Michael Green: Trump and the Pendulum of U.S. Foreign Policy

For this episode, we spoke with Professor Michael Green, who is CEO of the United States Studies Center at the University of Sydney, and served in the U.S. National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration. Dr. Green advocates for America’s allies to remain committed to the alliance, but notes the many counterproductive moves by the Trump administration that, while mostly reversible, are damaging America’s global strategy at a privotal moment in the competition with China.

Richard Gray

Welcome to Pacific Polarity. Today, we're speaking with Dr. Michael Green, who is CEO of the United States Studies Center at the University of Sydney and Senior Advisor and Henry Kissinger Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Dr. Green served as Senior Vice President for Asia at CSIS, and is on leave from Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service. Previously, he taught at Johns Hopkins SAIS and served in the U.S. National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration. Dr. Green received his PhD from SAIS and is the author of numerous books, including most recently, Line of Advantage, Japan's Grand Strategy in the Era of Shinzo Abe. Dr. Green, pleasure to be speaking with you.

Michael Green

Thank you, guys. Glad to join you.

Richard Gray

As a starting point, throughout your career working on U.S. policy in Asia, what have the historic strengths been for U.S. as a strategic ally and partner? Why have countries decided to collaborate with the United States out of choice, not necessarily out of the lack of options?

Michael Green

When the U.S. sent its first diplomatic mission to China in 1784 on board the sycophantically named Empress of China, which sailed out of New York Harbor with ginseng from Pennsylvania and other goods to trade, they sent a diplomat, major Shaw, who'd been in the Continental Army. And his instructions from Washington were, be very nice, say that the U.S. doesn't interfere in other countries' internal affairs, that we're interested in commerce, that we're not imperialists like the British.

For a lot of our history, really, into the early 20th century, the U.S. approach to the world was just be nice to everybody, and focus on commerce. The rest of the world figured, that is not exactly a consistent pattern, if you were in Latin America in the 1840s or the early 1900s, you didn't feel that way about the U.S.; big power rivals like Japan in the early 20th century—you know, Japanese people liked the U.S. actually, but they realized that the US, in fact, was not this Jeffersonian “peace and friendship with all”, but had hard power interests. And that's probably good because we do, the US does.

My book argued that the US will compete, it had competed starting in 1783 and 84, and it will compete now to prevent China from having hegemonic control of Asia. That's built into the DNA. The American colonists were fighting tooth and nail for their independence, they'd turn to the French, the Spanish, whoever would help them.

So that's one thing that allies get today, because the Japanese, the Indians and Australians, any ally worries about abandonment: will the US really be there? The consistency of American competition and not letting another hegemon take over, that frankly provides a really important base for an alliance. It's not just that we're nice. It's that actually, we don't like getting pushed around. And that is somewhat reassuring.

The other thing that has really built American credibility as an ally is the economic power of the United States. After World War II, 50% of global GDP was American because most of the world was blown up or not yet developed. By the 1970s, the U.S. had about 25% of global economic output.

In the post-Cold War years in the 90s, when the Soviet Union collapsed and everyone talked about American unipolarity, we had about 25%. You know what it is today? About 25%. So there's a consistent critical mass of American economic power that also makes it really important if you want to develop your country, have access to technology.

And then the third thing is, while American engagement in the world is based on realpolitik and hard power and preventing rival hegemons from dominating Asia or Europe or the Western Hemisphere, it's also built around the idealism and rule of law that the founders of the country built into the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. There's a theory that Charlie Kupchan at Georgetown and others have advanced, John Ikenberry at Princeton, that American hegemony is very different from ancient Rome or Nazi Germany, because it's based on the rule of law. So the UN, the World Trade Organization, the Bretton Woods system, all these things allow countries like Japan, Germany, former rivals to get rich because the Americans allow people who participate as partners and allies to get a say and to have constraint over American choices in the UN or the World Trade Organization.

I'm sure we'll ask about the Trump administration, but what worries a lot of people is that last part, keeping people on your side because you play by the rules is now really being questioned. And then the other two parts, American economic power, American hard power count, but the secret sauce has always been this willingness of Gulliver to let the Lilliputians tie him down. And Trump isn't going for that. And so we'll see what happens.

Richard Gray

You did predict the follow up, which is the question of looking at the status quo situation of U.S. strategic positioning. More narrowly on this question, you talked about a lot of things, which is consistency of commitment, economic power and commitment to some level of international rule setting. Specifically on the commitment side of things, how has that changed? And how do you think other countries are reacting to a perception, perhaps, that American commitment is less stable and predictable as maybe it had been five or 10 years ago?

Michael Green

Henry Kissinger was asked, when Trump was elected in 2016, to explain Donald Trump in the context of world history, very Kissinger kind of question. And Kissinger said, sometimes the international system changes and you don't realize it has changed until some figure comes along to remind you that it's broken. And he said that was Donald Trump.

And then the interviewer asked him, so what is Trump's vision for the new world order and Kissinger hesitated and said, I don't think he has one. He was an accident. So my view is that Donald Trump is the most disruptive American president in history. And that is obviously nerve wracking for allies and confusing for adversaries.

But he's not speaking for the American people. And frankly, I don't think he's speaking for American interests as the Congress defines them, which is to say he got elected mainly because of… there's new polling out that is much more reliable than the exit polls on the day of the election, and it pretty much shows he got elected because of inflation and the economy, and because people thought Biden was old and Kamala Harris wasn't elected in an open way, she was anointed, plus immigration and culture stuff, the woke DEI agenda, which was probably fourth on the list; that's why he was elected.

He was not elected to break American alliances, tariff everyone, because consistently in polls, the U.S. Studies Center polls we do, CSIS, Chicago Council, you name it, Pew, Gallup, consistently the American people really like having allies and think they're really important. And by the way, polls also show that two-thirds of Americans think tariffs are not good because they raise prices.

So Trump is disruptive. His leadership style is built around being unpredictable and threatening. And that's not how you run an alliance. But it's not a mandate that he has from the American people or the Congress. So my view is the disruption could get deeper, but it's not a new world order and it's not a new American strategy. It's a period of great disruption. And the question is, what comes next? Allies like Australia or Japan will have some say in that, because we need allies.

And it's interesting, even in the tariff wars, which are pretty harsh with Japan right now, the U.S. trade representative, the lead negotiator, has said, we are not going to bring defense into this. We're not going to talk about defense spending. So there is a recognition, even in the most protectionist parts of the Trump administration, that we really need allies because of China.

So as the French saying goes, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, the more it changes, the more it looks the same. There's huge disruption and change, but it's also revealing, I think, the depth of support for alliances in the major institutions of American power, the Congress, the public, think tanks, universities.

There is really no constituency in the U.S. that is against alliances right now, which for the first time ever, by the way, because in the 80s, when we had trade friction with Japan, a lot of trade unions were critical of the alliance. That's not the case now. So anyway, it's small comfort. Doesn't mean this won't be hard.

Richard Gray

As a point on the unions, I think the Nippon Steel situation points slightly in the other direction, but I take your point.

Michael Green

Let me say something about Nippon Steel, which was a supremely stupid decision by both Biden and Trump to not approve the purchase by Nippon Steel of a U.S. steel company that would have increased U.S. competitiveness in steel, saved jobs, and lowered prices for manufacturers. But in the context of the 2024 presidential election, swing state votes in Pennsylvania in particular, where my family's originally from, steel mill workers, foremen, way back 100 years ago, those people were so fixated on those votes, they didn't want to do anything that would signal they weren't 100% supporting unions, because the unions didn't like the Nippon Steel deal, because they were worried the Japanese would restructure.

However, none of that was about Japan free riding, none of it was about the alliance, it was all very specific. So what it shows you is rent-seeking and stupid policy is still possible, but it's very different from the 1980s or 90s when 70 percent of Americans said in polls, we can't trust Japan, and members of Congress were actually saying, why are we defending Japan? They're ripping us off. The only guy who says that now is Donald Trump. And he actually hasn't said it about Japan in some time. But anyways, you're right. It is not all sweetness and light, but it's not what it was.

Richard Gray

In many of our conversations, one of the through lines has been that for third states between the US and China, the US has played a crucial countervailing role. However, there's a similar view that's been coming up between threading the needle of these different discussions that we've had, which is that Australia, Japan, Europe and others should perhaps think about playing a greater role in their own security, have more autonomy and, to some extent in the more extreme end, hedge against the United States. So when you approach that type of question, what would your pitch be to, say, Japan, Australia and South Korea, that the maintenance of the existing alliance is worth a perceived uncertainty?

Michael Green

Well, I guess I'd preface it by saying, in spite of all the uncertainty and the frustration with the Trump tariff wars, there's no evidence or indication that any U.S. ally in Asia, not Japan, not Australia, not Korea, or major partner like India or Singapore, there's no indication that they are de-aligning or reducing their strategic dependence on the U.S.

There are little things, like very little things, like Prime Minister Albanese went to Indonesia and said Indonesia is Australia's best friend. If things were really going well with the U.S., he wouldn't have said that. The Japanese, the British, and the Italians are building a new jet fighter called GCAP, they're starting to market it in Australia. There's little things in the arms trade business and speeches that indicate not everything is smooth in alliance relations with the U.S., but absolutely no change in Australia, Japan or elsewhere on the defense initiative, started really back in Clinton, in the 90s in some ways, but accelerated under Biden. Things like AUKUS, the submarine deal with Australia and the UK, things like force posture initiatives in Japan, Australia, and the Philippines to get more access for the U.S. military to deal with contingencies, cooperation on missile defense, ammunitions production, technology sharing, none of that is getting unspooled, because it'd be crazy to do it if you were Australia or Japan. You've invested so much in U.S. technology and defense relationships, and it would take you decades and three, four, five times as much defense spending to try to create autarky.

Indonesia might or might not be Australia's best friend. It's certainly not going to defend Australia. So nobody's unspooling, disconnecting from the U.S., quite the opposite. The pattern has been more mutual interdependence. The U.S. needs these allies, needs Japan and Korea for shipbuilding and technology, needs Australia for critical minerals and geography and so that's just not happening.

The Chinese know it, because the Chinese aren't really trying to drive a wedge. They're just continuing to hammer everybody with military maneuvers. I think in that sense, the U.S. has quite a depth of a reservoir of, if not goodwill, common sense that will get us through this in terms of alliance cooperation.

The risk is that the Trump factor, trade fights, make everything harder. And we don't really have a lot of room for error right now. The Chinese Navy is bigger than the US Navy in number of ships; our ships are better, but they have more of them. Their Air Force is bigger in the Pacific than the US and Japan combined, tactical air in particular. They're building up nuclear weapons. We don't have a lot of room for error. And so injecting uncertainty and friction when you're trying to build more interdependence, we need each other more, is not smart military strategy, for sure, or grand strategy.

Now, the question about defense spending, the Trump administration is going to pressure everyone to spend more on defense. In public opinion polls, the American people support alliances, but two-thirds say our allies need to do more. The U.S. spends over 3% of GDP on defense. That number is going up in the new defense bill in Congress by 12% next year. Australia is pretty flat at 2% of GDP. Japan is going to 2%, but because of a cheap yen and other factors, and including the Coast Guard in the 2% and other things, it's not clear if Japan's really getting the bang for buck promised. Britain spends 2.5 percent, is going up. And arguably Japan and Australia live in a more dangerous neighborhood than Britain. So I think the pressure from Trump is a given. But even if Kamala Harris had won, the debates would have been happening.

The Defense Strategic Review in Australia, Japan's 2022 National Defense Strategy and National Security Strategy, described this as the most dangerous moment in their history for Australia since World War II and for Japan in the post-war era. Well, defense spending is not at its highest point as a percentage of GDP in its history.

And the Chinese aren't backing off. In fact, Xi Jinping announced he's going to increase defense spending by 7%. So I think the debates about increasing defense spending are definitely coming and are already there. The Australian election, the opposition briefly raised it, didn't poll well, they dropped it, but behind the scenes, it's a huge discussion, because the world isn't getting safer, and matching defense spending levels that you had for 10 years doesn't add up.

Will the Trump administration punish allies for not doing more? I don't know. Probably not in Asia. Probably will in Europe. So, yeah, it's going to be this is period of massive transition. Alliances are more important than ever. But the way we run them is definitely going to be shifting. Because of the larger power changes.

Jersey Lee

I wanted to get into another aspect of the alliance that we briefly just mentioned earlier. On trade, you previously mentioned that Japan has, perhaps to many people's surprise, stood up strongly against Trump's tariffs. And in Australia, Lowy Institute's poll showed that over 60% of Australians do not trust America to act responsibly within the world. Now, the same poll showed that 80% still have confidence in the alliance, so that goes to your point earlier. But it's undeniable that America is suffering some degree of reputational damage, which likely played a role in the recent Australian and certainly Canadian election results. How much damage do you think has been done and how quickly can it be reversed?

Michael Green

It's a really good question. And the Trump factor was huge in the Canadian election, not as big in the Australian election, but definitely there as a garnish or seasoning for how the Labor Party went at the Coalition effectively. And to me, the Lowy poll result was not at all surprising. In Japan, the numbers have been about 30 percent trust the U.S. to do the right thing and 90 percent support the alliance.

I like to tell the story of in the in the 1980s when Reagan became president. A lot of NATO allies in Europe thought he was a crazy cowboy. They'd never seen anything like him; maybe not as shocked as Trump, but pretty shocked. So all the European foreign ministers were gathered to prepare for their first NATO summit with President Reagan. And they were all complaining about the U.S. and all the cowboys and the unilateralism and the crazy cold warriors. And then the British foreign secretary said reportedly, yes, yes, everything you say about the Americans is true, but they're the only Americans we have. There was a lot of friction over deployment of intermediate range nuclear weapons, just the general hard line of the Reagan administration, massive protests in Europe, massive against the US alliance, the likes of which you do not see right now.

Less than a decade later, the Berlin Wall fell, the Cold War ended, and the West won, that alliance won, together with American alliances in Asia. So I think there is a helpful ability of the U.S. to recover and of allies to be extremely worried about the U.S., but realize they're the only Americans we have. And so there's nothing about this that needs to be linear, meaning that this is just a secular trend where the alliances are in trouble beyond Trump. I just don't believe that's going to be the case. I don't think governments in Asia believe that because they're not buying nuclear weapons or building nuclear weapons or saying, we won't accept U.S. forces or anything of the kind.

Sometimes that recovery can be pretty quick when you have an election and a new president, as we found from Trump to Biden. Some of it doesn't go away because on trade, for example, Biden was about as protectionist as Trump had been. So it's just the nature of what we're going to be facing, that there will be some level of uncertainty about the U.S. It can be reduced. It can be managed, but it's a factor.

Where does it matter? As I said earlier, it makes everything harder: implementing AUKUS, implementing force posture, getting politicians to convince local governments to let military exercises happen in their backyard. All the politics of alliance management that are always hard are just going to get harder in many cases. That's a risk. It's not a risk that the alliance will collapse, but we don't have a lot of room for error. We've got to catch up to the Chinese capabilities. It will matter a bit more in Southeast Asia, the so-called Global South, but not as much as many pundits are saying, in my view. My view is that countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, they'll look at Trump less favorably, for sure. Tariffs could make that quite spicy. But these countries have agency. They don't want to become wholly owned subsidiaries of China. They will play everyone against each other to get the best deal they can.

The risk there, frankly, is less in terms of the soft power or the image of the U.S., in my view. The risk there is from Trump decisions to pull back funding for USAID for development and for democracy and governance, because in a lot of these countries, China is less interested in public opinion about the U.S. or China, and much more interested in what's called elite capture, basically bribing people to let China build military bases and bridges. And elite capture is possible if there's poor democratic governance. And the Trump administration is basically canceling all funding from the U.S. to support democratic governance. The one area they seem to continue funding is in infrastructure financing, the Development Finance Corporation, and that's significant because that gives alternatives to China's Belt and Road. But in the developing part of Asia, not to mention Sub-Saharan Africa, the U.S. is just retreating.

And that vacuum is, to me, more of a problem than the brand of the U.S., because the vacuum is something China will quickly try to fill. And we will find that these countries are suddenly dominated by Huawei or hosting PLA submarines. And there will be long term consequences. That one worries me more. But soft power matters. Joe Nye, the author of soft power, sadly passed away recently. He was a mentor of mine. And it matters. And the Trump administration seems not to care at all. And they will pay a price for that. That's for sure.

Jersey Lee

You are a current board member of Radio Free Asia. The situation there, from what I read, can be best described as a state of limbo, as they're contesting their federal funding freeze right now. So first of all, could you give us what you know of what's going on right now?

And generally, in its efforts to shutter institutions such as USAID and U.S. Agency for Global Media, why was USAID the initial DOGE target? What do you think the impact of these DOGE-led cuts will be to America's global strategy?

Michael Green

Yeah, I'm on the board of Radio Free Asia and the Asia Foundation. And sorry to disappoint you, but I'm not going to now air all the internal discussions. Suffice it to say that the DOGE and the Trump administration tried to zero out funding. These are organizations that are directly funded by the U.S. Congress for their core funding. And there's a big constitutional question about whether the administration can cut that funding. So that's why it's being contested in courts and it's kind of day-to-day, month-to-month.

In the long run, I'm cautiously optimistic, even if the next months and years are more uncertain. And the reason is that organizations like Radio Free Asia and the Asia Foundation or the National Endowment for Democracy, they have huge support on the Hill, particularly from Republicans who have increased their spending from year to year in the Biden years, because they understand that what I said earlier, which is to compete against China, you have to support civil society, governance, democracy, information. You have to get information in. These Republicans, their hero is not Donald Trump. Their hero is Ronald Reagan. And Ronald Reagan, with the Westminster speech in London, created what became the National Endowment for Democracy in a lot of these efforts.

So I think the base of support is quite strong, and precisely because of China. And it certainly helped that the Global Times in Beijing published an editorial mocking RFA and other organizations for being cut. I mean, there's nothing that helps your case like the other guy saying, ha ha, we're glad you're gone. So I'm cautiously optimistic about the long term, but it's going to be a very uncertain period. And we'll pay a price for sure if we don't get our act together.

USAID is a bit different. The U.S. Agency for International Development really got hit by DOGE. And I think politically they were an easy target. DOGE wanted some early scalps.

At the end of the day, DOGE was a complete failure in my view. They didn't cut two trillion. They barely cut tens of billions. But the damage they did was massive and not just to development, but to all kinds of government services in all kinds of areas, from weather monitoring and tornado monitoring to management and stewardship of nuclear weapons to development. And it was an easy target because Americans don't really understand foreign aid. In polls, Americans think we spend huge amounts of our money on foreign aid. It's actually not that massive a percent of the federal budget.

AID needed reform, in my view. You know, the Australians, for example, and in a different way, the Japanese put their development agencies under the foreign industry so that decisions were being made about projects that advance the national interest. And in a very, very competitive environment like we're in right now globally with China and Russia and others, to me, that's very logical. And so folding AID into the State Department is not in itself the worst thing because a lot of AID projects do good for people, but you've got to prioritize. So that part makes sense or some reform makes sense.

But zeroing them out makes no sense. You literally had people working on projects at great physical risk in parts of the world, having their paycheck stop and no return flight. Just horrible way to treat people who've dedicated their lives. And what frankly drove me really crazy was these DOGE people were computer science majors who barely traveled around the world, passing judgment through algorithms about the value of work being done by people who professionally chose to go into some of the most difficult situations to build bridges, to purify water, to help combat AIDS, noble people who sacrificed a lot for the U.S. interest and to help people. And then you have these Musk protégés come in and just start hitting buttons to stop the funding. Pretty reprehensible.

And we will pay a price strategically. I suspect no one is more worried about this than the U.S. military because they know wars start when you have vacuums. And this is creating more of a vacuum in parts of the world that are contested. So we'll see.

The backdrop for a lot of this is that Donald Trump's support is going down, lowest support rate of any new president in history, and it's going down. None of his policies are popular now. In polls, all his policies are unpopular. The midterms, it'd be hard to see how the Republicans keep the House. So we'll see where this goes, but suffice it to say that DOGE and the Trump administration do not have like a long runway to do this.

They might have two years, two and a half, three years till the election. Might be less, but it's not a permanent thing in my view.

Jersey Lee

Moving back a bit to America's broader competition against China, there's all this talk about how America in the past used to have primacy in the Asia-Pacific, and now maybe that's not so true anymore, that America might need to become comfortable merely acting as a balancer against China. As you say, lots of countries in the region, even in Southeast Asia, even in Global South countries, they want America to be a balance against China. How comfortable would America be in that role? Some people in Australia, for example, like Lowy Institutes’ Sam Roggeveen, argue that if America doesn't enjoy privacy, it'll just decide that this isn't a worthwhile endeavor for America and they'll just pull out. What do you think of this view?

Michael Green

I think Sam needs to read my book, By More Than Providence, which is 250 years of history showing that that's not the pattern for American thinking about the region at all. The book also shows that primacy is hardly the norm for American engagement in Asia.

If you define primacy as the leading economic position, leading diplomatic position, and perhaps the ability to operate with impunity in the maritime domain to control the sea-lanes and the first island chain and so forth, when did the US have primacy? In the maritime domain and economically, it had primacy from 1945 until the 70s. The Vietnam War is different because that was continental. Korean War was continental. But in terms of maritime primacy, the U.S. was absolutely dominant. But it lost that after Vietnam because in the late 1970s, the Soviets dramatically built up their Far Eastern fleet. And in the late 70s, Soviet submarines were surfacing off of Hawaii and taunting the U.S. Navy and then submerging with impunity because the drawdown after Vietnam had been so severe. In the 80s, the U.S. reasserted maritime and air supremacy. And of course, after the Cold War collapsed, it had it for about 10 to 20 years.

So you add that all up, and what is that? That's 45 to 30 years of American history. There's been primacy in the Asia region in terms of what matters most to America, which is maritime. But most of American history, the US has had to play a balance of power game. It's been a multipolar region. It's been about preventing the rise of a rival hegemon, not through the unilateral application of American power, but depending on other powers to play a role. Even when the US didn't have formal alliances in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Theodore Roosevelt and others played a very clever balance of power game, as did John Quincy Adams in the 1820s. So I guess this primacy idea, it's not like the U.S… It's a fairly brief period in American history that we have primacy at all.

The second thing I'd say is China does not have primacy. China cannot operate with impunity within the first island chain. The U.S. and its allies have absolute… 10 to 15 year lead in understory warfare. The U.S. has more allies. China's sea lanes, half of China's energy supplies, hydrocarbons come by sea through the Indian Ocean and up the South China Sea, which, frankly, the US, Japanese, Australian, Indian navies, the Quad—not why the Quad was formed, but if you had a war and those navies decided to stop Chinese imports, they could. So China doesn't have primacy either.

What you have is fierce contestation, a standoff, a stalemate. And both sides know that and both sides will seek advantage. through submarines, through cyber, through more hypersonic missiles, through basing and forced posture options, both sides will be positioning themselves, but we're in an era of contestation, not Chinese primacy. And the American side knows that.

The problem in Australia with people saying America might fight a war for primacy, which you hear from Hugh White and my friend, Sam Roggeveen and other commentators, is there's no American strategic doctrine document speech that says America must have primacy in Asia. People sometimes point to the Trump 2018 national security strategy. And I interviewed the author, Nadia Schadlow, on my podcast, The Asian Chessboard, and I asked her about it. And she said, we didn't have that in our national security strategy.

So it's a bit of a strawman or a straw person to say the U.S. will fight for primacy. The U.S. will fight to prevent another hegemon from dominating Asia, as it has been prepared to do for a long, long time. But there's no mandate from the American public to fight to prevent another country from having contestation with the U.S. The American public doesn't think the U.S. has to be top dog in Asia, just doesn't want another dog driving us out and threatening our friends and our commerce and our values. Very, very different. And by the way, very manageable for allies, because that contestation, that game requires allies. So allies will have a big vote, especially Australia and Japan.

Richard Gray

On the broader issue of durability of commitments, while there's been a lot of focus on U.S. electoral cycles and uncertainty about what an administration's foreign policy might be from four years to the next, on the Chinese side, there's a more long-term but more grand transition, which is in leadership succession. Obviously during the Mao period, that transition period was particularly bumpy, but even today, there's a lot of uncertainty about what Xi Jinping successor might look like and what policy shifts might happen there. As you think about like what Australia, Japan and South Korea and others are thinking about in terms of the durability of their relationships between the US and China, how does the Chinese succession question fit within this?

Michael Green

A very good question. So I worked in the White House at the NSC for almost five years. And the first half of that time, I was mainly dealing with our allies. A lot of time with Japan, Korea, Australia. And for giggles, they gave me North Korea policy, too. The second half, I was the senior official for the whole Indo-Pacific region. And so I was in a lot of the summit meetings President Bush had with Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao. And I was also there during crises in U.S.-China relations like the EP-3 incident in April 2001 when President Bush had to call or try to call Jiang Zemin, I think it was 13 times before he could catch him, because the U.S. government and Chinese government were unable to manage the crisis.

And what that showed him, what those summits showed me, was that the management of U.S.-China relations, maybe more than any other bilateral relationship the U.S. has, really depends on the leaders. And that was always true for China because the foreign minister was never really empowered the way the Secretary of State was. The Central Military Commission included no diplomats historically. And the decision-making in Zhongnanhai was not conducive to sorting problems out at the level of the deputy secretary of state or assistant secretary, the way you would with the U.S. and Australia or most normal relations.

So it all kind of hung on the two leaders, which is why you had these big historic communiques, Nixon, Carter and Reagan, and why Bush's relationship with Hu and Jiang Zemin before him took so much of our time to get right: not caving but not provoking; we used to say “comprehensive, constructive and candid”, so pull no punches on human rights or Taiwan or North Korea. A lot of thought went into it.

So now you have two leaders in Trump and Xi Jinping that are very different from their predecessors. Xi is a strong man, a dictator, an authoritarian, take your choice. He's neutered the standing committee of the Politburo's role. It used to be more of a collective decision-making body. It's now a cult of personality for the most part. He's got the Xi Jinping Thought app that everyone has to take to be promoted. I've done it with a Chinese friend of mine. It's like a really bad video game, where you have to memorize Xi Jinping Thought if you want to get promoted, even in the private sector now.

Trump would love that. I don't know if Donald Trump knows about the Xi Jinping thought app, but he would love to have a Donald Trump thought app. You can just imagine it. And decision making now in the U.S. has also changed under Trump so that the secretary of state, secretary of treasury actually has very limited authority, because the president could change his mind the next day. It's much more capricious. So in some ways, that means the relationship between Trump and Xi is even more important, because both sides have centralized decision-making in the leader and don't have checks and balances such as they were in China and as they existed in the U.S.

The problem with that is Xi Jinping is not going to change strategy. You know, Rush Doshi's excellent book, The Long Game, maybe overstates how much consistency there was in China's strategy until now, but there sure is now under Xi Jinping. He is not taking his eye off the prize, which is primacy in Asia, by the way. So he's not going to make any big compromises that get in the way of that. And Donald Trump is the opposite, which is he has no grand strategy. He could change at any moment. It isn't even clear to the Chinese what his objective is, or to his own cabinet. That creates a real trust deficit that will make this interpersonal relationship more important, but frankly, less useful than in the past because of the personalities of the two leaders.

Ultimately, Xi and Trump have self-preservation instincts. So I think the odds are very low that Xi Jinping would use force or risk war on Taiwan. And Donald Trump talks a tough talk. But as you saw with Ukraine, with tariffs and the bond market, with North Korea in 2018, he talks a tough talk, but he backs down and claims victory. So that sort of deterrence works. Their political self-preservation instincts work. But there's no seatbelt for U.S.-China relations right now. It's going to be a very rough ride.

Jersey Lee

In terms of broader U.S. foreign policy, there's an interesting Trump speech that he made during his recent visit to Saudi Arabia, which signaled a complete repudiation of not just neoconservative foreign policy, but perhaps post-war U.S. doctrine generally. He remarked that Gulf countries' economic success “has not come from Western interventionists… so-called nation builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits giving lectures”, but by locals based on local cultural traditions. References to Iraq and Afghanistan make it obvious that the main target of this criticism was the Bush administration that you had served under. So what do you make of these remarks? What might it mean for U.S. foreign policy and how America sees itself in the world going forward?

Michael Green

You know who made a similar kind of speech to the Middle East? Barack Obama in 2009. He had run against the Iraq war. He'd promised to open to Iran. He made noises about local culture. Very similar themes, not as obnoxious as Trump. Trump is obnoxiously attacking his political opponents in the Republican Party at home. So nothing compares to Donald Trump in tone, but the message that we're not going to tell you how to run your countries, that was Barack Obama's message in 2009. The Democrats came in critical of the neocons and saying Bush was trying to democratize the Middle East, that's crazy, we're going to go back to realpolitik and real negotiations.

So it's a bit cyclical, frankly, in American history. The United States was founded on two slightly—this sounds very Marxist—contradictory principles. One was the founding fathers, the colonists wanting to restore their rights as Englishmen. That's how it all started. They didn't want to be taxed without representation, they wanted to be treated like Englishmen were everywhere in the UK, in Britain. So very conservative in that sense, but also at the same time, it was a revolution. Thomas Paine, the pamphlet he wrote, it was the last best hope for mankind and that someday this revolution of democracy and people's power would spread around the world. So the U.S. has always had this kind of, as Marxists say, internal contradiction. And polls show pretty clearly that the American public likes both. And so we kind of veer a little bit from one to the next.

So, yes, Trump is now pushing back against the Thomas Paine neocon view. Frankly, it fits his personal worldview because he, I don't think, has a particular interest in ethics or morality. You know, he's ordered the Justice Department to stop enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and other pretty important laws around ethics. So personally, it fits him and also his desire to cut deals with countries like Qatar and the Saudis. It's more pronounced than it was with Obama, for sure. And he's playing to a certain part of the Republican and Democratic camp that doesn't like, that still is angry about Iraq and democracy and advocacy.

But it's just one faction in the Trump administration. I can tell you for sure that's not what Marco Rubio thinks. It's not what Mike Walz, who was National Security Advisor, now in the UN, thinks. The Trump administration, like every administration, has a lot of factions, it's more of a roulette wheel; you never know what you're going to get, because there is no functioning National Security Council system. The president wants to just make up his own mind without being staffed. Some days you'll have Bessent at the treasury talking about stabilizing tariffs, and then the next day you'll have Peter Navarro come in and say we're tariffing everybody; you'll have Marco Rubio pushing the Quad, and then and then you'll have someone around J.D. Vance, who has adopted this sort of anti-neocon, America first isolationism, put out there—this was probably written by someone around Vance, frankly. So you can see the different factions very clearly. It's a pendulum.

There's going to be blowback. If the Democrats take the House—that seems very likely—they're not going to tolerate this. They're going to pass legislation on human rights and democracy, in trade, in relations with Saudi Arabia and Qatar. It's going to be a seesaw. Trump is taking it really far in one direction, but it's not the first time, as I said, that it's gone in that direction. Obama flirted with a similar theme himself.

It is fundamental to the U.S. and the American people's worldview that democracy matters. Polls show that. When it's inconvenient, then the Americans don't like it. But when we can afford to do it, they want to do it. And to me, this is one extreme swing in a very long history of seesawing on this issue. Ultimately, I think democracy and human rights matter. And the key is to try to find a way to be consistent, which we're not great at.

Richard Gray

Transitioning more to your own background, how you thought about your career as a sort of balanced pendulum between academia, policymaking and policy research? Was this a methodical or intentional choice? Was it a matter of circumstances and opportunities that came your way? And as you think going forward about utilizing that combination, what are some of the things you hope to achieve ahead?

Michael Green

Yeah, it's something I was able to do, because the American system, for all its flaws, allows it. We have checks and balances. So if you go into a think tank, Congress will want your information and your expertise, even if the administration doesn't. And then if there's an election, and you're associated with one side of the debate or one candidate, then you can go into government. And then if your guy loses or you need a break, you can go back to university or think tank. The people call it the revolving door. like it's some kind of corrupt thing; at the margins, maybe it is, but for the most part, it's a really good thing for the American people because it allows fresh ideas to come into government. It allows think tanks and scholars from the outside to get involved in policy debates through congressional hearings. It's unique. Parliamentary systems like Australia and Japan don't really have it.

So I followed that path. For people thinking about it, I would make a couple of cautions. One is, if you really want to serve in government, the safer path is definitely to take the foreign service exam and go into the State Department, be a presidential management fellow, maybe congressional staff, because if you go the political policy route of a think tank scholar type who advises campaigns, when the music stops, there may not be a chair for you, it's way beyond your control.

I advised John McCain on Asia for his campaign, Mitt Romney for his campaign, Jeb bush for his campaign, I was an Asia foreign policy advisor; when the music stopped, there was no chair, they lost, In 2000, I didn't actually work on the Bush campaign, but the key people in his administration who cared about Asia, Rich Armitage, Paul Wolfowitz, they knew about me and they wanted me in there because they needed an allies guy.

So you have much less control over it, frankly, than if you go into the civil service or the foreign service or the military, where you can do 15, 20, 25 years in your career, it's just that it's incremental, you can't do a big leap into a high-level position like you can. So you got to decide how much risk you have for the uncertainty of that.

The second thing is, if you do what I did, or my friend Victor Cha, or people like Peter Feaver at Duke, or Mira Rapp-Hooper who was in the Biden white house, you really do have to become an expert. You can't just sort of hang out, play video games. You got to write books. You got to publish. If you get a PhD, you got to be really serious about it. And so it's an intellectual journey, but it's a journey up to the top of a mountain. You've got to be ready for that. And if you get a PhD, you have to go into it thinking, this may not get me a high-level government job, this may not get me a tenure at university, but darn it, I have something I'm really interested in, and I think I can say something very profound and important about it. So even if that's all I do, I'm going for it. You can't look at it as a ticket to something else. You've got to really be into the topic itself. So those are a few ways to think about it.

The revolving door is kind of broken with Trump. And federal hiring is obviously crippled right now. But this is an aberration. This is not the new normal in my view. So if you're in school now, go to grad school, ride it out. Travel in Asia, ride it out. I think to compete, the U.S. needs expertise, especially in Asia. So that career path is there. It's just a little bit like a tree fell down and lightning hit. And the career path is temporarily blocked in a lot of places like USAID. But it's going to get cleared up, I think.

Richard Gray

For our last question, Scott Faulkner would often say that personnel is policy. Recently, the United States has lost two giants of U.S.-Asia policy, both of which you've mentioned in this conversation, the late Joe Nye and Rich Armitage. I've never personally met either of them, but know many whose lives were marked by both and who had nothing but the strongest words for both statesmen. As an American who previously thought about a career in government in some capacity, it is a phenomenal challenge to look at any current senior officials as someone to aspire to. I just don't see the vision and clarity, the sacrifice in public service or the expertise and poised competency. What do you say in response to this vantage point? And what do you look for a dose of measured optimism?

Michael Green

That is a fantastic question. I am so glad you asked. You know, rich Republican—I’m a rich Republican—Rich Armitage was not a rich Republican, he was a Naval Academy grad. He went to Vietnam, fought with the riverine forces in the small boats with the South Vietnamese Navy. The Navy transferred him and he said, nope, left the Navy and stayed as a civilian contractor to keep fighting. That's the kind of guy he was. And when the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam, he was mad. He said, you don't leave your friends in combat like that. He got almost the entire South Vietnamese Navy out. I think he probably wasn't even 30 years old yet. And he got the crews, their families, on board this flotilla of over 2,000 people and got them to Manila Bay. The story is that the Philippine government said, we can't take Vietnamese refugees. So Armitage had the ceremony and said they're now an auxiliary of the US Navy and raised an American flag so they could go into Manila Bay. Remarkable guy.

I had the pleasure of working very closely with him in and out of government, traveling around Asia with him frequently. A lot of people would take a bullet for Rich Armitage. He's that kind of guy. And I'm not talking like people who've been in the Army or the Navy. I'm talking about academics, people who never thought about taking a bullet for anybody. He inspired that kind of loyalty.

And then Joe Nye was his partner in building a bipartisan organization consensus around Asia policy, and especially focusing on Japan and allies, they came together in 2000. Nye was a Democrat. He worked for Clinton. And I worked for Kurt Campbell, who had worked for Nye in the Pentagon. But they came together in 2000, created this task force, produced what's called the Armitage-Nye Report, and several after that, which basically said, no matter who wins the election, this is the blueprint for how you get Asia right and Japan right. And of course, Bush won. Rich became Deputy Secretary of State, I went into the White House. When we had our meetings on Japan policy, we used the Armitage-Nye report. That was our strategy, a bipartisan document created outside of government that everyone agreed, if Gore wins or if Bush wins, we're going to support this from inside and outside of government.

And it was contested, frankly. A lot of people said, China's our future, not allies. And there were still some trade issues, but it, with the exception perhaps of President Trump himself, is now the mainstream view. And Joe was, where Rich was a salty sailor who busted and lifted 400 pounds in the gym and all that, Joe was a soft-spoken academic. His hobby was fly fishing, patient, strategic, and a wonderful human being. What they both had in common was they were very, very patriotic. One from the center right, one from the center left. They focused on the national interest more than their own ego. And they really nurtured and cared for and were loyal to their people, very loyal. Rich asked me about my family all the time. Joe asked me about my academic research. They cared about everyone in their orbit. Very warm, but very effective, tough bureaucratic players.

Do they exist today? Yes. And there's nothing more satisfying, frankly, than—so I'm older now, towards the end of my career. The most satisfying thing for me, the funnest, coolest part was being in the White House, negotiating with North Koreans, going to Afghanistan and so forth. But the part that's most satisfying is all the people I got to help along the way. And that's how Joe and Rich felt, that was what really marked their legacy and their view. Their legacy was huge on policy, but it's the cohort of people who were nurtured by both of them.

Maybe I'm old and cranky, I do worry that subsequent generations are not as loyal, that there's something about social media and careers where people are impatient and jumping from job to job and worried they'll be left behind. I hope I'm wrong. And I really hope that a new generation does what they did, which is really look out for and nurture the generation to come who will work on Asia. I've tried to do it. I know friends like Victor Cha, who worked with me in the Bush NSC, have tried to do it. Scholars like Peter Feaver at Duke. Randy Shriver, who worked for Armitage, Democrats like Kurt Campbell, Mira Rapp-Hooper, who worked for him. I do worry a little bit that loyalty and investing in people and relationships is a bit fragmented in Washington and everywhere. So hopefully people will read about Rich and Joe, read about those kinds of people and realize, not only is that an effective way to lead and have impact, but it's satisfying. It's gratifying, frankly. So I miss them both, but hopefully we'll get more like them.

Richard Gray

On that note, Dr. Green, thank you so much for a fantastic conversation.

Michael Green

Thanks, Richard. Thank you, Jersey.

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