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Foreign It's Wednesday, May 13, 2026. I'm Albert Mohler, and this is the Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. You gotta watch the time zones. When President Trump lands in Beijing, it will be Beijing time, Beijing calendar May 14. That's because the president leaving the United States and traveling to Beijing on Air Force One, will be crossing the international date. He's going to be crossing history as well. This is a big, big event. And when we're talking about state visits at this level, and especially when we are talking about what's going to be happening over the next several days there in China, we're talking about the two biggest political and economic and military players on the world scene having a conversation through the leader of the Communist Party, who is the premier there in China, Xi Jinping and Donald J. Trump, President of the United States. Now, of course, as you think about this, there's so much at stake. Let's just consider, first of all, the entire context of diplomacy. Diplomacy reminds us that the relationship between great power nations, even nations as big as the United States of America and China, forces in terms of alliances and all the rest, and of course, all kinds of conflict baked into the entire situation. All this reminds us that we are human beings and that eventually the only way to have a meeting between China and the United States is to have human beings in the room. And eventually the most important of those meetings will mean that the singular leader who represents China as head of state and the singular leader who represents the United States of America as head of state will meet together in what is often referred to as a summit meeting. You understand the summit. You understand the imagery, the metaphor, the very top of the mountain, that is where these two individuals, politically speaking, will be meeting. Or to put it another way, when you think about how diplomacy works, it's one thing to have diplomats at a lower level meet with one another, delegations from one country to the other, international meetings where there are representatives. It's another thing when you have elected representatives, or in the case of China, high level Communist Party representatives who meet together. And so it's important when, say, a U.S. speaker of the House goes to a place like China, or the vice president of the United States goes, or a delegation from the United States Senate. All of those are important. But everything comes down to a diplomacy at the level of two heads of state meeting together. And that's one of the reasons why these things don't happen by accident, and they often don't happen without. While a very great Deal indeed, the vast percentage of what's going to take place being tightly scripted. When it comes to the statecraft between the United States and China, when it comes down to these kinds of state visits, the calendar is measured in 15 minute segments. The White House will tell you that it's 15 minutes at a time. And from the time that a president arrives until the time that a president leaves, you are looking at every 15 minutes being very tightly scripted. And everything depends upon that calendar, that schedule staying in place. Furthermore, rank is immediately apparent. And this goes back. Just consider the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament. Just consider when you are talking about, say Pharaoh in Egypt, you're talking about a head of state, someone in that kind of power being surrounded by all kinds of circles of counselors. And by the way, in the Old Testament, that is one of the distinctions that is made when it comes to, to God as king, he has no counselors. When it comes to earthly leaders, lots of counselors. And rank is really important. In a Wall Street Journal front page story just in recent days, one official was saying, you know, it matters. This rank really does matter. If you are seen getting out of a car four cars after the President, what does that say to people? Well, it says you were assigned to the fourth car. That's what it says. Is history made at these kinds of meetings? Often the answer is yes. And most importantly, when you think of relations between the United States and China, and in particular between the United States and the People's Republic of China, that is Communist China under the reign and rule, the autocratic totalitarian rule of the Communist Party since 1949, you know, the history is made. It was made February 21st, 28th of 1972. And most famously, it came down to the words Nixon goes to China. The President of the United States and his national Security advisor leader, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, had been working hard on creating an open door to China. Now when it came to that kind of meeting, it had never happened before. There had never been a face to face meeting between the President of the United States and the leader of communist China. All that changed in 1972. And it didn't change because the leader of China came to the United States. And at that point the Chinese leadership was very aged. And that means not only Mao Zedong, who was the chairman of the party and had been of course the great revolutionary leader, but also Chou Enlai who was the primary government official under Mao at that time. Both of them were very old. Neither of them were likely to travel in this Sense. So it was Nixon who went to China, and this was the Nixon who had made his name in politics as a virulent anti communist. It didn't mean that Nixon had changed his mind on communism. It meant that Nixon saw an opportunity. So going back to 1972, what was the opportunity? Why would the President of the United States, a staunch anti communist, why would Richard Nixon go to China? It was to triangulate. Very interesting term in foreign policy. The chief dynamic at that time in the history of the world was the conflict between the United States and our allies and. And the Soviet Union and its allies. Now you would say, well, the Soviet Union, Marxist communist China, Marxist communist. They would have a great deal in common. Yes, well, in some sense they did, but in another sense they didn't. First of all, Mao Zedong felt insulted by the Russians, going all the way back to the beginning of the communist revolution in China. He also understood that that China would eventually be a far larger and far more powerful nation. In terms of economics, of course, in population, it already was. But as you're looking at this, it was evident that there was an opening. And that triangulation meant you go from a line in which you have the United States and the Soviet Union facing off, that's a straight line, you create an independent line, and all of a sudden you triangulate. And the United States came up with a brilliant strategy which was to develop a direct relationship with China at the expense of the Soviet Union. You also have to keep in mind that even though they shared at least the rudiments of a communist commitment, the fact is they also shared an awful lot of border, an awful lot of contested territory, and a great deal of contested history. It was a brilliant masterstroke in foreign policy, according to most at the time, and it has actually stood the test of time. The United States has had relations with Communist China now ever since that summit meeting in 1972. The communication that came at the end was known as the Shanghai Communique. It established official relations between China and the United States. Now, just imagine that. That reminds us that there hadn't, previous to that, been any such thing. There had been no direct relationship between the United States and the most populous nation on earth. Little footnote then. It was at that time the most populous nation. By many reports, India has now been grown even larger. But this triangulation is still a thing. But right now, there is so much at stake in terms of this summit meeting. And when President Trump goes, and his meeting was delayed because of the American military action with Israel in Iran, he now goes with even more at stake than had been true before. Now let's just face the reality. The reality is that if you go back to 1972, the big thick line was the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, two rival worldviews locked into a deathly battle known as the Cold War. Then you have the triangulation, you have Nixon go to China. Now it's a triangle. It's not just a straight line. But you also have the decline of Russia and the rise of China. In terms of the main alternative to the United States. No one these days speaks of the main rivalry in the world is the US versus Russia. That doesn't mean that there is not a basic problem in that relationship. It just means that Russia is no longer the ascendant power as the alternative to the United States. For the course of the last several decades, it has been clear that nation is China. And China, when it comes to opposition to this kind of conflict with the United States and competition, it is deeply ideological. And one of the things we need to understand is that the Chinese come to this kind of meeting with a very different worldview. Christians understand worldview matters. That's what we talk about. Well, how does worldview matter in this case? Well, for one thing, China has a different conception of time. And so when you just think about it, you understand that you have linear time in the Western civilizational mind. Western time, beginning and end, genesis and revelation, dot to dot, this happens, this happens. The next thing happens. In the Chinese, or in especially many Asian systems, it is more cyclical than it is linear. But even when you're looking at a linear calendar, you still have a difference in the conception of time. And the Chinese look at time with a much longer perspective than Americans. They see America as itself a relative upstart in the world. China will claim to be thousands of years old, representing a civilization that goes back thousands of years into what the Chinese claim is even prehistory. And when it comes to the United States of America, well, we're about to celebrate 250 years since 1776. Famously, the Chinese see the United States as a continuing experiment. And of course, you have the major conflict right now, which is between the west and China. And when I say the West, I mean the west as a civilizational alternative. The west was produced by Christianity and it largely identified with Europe and then with North America, Western civilization. And China now represents its own civilizational challenge. And its civilizational challenge is now very much committed to communism, to Marxism, and as A matter of fact, even though officially Marxism and Communism fell apart with the breakup of the Soviet Union, in terms of that territory in China, the Chinese Communist Party is in absolute control. Now. You also see how the Chinese have modified Marxist theory and modified what they will call communism over the period of time from Mao to Xi Jinping. And so you look at experiments with the use of markets and even private property and all the rest. But the point is it is all in the service and it is all ultimately under the control of the totalitarian regime and under the absolute autocratic control of, of the Chinese Communist Party. So one of the quickest distinctions you can draw between China and the United States is that the United States is a two party system. And ultimately it could be a multi party system when it comes to China, it is a one party system. And there is no rival to the totalitarian control of the Chinese Communist Party. And you're also looking at a very different understanding of what it means to be human, the human being in the Western civilizational model, again heavily influenced by Christianity and directly by scripture. You're looking at a conception of human dignity that simply doesn't exist. Human dignity, human liberty, human rights, that conception just doesn't exist in China. And thus you have had all kinds of things in China, just like the one child only policy that required couples to have only one child. And the government responded with abortion, contraception, forced sterilization and even infanticide. And you're also looking at mass starvation used by the government as a matter of policy and all kinds of totalitarian dimensions. And China sees itself as driven by historical destiny, as the leader of the entire world system. And so when you have President Trump flying to China, now you're not talking about Nixon going to China in 1972. No. Now China sees itself as the ascendant power and sees the United States as the temporary upstart. It's also clear there are other wild things going on here. You could not come up with fiction that could be anything that could rival the reality. So, for example, headlines yesterday and today, the New York Times California mayor will plead guilty to working as agent of China. And here you're talking about Eileen Wang, who was the mayor of Arcadia, California, who resigned on Monday. The New York Times tells us, quote, after federal prosecutors announced they had charged her with acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese government, she is expected now to plead guilty to the charge, having agreed to a plea deal. The felony charge comes with potential sentence of up to 10 years in prison. This is a mayor, a democratically elected mayor of a city which is a part of the larger metropolitan area of Los Angeles, a city of many thousands of people. And now she is scheduled to plead guilty to being an agent for Communist China. And you also have huge front page article just in recent days, the New York Times headline, an Audacious Plot Unveils Possible Spying by Beijing. And this has to do with a legislative aide working for a member of Congress. The headline comes with a secondary line. Listen to this quote with sensitivity is high for the US And China trying to get details on House panel. All right, the bottom line in all of this is that, yes, China, to an extent unimaginable to most Americans, is seeking to subvert the American system, to present itself as a rival to America's role in the world, to surpass the United States economically, militarily, you name it, and also to infiltrate every area of American life with its own agents. And by the way, America, a very famously open civilization, has been stupidly open to much of this. You have major American universities that allowed the Chinese Communist Party basically to put think tanks on their campuses disguised as cultural exchange and intellectual centers. You have all kinds of infiltration. And by the way, this is now so much a part of just what is expected that you're looking at the fact that the United States has to assume that, that agents for the Chinese Communist Party are trying to infiltrate virtually everything. And when I say everything, I mean even not for profit organizations and all the rest. And you look at a mayor in California, you look at a person who's just working as a legislative aide for a House panel, all of them are very much now at risk in terms of Chinese espionage. And you also have all these suspicious purchases of land particularly suspiciously near to American military sites. And finally, the United States has caught on to some of this. And both Democratic and Republican administrations have finally decided that they're going to try to take action in order to prevent some of this from taking place. That doesn't happen in China. That's not to say, by the way, let's be honest, that the United States is not using every tool imaginable to conduct American espionage on China. But China is a closed society, so it has to happen by other means. It is assumed that one of the primary means that is used, by the way, still direct espionage, in which you have the cultivation of agents. This goes, again, both ways. Just like in the Cold War, the Soviets were up to it against the United States, The United States and our allies were up to it when it came to espionage against the Soviet Union. That is just a part of the ongoing war. And by the way, that is one of the hallmarks of a cold war. Remember, that's a war without armies shooting at each other. That is better than a war in which the armies are shooting at each other. We're going to be looking at so much of what takes place, and it's going to be big. President Trump goes with certain expectations. It is different right now. It's a different mission than it would have been six months ago, primarily because of the American military action in Iran. Okay, so put all this together. What does China have? China has enormous assets. It has hundreds of millions of people. It has enormous landmass. It has mighty rivers that it can dam. It has total political control over the entire region. I tell you what it really doesn't have, and that's oil. It just doesn't have enough access to oil. It receives a great deal of its oil from two places. Wait for them. Both of them very much subject to US Military action. Even in the last several months, China's very dependent upon Iran and Venezuela. Wow. You do see why the stakes are pretty high with President Trump going. President Trump wants China to use its influence to help force the Iranian government to accept American demands and bring the military action there, the conflict to an end, open the Strait of Hormuz, and then the United States would open the port so that Iran could function. The fact is that Iran's leadership, totalitarian in the extreme and committed to an ideology even more extreme in many ways than you see now in China. And there is no sense that the Iranians are really ready yet to make a deal acceptable to the United States. President Trump wants the leader of China to weigh in in a way that might actually be quite effective. If the leader of China, if Xi Jinping decides to do such a thing, of course, what will that cost the United States? That's very much now an open question. All right, we're going to be tracking all of this with you. And of course, there are always surprises. We'll be looking at the diplomacy. And just another footnote on that. Diplomacy at this level is always an extremely sensitive matter. And I mean extremely sensitive. But amp, that all up a lot when you're talking about China, which is historically an honor culture. And so all of that is even more important when in the United States a mistake is made. Generally, people go, well, that's what it means to be human. Well, we won't do that again. And of course, there have been some embarrassing moments. And Americans can mess things up too. But the Chinese are hypersensitive about such things and slights when it comes to diplomatic protocol and all the rest. And, you know, the Chinese have to be thinking about something. The Chinese government has to be very sensitive to. One bad memory. That bad memory was in 2016 when Barack Obama, the President of the United States, landed on Air Force One on an official visit to China. The Chinese were ready. The bands were ready to play. The red carpet was ready to be pulled out. Everything was in place except the person who was driving the powered stairs, the beautiful diplomatic stair on which the President would exit Air Force One and walk down and stand on Chinese soil. The driver of that ladder vehicle did not speak English, and officials with the United States were afraid he was going to crash the thing into Air Force One. So they did not allow it to come that close. President Obama had to go down the back stairs of the plane, let down as an hydraulic lift. It was a diplomatic embarrassment to China. I can assure you someone paid a heavy price for that one. All right, I can't let this go. I think you're going to find this fascinating when it comes to diplomatic protocol. You have, for instance, all these attendants. And this, again, is biblical. It's a contrast in the Old Testament between human monarchs who have to have all these counselors, and God, of course, who reigns in absolute majesty. But when you look at it now, it's the same thing. It's just like the Book of Daniel all over again, or Pharaoh in Egypt all over again. And so all these things are matters of deep, deep symbolism and diplomatic sensitivity. They're also a part of national security. Do you realize that when it comes to the teams around the President of the United States and around the premier of China, when it comes to this kind of visit, do you know one of the things that staff will do? The American staff will take away everything the President of the United States had touched at an official dinner or any kind of event like this. They will take everything the President touched, every glass the President took a sip out of, every utensil and everything. They will take it away because they do not want the foreign government to have the President's DNA. Ling Ling Wei reports to the Wall Street Journal. Listen to this quote. Xi Jinping had just finished a lunch of her ricotta ravioli at a secluded estate outside San Francisco in 2023 when his security agents sprang into action. Their mission, ensuring no trace of the Chinese leader's DNA, fell into foreign hands. The agents, measuring about 6 foot 3, dressed in identical dark suits, were observed grabbing Xi's utensils and plate and spraying them with an unidentified liquid. Then Wei writes, quote, welcome to the unseen theater of great power diplomacy, where a meeting of the two most powerful leaders on earth and can hinge on the slightest missed protocol, an unexpected miscue, or even a bit of saliva left on a fork. Then the reporter summarizes, it is a ritual that is at once deeply absurd and deeply serious. End quote. Yep, I think that's right. Deeply absurd, but deeply serious. We'll be watching these events, understanding that a great deal is at stake. It is not just the meeting of two men. It is the collision between two civilizations and two worldviews. Coming back to the United States, big news with the resignation of the 27th Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. We're talking about a gastrointestinal surgeon long associated with Johns Hopkins University, not only as a surgeon, but also a member of the faculty. President Trump in his second term, appointed Dr. Makary to serve as the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. He was controversial from the start, and he was certainly controversial by the end. And as a matter of fact, there are many people who thought he would have been fired before now. Clearly, there were problems. And by the way, these problems sometimes show up in statements made by a president about someone exiting his administration. So just factor that in when you hear what the president said about Dr. Makary's resignation. Quote, marty's a terrific guy, but he's going to go on and he's going to lead a good life. He was having some difficulty, end quote. Okay, put in presidential language. That's pretty much a bomb. Dr. Makary had been controversial, as I say, from the start, but there have been particular flashpoints, and it was actually numerous flashpoints to the point that someone said he had nine lives and he basically used up his ninth life. Speaking of the proverbial cat, in this case, his political life is over. He's resigned from his post. And he did so, evidently not so much as a matter of his own choice. It is really interesting the worldview class shows up here, here. Dr. Makary had not given adequate leadership in any sense for the pro life cause. And as a matter of fact, he had the responsibility, it was his specific responsibility to make certain that drugs are safe. And therefore he failed horribly when it comes to the drug mifepristone, with plenty of evidence and with every reason to conduct a full investigation and eventually to reverse what had been the unwarranted actions, pro abortion actions undertaken by the Biden administration. And basically legalizing it, mifepristone and also without a physician's visit, simply under what was declared to be the emergency of COVID but of course intending never to reverse it. Dr. Makary had the responsibility to deal with that and he didn't. U.S. senator Josh Hawley, speaking of the resignation of Dr. Makary, said this quote, this is welcome news. Dr. Makary was uniquely destructive to the pro life movement. He attempted to place pro abortion lawyers in key positions. He slow walked a vitally necessary review of the abortion drug mifepristone. He used his discretion to approve a new abortion drug when the data shows it sends one in 10 women to the emergency room. He froze out pro life leaders and repeatedly stonewalled Congress. His resignation is an opportunity for the FDA to reset, end quote. It is also an opportunity and a responsibility for President Trump to reset and to do so well, understanding what is at stake, we need to pray that a good announcement will come out of the White House concerning this opportunity. Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information go to my website@albertmuller.com youm can follow me on X or on Twitter by going to x.comalbertmohler for information on the Southern Baptist Theological seminary, go to sbts.eduardo for information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.