Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

On his way back from China, President Trump told reporters, "We've settled a lot of different problems that other people wouldn't have been able to settle."

One thing that wasn't settled was China's support for Iran.

Another unsettled issue, American arm sales to Taiwan, and more broadly, American support for Taiwan.

Just as Trump's backing of America's European allies is an open question, so too is his support for Taiwanese freedom.

Joining me tonight to discuss the future of the planet, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at the New York Times, Susan Glasser is a staff writer at the New Yorker, Mark Misetti is a Washington correspondent at the New York Times, and Nancy Ysef is a Pentagon correspondent and staff writer at The Atlantic.

Thank you all for joining me.

The future of the planet will be discussed tonight.

Uh Peter, um it seems like Xiinping got what he wanted out of the summit.

that fair?

Well, he was the host.

He was the dominant figure here, right?

Trump was the supplicant in a way coming to to to to his territory, to his turf.

And um he didn't give anything away as far as we know right now.

You never know if there are secreted agreements that we don't uh yet un uh understand.

But certainly Trump did not get a breakthrough out of it.

Did not get any cooperation on the straight of Hormuz.

Did not get uh any large trade deal.

and and she got at least something of what he wanted in terms of Taiwan.

Some ambivalence at the very least on the part of the president.

Yeah.

What could China do in the straight of Hormuz?

Well, they have a little impact on uh Iran.

Obviously, they over the years have been one of Iran's uh bigger customers and and they could in fact play it either way.

They could pressure Iran to to come to the table and make some concessions or they could in fact supply them with weapons to help them uh fight the war uh against us.

And and that's the question there.

you point to Mark Misetti like he's the weapon supplier.

We'll get to that question in a minute uh of of weapons supplier.

But Nancy, let me ask you, so playing on this, if you're if you're Taiwan's government right now, how are you feeling about America's commitment to your security?

I think uneasy for a couple reasons.

One of the things that emerged from this was the president was unwilling to even talk about Taiwan until he was on the plane headed home.

They've been waiting for months for this 14 billion um arms package and we saw more ambivalence from this uh the president about funding that and the unwillingness to sort of definitively say that the US was ready to stand by its policy.

President Xi was willing to definitively say that any involvement by the United States would lead to a clash.

It was not reciprocated by the United States in its willing to equally say that it would continue to defend its position.

So I think if you're in Taipei right right now, there's reason to be nervous.

In addition, militarily, the United States has moved a lot of its naval resources to the Middle East.

And so, some of the defenses that we have um had in the region.

Some of our commitment militarily has shifted towards the Middle East.

And the US has also spent down some of the stockpiles of the missiles fired by these weapon systems.

Correct.

That's right.

So, a lot of the air defense systems that we kept in places like South Korea, that we kept in the region, were moved over to the Middle East for the the war in Iran.

It'll take years to rebuild those stockpiles.

So Susan, let me ask you about two even more important allies in Asia, South Korea and Japan.

And you're watching Donald Trump, not just these last two days, but watching Trump's general performance and demeanor when it comes to Asia.

What are you thinking right now?

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think there was an enormous amount of trepidation looking in advance of the summit on the part of America's allies.

They've seen how Donald Trump has treated uh Europe.

Uh Nancy mentioned the air defense.

Uh South Korea had paid a large amount of money uh to be stationed with THAAD air missile defense system.

Donald Trump uh had already even before the summit had to pull it out because of the war in the Middle East.

And so I think what Donald Trump has made very clear is that uh no matter what's written on paper, no matter what laws are passed by Congress, there's no permanent commitments uh or alliances as far as he's concerned.

And I think you also have to juxtapose these things.

For the last decade, basically Republicans as well as Democrats in Washington have been signaling to our partners in Asia.

You know, now is a different moment.

We see China as a much more significant long-term threat, our only pure competitor, the major rivalry of the 21st century.

Donald Trump in just a few days has sort of abandoned that position.

And I think that in some ways we're so ignored to how radical and disruptive Trump has been to American foreign policy and domestic policy that we kind of need to take a breath and say if any other president of our recent lifetime, Democrat or Republican, had gone to China and said the things that Donald Trump has been saying, we would be having major front page headlines saying Donald Trump reverses uh American foreign policy in Asia.

Yeah, Mark, it does seem like she accomplished one mission, which is to convince the world that the Americans see China as their peer.

Is that fair?

I mean, President Trump was a fusive in his praise of President Xi, calling him calling him a great leader.

President Xi reciprocated by playing YMCA by the village people.

Uh, and that was made President Trump very happy.

Um he was as Peter said it was it was sort of as a supplicant and it was um it was a very good show for President Xi and as Nancy said he sort of cast some doubt on the question of Taiwan right President Trump just infused a little bit of doubt about weapons and the support of Taiwan which is sort of this bedrock policy of the United States going to this I want you to watch uh I want you to watch talking Trump talking about uh China this is on the plane ride back about deference Did you talk to him about the cyber attacks that he's done in the United States or the MSS has done?

I did.

And uh he talked about attacks that we did in China.

You know what they do?

We do too.

I told we do a lot of stuff to you that you don't know about.

And you're doing things to us that we probably do know about, but we do plenty.

It's a double It's a double-edged.

You've covered intelligence for years.

very unusual for an American president to say, "Yeah, they do stuff to us.

We do stuff to them.

They don't even know some of the stuff that we do."

Wink wink.

That that's going to Susan's point.

We're not We're still not used to to seeing that kind of presidential behavior.

Yeah.

It's a theme over the last several weeks that the administration did not want to disrupt this summit.

Uh intelligence be damned about what China was doing.

Right.

So, we reported a couple stories about how China was uh well, it it's a little murky exactly how many weapons have been shipped to Iran or the extent of the weapon shipments, but there's some plausible deniability and there were shipments of missiles that have gone to Iran from China.

The president uh and the administration didn't want to talk about this much.

He wanted to talk about well mostly been good on Iran.

Okay.

Talk about your reporting a little bit on this question.

Yeah.

So, um, we reported over the last few weeks that there is intelligence that, uh, that China has tried it to use third party countries to ship, um, at least one large shipment of shoulder fired missiles called man pads that can f that can shoot down helicopters, jets.

Uh, we saw this in Afghanistan.

Um, and so this is China dipping their toe in the water uh, in the military confrontation in Iran.

And then the question is, of course, so what does China want?

I mean, they're not they don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

Uh but they don't want to bail the United States out of a mess that the United States is currently in.

So they're going to make it hard.

And as we saw the last couple days, they're not going to make it easy on President Trump to get out of this.

China and Russia, generally speaking, enjoy when America goes on big adventures in the Middle East.

Sure.

And and they are happy if this continues for some time.

Not forever, but for some time.

And of course, as we said, they're looking at this very very closely with the draw down and the munitions uh for what it really matters to them, which is Taiwan, right?

Come back just just from the perspective of an intelligence reporter.

Come back to this this this way that Trump presents information to the world.

Yeah, we we we spy on them, too.

I don't recall presidents kind of flippantly and openly talking about this kind of tit for tat.

It's not only revealing of information that probably shouldn't be revealed, but it also sort of goes to this in his own mind kind of a moral equivalence like, yeah, they do it to us, but we do it to them, so we're all pretty bad, right?

Recall the famous uh Putin meeting, right?

Where right in Helsinki where he talks about the US intelligence assessment on the Russia on the election.

Um so right just to just to remind people that that's when he said he doesn't believe us he doesn't believe US intelligence because Putin said it didn't happen.

Right.

Right.

And so Putin says it so you know who are we to believe here.

Right.

And and this issue now maybe you know there's good reason to downplay and not you know spill out into public um a um some really sort of hot intelligence operations going on.

There's there may be some reason to do that, but as you say, there is a kind of equivalence that he's downplaying and making it kind of seem like it's no big deal.

And we're talking about very significant cyber operations that the Chinese have been involved in, right?

Did Trump do we know if Trump brought up privately with Shei?

Did the administration give any indication that they brought up with Shei this movement of Chinese weapons toward Iran?

Uh, not that we know of.

uh and u whether it was done behind uh closed doors, whether it was done in other bilateral meetings uh or you know in intelligence channels, we're not sure.

We certainly know they weren't trying to make a big deal of it before the summit.