that our mutual acquaintance Robert Daly once said. He said that a state of Cold war exists between two nations when the basic organizing principle in each society is hostility to the other. I've shied away from using the term Cold War, but you have described the situation, hostility as organizing principle. So I wonder whether you think in effect, we are already in a Cold war. Whether people want to use that term or not.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Are we really in a Cold war? And I think that's one of those questions. It depends what you mean exactly. But what I would say is we would make a huge mistake if we don't recognize the parallelism between some of the processes of the first Cold War and the current situation. And I think the core of our worry and what we said there was that deterrence is becoming harder to maintain. And I think what we mean by that is that deterrence is essentially about threat and how you make threats credible, believable, and they have to be unacceptable to the other side to deter them, to, to incentivize them not to do what you're warning them not to do. And the problem is that what constitutes deterrence keeps changing because technology keeps evolving. We now can threaten in ways we never could in the first Cold War through cyber affect domestic statistical systems, welfare systems, power grids, banking systems. We don't even know all of the possibilities of AI, but already autonomous weapons and so forth are an item for possible discussion. Also the degree to which we can use outer space. Contrary to our earlier agreements on the peaceful uses of space. We are now involved in a space race. So I think the defining feature of the first Cold War was really a stair step process in which technology was driving new forms of threat. And the other side then responds by trying to increase its threat level and its capacity to defend itself from the other. And what happens in the end is that you have an ever more expensive security budget and it provides you ever less Security. And I think in that central way that's where were headed. And indeed, if you just look at the recent budget increase in the current NPC, it's going up at about 7%. And the United States is, it's hard to say, but is going up at least as fast. And there are dramatic proposals to further increase that in the year or two ahead.

[Kaiser Guo]

Mike, one of the things that the essay does particularly well is describe how the two sides now really inhabit each other's worst case assumptions. Right. So in Washington, China is now understood as, you know, the, the, the principal systemic challenger. And in Beijing, the United States is, and you know, has been for some time now seen as the sort of central force trying to contain China's rise, to undermine the authority of the party, to, you know, preserve American primacy at China's expense, of course. So at a certain point those narratives stop being descriptions and they become kind of operating systems almost, I would say they become so central. Do you think, it's a fairly straightforward question, do you think that one side is more trapped by its own narrative of the other than the other is, or has the symmetry itself, if that's what you think become the problem?

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Well, I think the problem is, to my way of thinking, there are of course hundreds of problems. But it seems to me, as I guess Chairman Mao would have said, the key link problem is that we each have macro security and I'll say national development strategies that are unacceptable to the other and through, I think, a sort of stair step process, an action reaction process, the natural development process, whereas people get more power, they have more objectives, they have more capacity to achieve those objectives. It's all understandable. But I think that we have national strategies that are no longer and haven't been for some time acceptable to the other. I think without putting too fine a point on it, the United States was much more comfortable with a China that had relatively little capacity to reach beyond its borders. In the situation of the 70s, 80s and even into the 90s, particularly until WTO and 2001, I think the United States was comfortable with the proposition that a strong, stable and prosperous China's in the interests of the United States, as

[Kaiser Guo]

President Obama often said. Right?

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Yeah, yes, we said it all the way at least until about a decade or decade and a half ago, maybe two decades, so that, you know, we were comfortable and we were in a supportive posture and all of the subsidiary policies, whether it was trade tolerance for trade deficits, technology transfer, 375,000 students from China in the United States at the Height. All of this made sense because in the end we weren't worried that China had capabilities it would use against us.

[Kaiser Guo]

Right. And the macro development strategy that you referenced, these were complementary, if at least compatible, if that. Perfectly complementary.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Right. And all along we're pluralistic societies. Each of our societies always had somebody said, be careful, you're becoming too intertwined, too dependent on the other side. They will use that leverage against you when they need to. So there were always skeptics. This has never been unanimity, but the weight of consensus in the United States was that a stronger and more prosperous China would be compatible with U.S. interests. Now that weakened a little when the Soviet Union went away. But on the other hand, terrorism came along and China seemed to be on a similar page and so forth. So I would say we have switched from being comfortable with Chinese modernization and development to seeing it as a challenge. And of course we've had leadership change. The change from, you know, Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao and then on to Xi Jinping. Each of that upped the degree of concern in the United States after Hu Jintao. So if you look at the American strategy, of course, then it looks like containment to China. It looks like the historic fear that China's always had is the outside world will kind of conspire to keep China down and so forth. And it's always. I wrote an article about 2015 on one of the first things that Xi Jinping did was create a National Security Commission. And I thought originally the National Security Commission might be something like our National Security Council to coordinate various departments. And so that the left hand knew what the right hand was doing, that it was a bureaucratic rationalization of the foreign policy apparatus. I got a contract to look into that. And the more I looked into it, it became clear to me that that wasn't what the National Security Commission in China was. It had more to do with suspicion of subversion from the outside world and presented preventing it both in China itself and Hong Kong. And China began to, I would say rather soon after Xi Jinping took over to move in this more skeptical of the outside world. Also very shortly after he took over, he made a major speech in which he essentially, this is my phraseology, but it read to Americans like something like, how about Asia for Asians? And so that began to feed both the American side and also the notion that China had to place greater emphasis on anti subversion, that China had to place more emphasis on self reliance economically and so forth. So I would say underneath all of this and of Course, we've each responded to each move that the others made. And that's why I don't find trying to assign blame. Who's at fault for this? You know, that might be an interesting question at the beginning, but very rapidly it just becomes an action reaction cycle. So I think what we need to have is leaders that try to deal with, get out of this action reaction cycle and develop some positive forward initiatives that will begin to rebuild some mutual benefit in this relation that will act as a restraint.

[Kaiser Guo]

What you've described here is a situation of securitization, of course. I mean, it's happened, as you say, on both sides. Sides, Both sides. Now see the interdependence that was once a feature very much now as a bug. It's primarily, as you write in your essay, a vulnerability with economics subordinated to national security. I mean, that feels right to me to describe the situation we're in right now. But it also raises the question, once that shift happens, once economic ties are understood mainly as exposure, leverage and dependency, it feels like there's not an easy way back. It feels like it might even be a one way ratchet. Do you have ideas that you're ready to talk about on how to delink this, how to make us feel less securitized about mutual interdependence?

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Well, you've hit a key problem and I suppose the, the end point answer is I have some impulses, but I'm not sure I. And I assume Wang Ji still feels the same way, but he needs to speak for himself. I don't have an answer, but I'm a great believer in. Let's start with first principles. If you're going to organize the world and our bilateral relationship to meet the physical, economic, nutritional needs of the world, we need efficiency, a certain degree of efficiency. And we can't allow the military budgets to eat the seed corn of future growth and welfare. So we've got to have a balance, it seems to me. And the first principle, it seems to me, goes back to Ricardo and something called comparative advantage. And that is, and you know, I don't want to say globalization's got a bad rap because it did create a lot of inequality and that created political problems in the United States, in China and everywhere else. So we have to deal with that. But basically we've got to get back to, I think, a greater importance attached to comparative advantage, meaning that each of us, with the exception of major strategic or security items, needs to do what each society is more, relatively more efficient at doing, and leave the Production of other things where we're relatively less efficient to others. Now it has to be modulated by a concern about certain technologies and so forth. So I'm not an extremist here, but we have moved so far away from comparative advantage that we're alienating everybody in the system. China's moved away from comparative advantage by flooding European markets with exports as the US has shut down its import market. So I think a first step would be if Trump and Xi get together either at the next meeting in March, April, or subsequent meetings later in the year that seem to be planned, we ought to try to move towards back, reestablishing what I would call the primacy of comparative advantage thinking. So that's on the economic front.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yeah, bring back Ricardo.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Yeah, bring back Ricardo.

[Kaiser Guo]

I mean, it's. Yeah. Unfortunately, we're at a point right now where, where I think most people in America believe that comparative advantage comparatively favors China. I mean, that, that they understand the importance of manufacturing. They're, they're smiting from the having, you know, having had the US economy so hollowed out, they look at China's $1.2 trillion trade surplus. They may take issue with the, the naked mercantilism of the Trump administration's thinking, but they understand that China's massive trade surplus, 1.2 trillion in 2024. I don't know if you saw today, new trade numbers for Europe just came out and there is a massive, massive increase across the board to all major European economies in Chinese exports for the months of January, February, I believe. So it's going to be tough going for a while.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Just on that point, we provide some fig and I agree with everything you said and China has to do something. Right. I'm sure what Wang Ji Si would think, and what I'm going to say is we're not proposing that only the United States do something. This is going to have to be both sides making adjustments. And the adjustments you've identified, I think are universally conceded to be a very important responsibility that China has in the article we did point out though, that keep in mind, at the same time there was growing, since mid-1980s, a dramatically growing U. S China trade deficit with China. First of all, the services balance was not nearly as lopsided and there were lots of statistical things going on that made the trade deficit actually less worrisome in some respects than the headline numbers. But the main point we make there is as many problems and inequities and unfair trade relations that did exist. The per capita GDP of China grew dramatically but by 2024, the US was further ahead of China in per capita GDP by far than it was when globalization took took root in, you know, from WTO in 2001 on. So the point is that the macro storyline that the United States did not make gains in the era of globalization is absolutely wrong. Part of China's motivation for its internal economic policies and its competitive position is that it realized that as rapidly as it was growing, the United States was further ahead in per capita terms than

[Kaiser Guo]

it was when it started in absolute per capita terms. But in terms of percentage growth, it wasn't.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Right. Sure, it's complicated.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yeah, it's complicated. And of course, there's what parts of American society got richer and really benefited from globalization. That's, you know, Branko Millerovich's elephant curve, right, that the 1% really, really gained from. From globalization.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Exactly. The lower middle class, not so much the 1%. That decision was in many respects an American decision about how to allocate spending and how to allocate taxation. And, you know, you can't load all the deficient policies of the United States on China.

[Kaiser Guo]

So your essay is an extraordinarily ambitious one. The section on accidental war is one particularly arresting one in the piece, and maybe something that more concrete measures can be taken about. I mean, you write that the danger today lies less in a deliberate conflict than in an accidental one. And you invoke the EP3 collision near Hainan, April of 2001. I was in China during that time, and I was Here during the May 1999 Belgrade embassy bombing, too. And I've often thought about that. What if something like that were to happen again today under present conditions? I remember in 99, there were about a million people online, and already, you know, we had these sort of patriotic hackers getting together and attacking, you know, U.S. doD sites and things like that. I can't even imagine what would happen if. If it were, you know, today when there are 1.2 billion people all online. You say that could trigger not just a war, but a nuclear war. I mean, that's a pretty stark claim. What specifically has changed to make accidents so much more dangerous now than they were then in the turn of the millennium?

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Well, I think a number of things. First of all, let's. And it's been coming out over the last decade or so. Let's first of all start with a recognition of how perilous the threat of accidental war was just with the Soviet Union. There were several incidents in which the United States itself had vehicles crash in The United States with nuclear weapons. There were instances in which our early warning system, called the DO system up in Canada and Greenland misidentified objects, often birds, as an attack. In one case, the United States put the wrong disk that simulated a Russian attack in the computer that recognized mistakenly that the United States was under attack and came dangerously close to having to respond to that. And at that point, China was relatively few nuclear weapons and so forth. Now we're talking about a world in which you not only have Russia with a large number of nuclear weapons, you have China building up, you have the Japanese beginning to think about how to respond. You have North Korea. That's a wild card for everybody, including China, but certainly certainly us. As China builds up, India will react. As India reacts, Pakistan will react. This is a can of worms.

[Kaiser Guo]

Absolutely.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

And just sort of the law of statistics. The more objects you have in interaction, the more likely they're going to be to bump into each other. So I just start at the most basic level also many of our news sources and so forth now with social media being a source of news for particularly the new generation. And we know that social media is basically organized around algorithms that select in favor of conflict and interest. And so it seems to me our information systems are becoming more reactive quicker and biased towards negative outcomes. So I would say it just seems to me that the combination of numbers, technology on the Internet and so forth, also we're moving to new domains. We could, with the Soviet Union, we cooperated in space in many regards. We had an outer space treaty that said you will not turn planetary bodies and constellations into platforms for weapons. And now that's all falling by the wayside. Also, we didn't have the ability to fundamentally affect remotely and covertly critical utility systems, power systems, banking systems, health records and so forth, and even deny who did it. So I just think no matter which way you look, if you believe in the action reaction cycle, if you believe in deterrence theory, you've got to be alarmed.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yes, yes. I remember a few years back I read a book called Command and Control by Eric Schlosser about. I mean, they cataloged all those near misses that we had that you mentioned just now. It's a really, truly frightening book. If anyone wants to deepen their insomnia, check that out. Yeah, but let me press you a little bit on this phrase accidental war, because I mean, that phrase can sometimes do a little too much exculpatory work. I mean, accidents happen, sure, inside systems that human beings have built, but guardrails don't just erode on their own. I mean, when you look at the last decade where, Mike, do you see the most damaging choices having been made by either side? Not in terms of assigning moral blame necessarily, but in terms of just actual decisions that have made crisis more likely, that have increased the chance of accident happening?

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Well, in the quest, and I'm not associating Wang Jisu with my response to that, he would need to speak for himself. But I would say there are and this isn't an exhaustive list. Your question deserves a very comprehensive and a thoughtful response. But I'll make a first draft here for you. It seems to me we're both making mistakes, that is the US And China. And it's an interesting question. When did the mistakes start piling up? And we often point to 2015 or 2010, 2015 era, the development of the pivot. I think that we could certainly say made in China 2025. So you could flag some policies, but I just had to pick a couple. As far as China's concerned, I think the most alarming thing to me was when if you think back to 2008 and the Russian encroachment on Georgia. Georgia, China reacted and opposed that. And it did not associate and in fact distanced itself from the Russian move in Georgia.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yeah. It didn't recognize South Ossetia or Abkhazia.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Right. And identified itself with its traditional principle of sovereignty is inviolable and applied that to Russia. And then you come along to. It's a long story, but February 2022 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and it's a long, complicated story, but China did not disassociate itself from that. And the US became extremely worried that China might participate more actively on behalf of the Russians in Ukraine. A war of aggression in the heart of Europe. And I think a lot of people were skeptical before, but that alignment in the Ukraine war, to me, and I think many of the people that I talked to was a defining because here China, for really the first major time, distance itself from the basic principle of its foreign policy, the inviolability of sovereignty.

[Kaiser Guo]

It still does invoke that at every turn. Anytime a diplomat representing the PRC opens his mouth about the Ukraine conflict, that's the first thing they'll say. And it's intended as something of a rebuke. I mean, and I think it's still worth remembering that they still to this day have not recognized Crimea after its supposed annexation in 2014 as being part of Russia. They haven't recognized Donetsk or Luhansk which Russia claimed on the eve of the invasion as its territory. So, Yeah, I mean, there's still a case to be made that they have not gone all in. They certainly have not.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Well, I think you're correct that China has said those things along the way, but I think I'm correct in saying that the perception in the United States was that China was going to do nothing by way of putting pressure on Russia to adhere to those principles. And I think the United States paid a lot of attention to the joint statement of. Was it February 4, 2022? No limits. When you say no limits partnership, you know, the, the simple minded reading of that is there are no limits.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yeah. And we can talk about this another time. I mean, that's a long conversation, but.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Yes, but you asked.

[Kaiser Guo]

But you're right about the perception. Certainly from the US Side, the perception is there.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Exactly. And remember, we're talking about empathy and perception and all of these things. So I would say that was a very important moment there. Also, I think China, if you think back to its, its previous foreign policy when it had adversaries, the Soviet Union and the United States, at the same time, it went to its three world policy, trying to win over the intermediate states, the third World, the states of Europe and so forth, to sort of counterbalance the two superpowers. China now and particularly are less so now. I think it's in the process of changing, but for the last few years with Wolf Warrior diplomacy and the pressure that it's put on the Philippines and so forth, it seems like China has. And I think China's in the process of trying to now move away from this. And I think that's one of the opportunities we face that China recognizes, I think some of the perceptions I just mentioned. But I think the Wolf Warrior diplomacy was really hurtful because it affected the confidence with which small and medium powers looked at Chinese foreign policy and intentions. So I think those were two problems as far as the United States. I mean, just looking at the Trump era. But you could also go back to the Obama era and the pivot policy and so forth. I think the United States certainly aggravated the allergies that China has stemming from its history and past behavior of the United States. So I think that also I think another thing that's contributing to all of this is we are abandoning, we, the United States are abandoning the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks process, we abandon the intermediate FL force missile process, all because we saw China as increasing its capacity and so on. So to make a long story short, the United States has Abandoned in many respects the multilateral structure that gave stability during the long peace dividend period. So I think there's plenty of room for blame both ways.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yeah, absolutely. We let's take the rest of the time we have here now and look toward the future because the central claim of the piece is that yes, the trajectory is quite dire, but it's not irreversible. And you write that in the coming months, the coming months themselves may present a rare window for stabilization and for what you talk about this sort of new normalization. So I want to ask you very directly, why did you believe that when you wrote that and do you still believe it now in what's happened in the intervening month or so?

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Well, with the caveat that anything seems possible given the flux in the world, I think it remains our central argument that there is a window of opportunity. Perhaps we don't say categorically. We say we perceive there's a window of opportunity in which the political environment in both of our countries may be creating a possibility to at least somewhat stabilize. You use the word guardrails. So we may have an opportunity, but key word may. And remember, we wrote this article before the invasion of Iran by Israel and the United States just to force tell your question.

[Kaiser Guo]

Sure.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

I think in a way the Iran invasion makes it more likely we may see an opportunity here. But why did we say we see an opportunity? In no particular order, we point to some public opinion polls and public opinion polls, the Pew Organization and in China Tsinghua University both show upticks in the case of the Pew or the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations poll show about. I think it was 14 point increase in those that believe getting along and engaging with China is an important thing. So that was the first time you've seen it go in a positive, significant direction for a very long time.

[Kaiser Guo]

Right? Right.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Secondly, China had its fourth plenum and of course now it has its two sessions going on. But I think the underlying ethos, so to speak, of the fourth plenum is China has tremendous internal economic and other problems. We need to devote tremendous investment to both increasing our innovative capacity at home and economic efficiency. And along with this, China has now what? Purged. I'll say purged what? In excess of 40 senior officers in the military. I'm just not entirely sure that the top leadership of China thinks that the PLA is in the best shape it needs to be if it's going to be very confrontational. Also, the United States in November came up with its new national security strategy and one of the most important phrases there was the United States can no longer be atlas supporting the world. I think in conflict right now there are divisions within the Trump administration, inconsistencies and so forth. But we argue that the United States is stretched, realizes it's stretched. And of course, if we already thought things were stretched before Iran, think about what, what it must be now. So we see a small opportunity to make limited moves. We're not talking about nirvana here. We're talking about turning the rudder of the ship and getting it into a more stable course. And there are other meetings that seem to be planned later in the year. And so we argue this is a first step in what could be a more positive direction. So if that counts as optimism, now, count as optimistic.

[Kaiser Guo]

I too am an inveterate optimist. But I confess, you know, it's hard to see the whole period stretching from, you know, the Busan sort of truce, the trade truce. Even if that truce is extended after Trump's March, April visit, it's hard for me to see that as much more than just sort of buying time by each side to address vulnerabilities, strengthen their respective hands ahead of the next inevitable collision. So I'm still wondering what makes this a real opening rather than just a brief lull, a kind of warmer patch of meteorology in a still kind of cold climate trend?

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Well, I guess there's a number of things to say that if we buy your analysis, what do we do?

[Kaiser Guo]

Yeah, right.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Where does your analysis lead? And I think the answer is more of the same.

[Kaiser Guo]

Unfortunately, that would be it.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Or maybe more of the same. Right, so I'm left, not that your analysis is wrong, but if you adopt that analysis, you will continue on exactly the track we have described.

[Kaiser Guo]

Well, I mean, not necessarily that they may be on my analysis, but I see that as, as still exhibiting a really deep pathology. And it's the same pathology that you identify. It's just whether. I just think maybe we need to sort of manage what our expectations are and pick a few pieces of lower hanging fruit. So let's talk about that, about the things that you identify as relatively low hanging fruit. I mean, some of these things that you talk about are things I've been saying for a long time, let's reopen Houston, reopen Chengdu, you know, reciprocally, restore exchanges, you know, let more journalists and more scholars stop treating students and researchers as presumptive, you know, spies and revive more mill to mill talks. All these things are good things, all sensible, all things that I would absolutely advocate. But I mean, the thing that nags at me is, are these measures proportionate at all to the problem that you yourself describe? I mean, if the disease is pretty deeply systemic, increasingly, you know, civilizational in rhetoric, it's military in structure, it's increasingly identity laden. Right. I mean, I wonder if these, if these remedies are enough or are they just kind of palliative care.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Well, you've got a lot of things there. And of course, I'll say my fear, and I presume Wang Jisu would subscribe to some large portion of this fear that I have, is that you may well be right. But let me just put a couple of things in the mix which we haven't mentioned. The United States and China in the indefinite in case of China, indefinite future, but presumably not distant future, there's going to be leadership change in each of these countries. And I believe underneath, and I've been told by people in China that when it comes to foreign policy and China's position in the world, there are two irreconcilable opinion groups. At the current time, there's only one voice, but underneath there is contestation. And there are many that think yes, there were problems in globalization and maybe over dependence on the United States and so forth, and that China has more power and deserves more respect. But on the other hand, there were large benefits to China in what you might call both the engagement period and so forth. And so there are people who want to modify policy to the degree they can increase the gains and diminish the reaction. Many Chinese are not comfortable with the reaction that the rest of the world has had to Chinese, first of all, wolf warrior diplomacy and so forth. So there's going to be some leadership change there, and this presumably will be leadership change in the U.S. maybe it'll come more incrementally, perhaps in the next congressional election, perhaps in the next general election in 2028. So hard to say when and what its nature will be. But both of our, I believe, succession systems will produce a somewhat different reality. Now, it could be something more intractable and more committed to conflict, but we do have systems that are pluralized, different views and so on. So we ought to try to create an environment that at least empowers more moderate voices. That may be a limited idea, but that's certainly what I think.

[Kaiser Guo]

I do want to pull on this thread where you suggested that the Iran conflict might actually maybe widen the window of opportunity here or increase the likelihood for some kind of a climb down. But before we do that, I do want to ask you about this because everything leads inevitably to the issue of Taiwan, which is where your essay makes what I think might be its most counterintuitive move. You say that the best place to begin stabilizing the relationship is perhaps counterintuitively with its most dangerous dimension, the long simmering issue of Taiwan. I think nobody would debate whether that is the most dangerous dimension. That is, absolutely. Most people, though, would maybe say the opposite. That because you describe it as counterintuitive, I think you're right there. Taiwan does not seem like an issue that is amenable to stabilization to a lot of observers. It's the issue where, you know, all the contradictions are concentrated. So. So make your case, Mike. Why do you see Taiwan not as the place where stabilization goes to die, but as the logical place for stabilization to start?

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Well, it's a complex picture and there are many things feeding into it and it's not so easy to put into a coherent package. But let's give it a try. First of all, let's look back and when was the Taiwan issue from the viewpoint of the United States? And I believe China managed well, and when it was managed well is, I think during the administration of George W. Bush.

[Kaiser Guo]

Okay.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Wen Jiabao came to the United States in 2003, and at that point we had Shen Shui Bian in Taiwan upsetting the status quo by the judgment of both Beijing and George W. Bush, and contrary to his own personal history and support of Taiwan, despite his skepticism about Beijing, he recognized that Taiwan could destabilize the US China relationship to the point where it would not be in the interest of the United States and could drag us into open ended conflict. And that was unacceptable to him. And he conveyed that he did not support any destabilization of the status quo. And the whole idea of destabilizing leadership in Taiwan, upsetting the US China relationship to the detriment of a fundamental American interest was great. And so he issued with Wen Jiabao in his presence talking about urging Chen Shui Bian to be cautious.

[Kaiser Guo]

Right.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

And then of course, we later had Ma Ying Zhou that built on that stabilized relationship and increased, you know, had meetings with senior PRC leaders, agreed on increasing tourism, trade, investment. And we had a long period, at least eight years of Pacific progressive relations that helped Taiwan as well as the mainland. And I think since that time we, the United States, have chipped away at the confidence that the PRC has that we are committed to the one China policy. And indeed, there's been movement in both directions. You have Trump sort of saying how important trade is, suggesting maybe Taiwan's not so important, but you also have massive weapons sales to Taiwan that worry the prc. So I think the Chinese are not sure about what our real policy is. And therefore I think that we need to once again make it clear that we oppose the use of force, but that we do not support de jure unilaterally declared independence and that we would be disappointed if Taiwan were to move in such a direction. Now there's a debate and that's hard to say in the United States States. But on the other hand, I think at this moment, and also PRC military may not be in any shape to do too much now. It could certainly start a embargo and all sorts of steps on the escalation ladder. But if Iran and all of the current and Ukraine show anything, his little guys can resist. And so I think the Chinese might be happy with reassurance and coming out of the fourth plenum, concentrate on economic and social issues in the prc. And this doesn't solve the problem for the indefinite future. Nothing we've ever done since Nixon and you know, the Shanghai Communique has permanently solved this problem. It's just managed it. You might even ingenuously say kick the can down the road, but at this point, kick the can down the road's positive.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yeah, it seems like a pretty good option to me. I mean, I think where you're going to get pushback is, I mean, sure a lot of people would agree that the words, the behavior matters more, but the words matter. I happen to agree many though in D.C. are going to hear that and say, well look, this is stale formulaic language. Beijing just no longer trusts declaratory policy. We've kind of, you know, that, that, that ship has sailed. Repeating the old phrases without changing the underlying strategic trajectory is not going to do a whole hell of a lot. So why do you think that the words still matter enough to be really worth foregrounding, I mean, as you do in your piece?

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Well, I think, well, first of all, if we just, this is my personal opinion, I'm not associating Wang Jisuo with this, but I agree with you that what Trump said, because we have to talk about Trump and what he says, because he's made it perfectly clear that is the policy du jour, even if it changes every day, it's the policy. And it'd be almost, I mean self evidently false to say he's a high credibility articulator of policy. But on the other hand, I think the Chinese are great structuralists when they look at a situation and I gotta think this is my projection of their thinking is they've got to see the structural position of the U.S. i think they have a kind of idea that strategically the US is weakening itself greatly and that's the trend. We're alienating ourselves from our allies. We're expending ammunition in wars, several wars. The United States, I mean you just look at our commitments and he said he had just particular importance to, to the Western hemisphere and clearly he does. But we've got commitments in Venezuela obviously Iran, Ukraine, Russia conflict, Taiwan, we're talking about Cuba, Gaza, North Korea. You could even throw the bathtub in of Panama Canal.

[Kaiser Guo]

Sure. And of course Greenland.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

I think the Chinese just look at the situation and sort of like in the anti Japanese war, say Japan is a small nation trying to occupy a big nation. If we can protract this thing out, they're going to lose interest or capability or whatever, which is historically pretty much what happened. So I think they think the desire is expressed in the national security strategy of the US can't be Atlas holding up the world. I believe the Chinese probably think that true now over what time frame? And so what I'm really trying to say is I think that given their belief that over time the US is overextended, the idea that we don't want another conflict in Taiwan is probably at this moment a credible statement.

[Kaiser Guo]

That's assuring. But there's another problem that you raised near the end of the piece. There's a pair of warnings. One is that, you know, a lot of Americans still expect China somehow to experience kind of Soviet style political unraveling, a collapse. And there's, you know, people in China conversely who think that China is going to comprehensively catch up with or surpass the United States. In reality, you, you don't, you know, you, you write in your piece neither outcome is likely. I get that's, that's an important corrective I think on both sides. And I certainly agree. I, I would caution against hubris or, or you know, I think the belief in collapse is very much a coping strategy. But then you add something even more interesting, which is that the opposite danger exists. And this is why I wanted to raise this just after what you've just said. And the problem is that each side may fear its own position is eroding and therefore feel pressure to act sooner rather than later out of concern that we are now at peak power. If we don't do something now, the time is not on our side. So which of these dangers worries you more right now? Overconfidence about one's future position or anxiety that they face a closing window of opportunity?

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Well, I think my own view is I'm worried about us each exaggerating our own power. That's. Of the two possibilities you identified, that's the one that worries me. I did not ask Wang Jisu that question, so you might want to sometime ask him. That's the one that worries me. That alternative was put in because you can end up in a war by each. And just look at Japan, Japan In 1944, 45, the US had imposed embargoes on Japan. Japan could daily see its strength declining. And their basic view was we act now or very quickly or we will lose the opportunity, the window to redress the situation at all. And they took their decline as they saw their own situation to be incentive to attack now, ergo the surprise attack in Pearl Harbor. So we put that in, or at least I, I mean, I was in favor of it being there because I thought intellectually there's more than one way to get in a problem. And my general view is that oversimplified analysis is a danger when you're two superpowers interacting. So if you ask which one I'm worried about, I'm worried that we each think we're stronger than we are. That's what I'm most worried about. But on the other hand, I can intellectually say if one of us were to sort of be on a trajectory of decisive dominance, then you'd have to become worried about somebody arguing, let's try to correct the situation now before we're even in a worse position.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yeah, I think that would be very destabilizing. Let me move to wrap up here. You and Wang Jisi have both kind of trained generations of us and China, specialists in the relationship. In the other hand, I have a whole generation of them. You've learned firsthand, both of you, how strategic hostility can seep into the classroom. You're educators, you see this, but also into, you know, into families, into personal aspirations. You write about this in your, in your piece. You close by saying that even with all these analytical tools that we have, I mean even AI now, what is still required is what you call strategic memory, crisis experience, cross cultural trust that is built over decades. That's powerful. It's also a little elegiac. Are you worried that the people who most viscerally understand the costs, who really have skin in the game, the costs of sustained enmity are gradually just kind of aging out just at the moment that they're most needed.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Well, I'm involved with a project by the US China Education Trust to try to get and we've been to China and talked to the authorities, educational authorities there about this and universities. I am worried about the declining number of students serious going into serious China studies. I'm not talking about a two week trip. I'm talking about living in China and you know, at the basic levels and interacting with Chinese citizens over a long period of time, getting access to archives, getting a more fine grained empathetic understanding of how China operates whether we like it or not. So we have a report coming out that's going to talk about America's China talent problem. We certainly have fewer than 2,000Americans what I will say seriously study in China and it went down to about 350 at the most in the COVID period. And also universities in the United States and in China are making it harder for graduate students to go both ways. You in the end, some institutions much more supportive than others. We also have a fabric of schools in China, nyu, Duke, Kunshan Hopkins, Nanjing and others. So it's not totally bereft. But there is a looming situation in which there are going to be many more retirements out of the ranks of senior people that had deep experience, experience with China and a lower replenishment rate. So I think strategically we need to up our ante there. And as we did in the first Cold War, we had scholarships and the Ford foundation had four year guaranteed awards to make sure people would study language and concentrate on China. So something like that I think is warranted. So we got a problem there. But I do want to tackle this idea. Is the younger generation sort of structurally more hostile to China than the older generation? My experience, well, it's a complex story, but my experience is I see the same range of opinion about China today between what's now the older generation and younger. As I saw when I was a graduate student, we were protesting against older faculty on the one hand and there were many students on campus that agreed with the older faculty. So my overview is that there's the same range. Now maybe it's not exactly that reassuring because when I grew up into the field the opportunity was especially after Nixon and it grew during the 70s you could build a career by the opportunity was go to China and learn something that nobody else was looking at. And I mean I went off to Hubei province and looked at water conservancy. That's how I thought I could learn about China. So now with all the security concerns and graduate students are often afraid they couldn't get a security clearance if they have too much exposure to China. There are discouraging obstacles to students and also financial support isn't there. And universities are imposing limits on how you interact with Chinese students, out of human subjects protection and so forth. So if you're trying to make your way as a young person now in the field, you've got a whole set of security concerns, financial concerns, and of course the jobs are increasingly in the national security area. So I would say, you know, and I came up through the system, the anti Vietnam War, so it's not to. There. There is a difference in the environment, but just as a first cut, my basic view is there are as many or there are a lot of students that still have the objectives that the older generation, many in the older generation would recognize. And also there are as many people that are concerned about security and how to. I remember when I told my father I was going to go into China Studies, it was like I let a bomb under his feet. He just. That was the first thing he could imagine. So I don't think the effort to sort of say, well, the younger generation's different than the older. Yes, they are in a different environment, but there's still a broad range of motivation and motivation to go into the field.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yeah. And I mean, as much as I'd like to say otherwise, listening to Seneca even regularly is no substitute for actually seriously undertaking China scholarship. No matter how many Mike Lamptons I bring on or how many Mike Lampton chairs, David M. Lampton chairs at sais. I bring on Jessica Chen Weiss and wonderful scholars like her. So you get out there and yeah, you've described a lot of hurdles. The clearance thing should not be on top of your mind right now. I mean, the world that you're going to be entering the job market after you finally finish is going to be a completely different one. There's no such thing as preparing for it now, but it can't hurt you to learn China. Right?

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Right. Also, I mean, no matter how this relationship goes, whether it goes in a more reassuring, optimistic direction that we've been trying to talk about here, or continues on this very dangerous trajectory, China's going to be really important and the United States is going to be important to China, and we need national capability to recognize that importance and deal with it as most intelligently as possible. It may end up on a trend that I or people of similar thinking decry. But we have to try to manage it. It's our responsibility, not only to our citizens, but to the world. So I have no doubt those who know about China are going to be in a position that is valued by both our societies.

[Kaiser Guo]

Amen to that, Mike. And let me remind everybody that the essay is called America and China at the Edge of Ruin, A Last Chance to Step Back from the Brink. The authors are, of course, David M. Mike Lampton and Wang Ti Si of Beida. You can find it in the current issue of Foreign affairs magazine. Thank you so much for taking the time. Let's move on now to the segment that I call Paying It Forward. Mike, do you have a younger scholar or colleague or somebody who you've worked with over the years that you want to bring out into the light?

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Well, she's already emerging into the light, but I think she deserves more brightness put on her. Her name's Rosie Levine.

[Kaiser Guo]

Oh, Rosie. She's good friends with her mom and Rosie's terrific.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Yeah. Okay. Well, we didn't plan this, did we?

[Kaiser Guo]

No, no, no.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Kaiser, no. So anyway, Rosie Levine is executive director of the US China Education Trust. I mentioned the project that we're involved in about trying to get more serious scholars to China and get the Chinese to open up more to them. So she's heading that project. We're rolling out the project in the next couple of weeks. We took a trip to China to speak to, I'll say, middle level leaders in the education realm and with the party. She's done a wonderful job in organizing that. Earlier, Rosie spent four years at the National Committee on US China Relations and managed the Public Intellectuals Program also at the National Committee. That's an effort that's now quite well developed to develop young public intellectuals over time. And she ran that for the national committee from 2014 to 2018. Rosie lived in Beijing, completed her master's at Yenching Academy and served as program director at the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center. She's a graduate of the University of Michigan and head of the Young China watchers in Washington, D.C. oh, fantastic. Trying to keep the community of people who have deep understanding of China in Washington, D.C. getting together, understanding where they think China's going and what constructively could be done about that. So I think she's somebody who merges the world of action, non governmental organizations and academia very committed to bringing this community together. And I think people like her just deserve all the support they can get.

[Kaiser Guo]

I couldn't agree with you more. And she's a marvelous human being to boot. I thought for A long time about getting a show together with second generation China people. I mean, Rosie would be one of them because her mom, Joan Kaufman, of course, who's academic director at the Schwarzman Program and was at the Ford foundation in Beijing for a very, very long time. Another wonderful friend. But yeah, lots of these second gens now coming up and I gotta gather them and do a show.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

You can see why I reacted the way I did when you said the younger generation.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yes, yes, yes.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Absolutely skeptical. I mean, it's true at one level, but there's wonderful motivation among lots of people.

[Kaiser Guo]

All right, fantastic. Paying it forward, Rosie Levine. All right, let's move on to recommendations. Mike, do you have a book or a film or something that you've read or seen recently that you want to recommend?

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Well, I've always loved biography and I've always loved military history. And one of the first books I read was Guadalcanal Diary. But anyway, the book I want to recommend here is the Raider by Stephen R. Platt, put out by Knopf in 2025. And the book Raider is about swashbuckling Major Evans Carlson, who started in the US army in the early 20th century. He didn't do initially very well in the US army, quit, but rejoined the US Marines and went to China. And that's where the book really gets going. He was in the Marines in China and then spent some time in Nicaragua. Nicaragua and so forth. But he became a guard for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yeah. Down at Warm Spring. Yeah, yeah.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Yes. In the 1930s. And he came back and went back to China in the 1933 in the intelligence Corps. And in due course in his time in China met Zhu De and Zhu De. And he developed somewhat of a personal, I don't want to say intimate relationship, but a personal understanding and I would say friendship.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yeah. And he learned a lot of tactics from him as well. And you know, as we, Evans Carlsen went on to become the founder of the second of the Marine Raider.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Right. And develop the idea of the gung ho.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yeah,

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

the whole gung ho idea in English language. Yeah, Introducing that phrase came from him.

[Kaiser Guo]

So, Mike, I don't know if you heard the show, but we actually did a show. I did a show with Steve about the book. Please do go back and listen to it. Steve is a wonderful raconteur and he is one of my favorite writers as an historian. I mean, because his other two books, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom and Twilight of Empire, are just so beautifully written. Just in terms of his prose, this is just absolutely Worth it. And Raider is just great.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

He's a great scholar. The writing wise, as you say, is the great joy. I don't want to equate with Jonathan Spence, but if I had to think of another writer and historian that had the gift of beautiful language, it's him.

[Kaiser Guo]

Well, not coincidentally, he studied in her. Spence. Yes.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Yeah. At Yale.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yeah, yeah.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

So in any case, there are two things that resonated with me at. At this moment. First of all, the book is the lesson. It seems to me these are my lessons of leadership and how he built small unit loyalty.

[Kaiser Guo]

Absolutely.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

And by the role of ideology and how guerrilla warfare and small unit cohesion and all of that. So there's the whole notion of the Green Berets and irregular warfare and what it takes for small units to be successful and the importance of belief systems and the importance of the leader not being at what you might call kiss up, kick down kind of leadership. It's rather sticking up for your men and articulating the situation to leaders who often don't want to hear what you have to say. And there's a whole by play about how his own leadership in the Marines he wasn't endured to his leaders in the Marine and they had trouble finding people to come to his funeral when he died in 1947. But it's a study in leadership and loyalty building and so forth. I think in this era of leaders we can think about. This is an example to think about. The other, I thought quite poignant aspect of this was the book concluded, or at least I concluded from the book, that when he died in 1947, he was probably lucky to die then.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yeah, yeah.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Because he had an image of the Chinese Communists as pursuing, in a sense, liberty that shared many of the values he associated with his New England upbringing. And of course, we saw post 1949 history unfold and it really wasn't about liberty and sense of New England America.

[Kaiser Guo]

Well, Mike, to be fair, the America that he missed out on of the early 1950s, he missed out on worst of McCarthyism and he would have been one of its major targets as well. I mean, so he would have been.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Exactly what I meant.

[Kaiser Guo]

Right, right. Well, both sides. I think he would have been disappointed in the communists and in the anti communists.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Right. He missed being disillusioned to some extent and he missed being persecuted in his own country, at least as McCarthyism could have done. And he was also good friends with Agnes Medley and Edgar Snow and so on. So I think it's a good excursion through the late. Well the 1930s and 40s. And the, the part about his relationship to Roosevelt was. Is really interesting.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yeah. His secret correspondence, you know, all done through.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Exactly.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, we don't want to spoil the whole book. Let's let people read it and they will absolutely love it. But yeah, I heartily endorse that endorsement. It's a great recommendation.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Thank you.

[Kaiser Guo]

Let me keep mine super short then, because I plan on having the author on the show in the next few weeks. Chung Ch, who used to work with me at the China Project, the erstwhile China Project. He's written a really interesting, wonderfully written piece in the New Yorker. It's called How China Learned to Love the Classics. And it's about the sort of, you almost call it a renaissance of interest in the Greco Roman world, in Greek and Roman philosophers, and in Greek and Roman literature in China. It's a marvelous piece and of course, he doesn't leave it just there. He has lots to say about what this says about the world we live in and I look forward to having him on the show. He's going to be in Beijing in a couple of weeks. He's currently living in Tokyo, I'm believe, but we'll be here soon. Great piece.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

I'll look for that.

[Kaiser Guo]

Yeah, please do, please do. Mike, thank you once again and thanks for getting up early and staying with me for so long. And I look forward to hearing more about what the US China Education Trust is doing. Maybe I'll get you and Rosie to come on and talk about your work there.

[David M. 'Mike' Lampton]

Okay. All right, well, thanks for all you do, Kaiser, and keeping our community together here.

[Kaiser Guo]

Thank you very much. You've been listening to the Seneca Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited and mastered by me. Kaiser Guo, support the show through [e-mail] where you will find a growing offering of terrific original China related writing and audio. Email [e-mail] if you've got suggestions on what I can do better with the show. Don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Enormous gratitude to to the University of Wisconsin Madison's center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show this year. Huge thanks to my guest, David Mike Lampton. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. Take care.

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