Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsIt’s a big week on the global stage. More than 100 world leaders and their senior representatives will meet in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly. And on Thursday, eyes will turn south, to Washington, where President Trump will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping for the second time in the past six months.Warnings from Silicon Valley executives about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence hang over the proceedings. Tech leaders have called for a slowdown in development and regulation, but Trump is wary of their caution. The president believes that slowing down on AI will help China, though recent reporting suggests that he may be just as, if not more, worried that a slowdown will throw the American economy—already hurting from the war in Iran, which has sent gas prices soaring—into a recession.What will come of the meetings in New York? Will Xi and Trump find common ground on AI? On this episode of Radio Atlantic, I spoke with my colleagues Vivian Salama, a longtime foreign-policy reporter, and Rogé Karma, an economics reporter, to make sense of it all.The following is a transcript of the episode:Rogé Karma: If Donald Trump’s main way to negotiate is by threatening economic coercion, China now knows he doesn’t have much to use.[Music]Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris, and it’s a big week in international politics.World leaders are meeting in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, and Chinese President Xi Jinping is coming to Washington for the first time in over a decade, at a moment when China is central to the global conversation around AI.President Trump continues to favor speed over caution to ensure the U.S. can remain ahead on artificial intelligence. But not everyone, including the CEOs leading AI companies, are so sure.The U.S. and China’s relationship has been cold to lukewarm since the president returned to office. The nations reached a shaky trade truce last year following Trump’s tariff rollout, and other countries have turned to China for trade deals amid the turmoil inflicted by his administration’s policies.Meanwhile, in the U.S., Americans are feeling the pain of Trump’s economic plans and a war that is driving up the price of everyday items, from gas to groceries.What will all of these meetings lead to—if anything?With me to discuss are my colleagues Atlantic staff writers Vivan Salama and Rogé Karma.Let’s get to questions.Vivian, Rogé, thank you so much for joining me today.Vivian Salama: Good to be here.Rogé Karma: Great to be here, Adam.Harris: Vivian, I want to start with you to sort of frame this a little bit for us. What is at stake during this week’s meetings between Xi and Trump?Salama: I mean, the two countries have so much at stake because they basically thrive in this ecosystem in which they are codependent and yet trying to cooperate with each other at the same time—codependent economically on each other, trying to compete with each other, and trying to kind of maintain their status as these two global superpowers. And a lot of these interests face headwinds.And so, they’re coming in a very strange moment geopolitically, both for President Trump and for President Xi. Apart from the fact that they’ve had this up-and-down dispute rolling for the last year and a half over trade and tariffs and, in particular, competition about advanced semiconductors and artificial intelligence and this race for rare-earth minerals, they’re both also squeezed economically at home. President Trump obviously has the Iran war very heavy on his mind these days, and he has been frustrated with countries like China and Russia, who are believed to still be propping up the Iranian regime and helping them to sustain the attacks that the U.S. has launched with Israel. But also the economic impact that has come from this war, where it’s basically sent shock waves across the world, and particularly for oil markets that have struggled. You know, that’s something that also impacts China as well. Inflationary pressures in both countries have been really problematic.And so they’re coming to the table with this understanding and this sense that they both really need to do something to help them domestically, first of all, while also sustaining their ability to do the things that they do around the world, and do so in a way where they’re competing with each other. It’s a very strange dynamic, but one that President Trump has consistently said is a priority for him. And he wants that relationship to thrive.Harris: How has the president’s posture changed, even from that first Trump term, right? It seemed that coming into this term, there was the outright kind of hostility with the tariffs, and it’s sort of changed into a Well, we can work together and We have this sort of working relationship. How has the president’s position on China changed since that first term?Salama: Yeah, well, I mean, he recognizes that picking a fight with China is not advantageous to the United States, although he has insisted that tariffs, for example, help American businesses, help American producers. He has said that farmers are sort of insulated. He’s denied the economic impact of those tariffs that so many economists around the world say are the cause for driving inflationary pressures up and prices up here in the United States. And so he has completely dismissed that. It is one of the core elements of his economic agenda.But what we’ve seen is that—on top of the Iran war and the pressures that are happening because oil prices have gone up and inflation is going up, and on top of some of the other economic conditions that we see here—the president is really in a bind, and he recognizes that picking a fight with China would only probably exacerbate that. His advisers continuously tell him that Picking a fight with China just does not present the ultimate advantages that you’re seeking. And especially—remind our listeners and viewers’we’re in an election period right now where Republicans, especially those running for the House, for House seats, are up against a wall right now because of a lot of these issues. And so politically, it’s not advantageous to pick a fight with China right now, and instead to try to find ways where, Yes, we can compete, but ultimately we need each other in order to survive and thrive in this day and age.And so they are trying to approach the relationship with China now with a very open-eyed, a wide-eyed recognition of that—that they just can’t shut the door to China. It’s not even realistic.Harris: You know, Rogé, one of the things I think we’ve learned over the last decade or so is that the president doesn’t always listen to his advisers when they’re telling him not to pick fights. And thinking about the news over the last several weeks—the panic about AI that’s been coming out from the tech CEOs themselves, who are talking about slowing down the pace of development to align and to allow for regulation to land in that time—The president, for his part, isn’t necessarily buying it, right? He’s said to reporters recently:Donald Trump: We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world. And frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.Harris: Rogé, do you buy this argument from the president that this push to disregard the tech CEOs’ warnings is about China?Karma: I don’t fully buy it. So, I think it’s important to place this meeting in context. I do think the AI race is going to be the central issue in this meeting. You already are seeing reports of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent meeting with his Chinese counterpart and discussing the idea of, for example, an AI warning system. I think this issue is going to be central.And as you alluded to, Adam, I think there are really two stories that are colliding here. So the first story is the one that you mentioned, which is the AI freak-out that is happening in the U.S., where you have this series of incidents in which AIs are—and people are probably pretty familiar with them by now—but are displaying some, let’s just call it very scary behavior that has got essentially every tech CEO, from Elon Musk to Sam Altman at OpenAI to Dario Amodei at Anthropic, really, really worried. These companies that were bristling at the idea of regulation just six months ago are now basically begging the government to regulate them. You have lawmakers from both sides of the aisle scrambling to try to write regulations, and the whole view in the U.S. is like, Okay, this is going way too fast; we need to slow it down.But there’s also a second story that has been happening this year, and that is the acceleration of Chinese AI. And this is what’s happening in the background, is that heading into this year, Claude Code was taking the world by storm; there was a view that the U.S. and its labs were leading the AI race definitively. And over the last few months, there has been a series of Chinese models released that have basically, on the benchmarks that we know of, have shown to be pretty neck and neck with the U.S. models and have often been trained at a fraction of the price.And this, I think, has really complicated the story around the U.S. slowdown. Because I think there is a good-faith argument to be made that if the U.S. unilaterally imposes really strict regulations, if the U.S. unilaterally slows down, then it’s only a matter of time before China catches up with and then surpasses the U.S. And then we have the worst of both worlds, right? Because in that case, we have rapidly advancing AI systems that are dangerous, and the technology is controlled by our biggest geopolitical rival—an authoritarian government.And so I think these two stories coming together in this meeting is what’s really important. There is, I think, a view among AI experts that the only real, sustainable way in order to have an AI slowdown to address some of these possibilities is for the U.S. and China to work together.Now, when it comes to Donald Trump’s comments of saying, Okay, we can’t do any regulation because of China, I find that a little bit disingenuous and a little bit puzzling, because Donald Trump and his policies are some of the biggest reasons why China is so close to the U.S. in the AI race.Harris: How exactly has he advanced China’s capabilities?Karma: So the biggest advantage that the United States has when it comes to the AI race is our quasi-monopoly on what are called advanced semiconductors—the very advanced computer chips that are needed to run the trillions of calculations per second in order to train these very advanced AI systems. There’s basically one company in the world that can create, design, these at scale, and it’s the U.S.-based Nvidia, the most valuable company in the world. Under Joe Biden, there was a policy where the Biden administration announced what are called export controls on these semiconductors, basically saying, Look, we recognize this is an important technology. We recognize that it has a lot of military applications. We don’t want China to be able to advance as quickly as us in this technology. So we’re going to restrict the chip sales of our most advanced chips to China. We’re gonna tell Nvidia it’s not allowed to sell its best chips to China.Most experts believe that is a key reason why China has remained behind in the AI race, even though they have pretty equal AI-engineering talent. They have a huge amount of research scientists; they have incredible energy use and ability to build data centers. But the one thing they don’t have is the chips.But when Donald Trump comes into office, he has systematically rolled back those export controls. Right now, China has access to import the H200, which is the second-best Nvidia chip available, which is far more advanced than anything any Chinese company could make at the moment. And so I wrote a piece about this where I basically said, This is the equivalent of saying we’re in a race with Russia when it comes to nuclear weapons, while also selling the Kremlin uranium. That’s basically what Donald Trump’s policy is. And I think it makes very little sense.Harris: Vivian, we talk about the ways that the president’s policies have driven other nations into the arms of competitors, driven them into the arms of China—thinking about Mark Carney and his talk about the realignment of the international order. I’ve been thinking about the continuing war with Iran in this context. It’s a war that’s really unpopular with the majority of U.S. voters, but China recently hosted an Iranian diplomat in a show of Beijing’s leverage over Iran. What does that tell us about China’s relationship with Iran, as this war with the U.S. continues to unfold?Salama: So there’s so much to unpack in your question, and it happens to be something I’m writing quite a bit about these days. The relationship between China and Iran in particular is advantageous to Russia and to China for different reasons. At this point, Iran is looking for any friends that it can get. There’s increasingly, because of the Trump administration’s sanctions and blockades on Iran right now, there’s very little that can be done by countries around the world, even if their own bilateral relations are pretty solid with Tehran. They would face heavy sanctions on their own, especially as the Trump administration talks about what’s called secondary sanctions, which is sanctioning countries and companies elsewhere in the world for doing business with Iran.And China has heeded those warnings to a certain extent, where a lot of the aboveboard cooperation and relations with Iran have subdued because they would also be subject to those sanctions. But behind the scenes and, in particular, on the military side, China sees a customer in Iran. Iran right now—some of its stockpiles, its military stockpiles, have been depleted because of this war, in particular, drone technology, which has been a driving force of its ability to sustain U.S. attacks in the last eight months or so of this war. It will turn to China increasingly as it tries to rebuild those stockpiles. And China, of course, has excellent technology when it comes to military, but also especially with drone technology; it’s some of the most advanced in the world. Iran had pretty good technology too, but it needs more.And so China’s happy to do that. It ultimately wants to do that business, and it’s not concerned with the politics or the geopolitics involved in it. Obviously China also—it’s a double-edged sword for China because, again, economically this war has not been favorable to them. They have felt the pressures that many countries around the world have felt, and so it has been problematic for them.But both countries also have the advantage of also doing business with Russia, and Russia can fill in the gaps of some of those, especially when it comes to getting cheaper oil. They’ve lifted, temporarily, any blockades on Russian oil being exported during this war to alleviate some of the pressures globally to get some of that oil in the market. And so they have sort of a trio that benefits from each other in terms of being able to sustain the current challenges that are being felt economically around the world.To your broader question about the alliances, though, I really want to point out—and it’s something that I’ve been writing about quite a bit—is that one of the fears and Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, sort of being embraced by the European Union as an associate member, and all of these things that we’re seeing under the second Trump administration. One of the things I’ve been writing about is that this is not really isolated to the second Trump administration. If anything, I’ve been talking to senior officials around the world in recent months, and they say we have to plan for a world in which the United States is no longer the leader of the free world. And this is something that they believe is not isolated to Trump. You look at some of the winds of change here in the United States; you even hear progressives in some ways talking about less wars overseas and defunding the Department of Defense and things like that.That is troubling to a lot of countries around the world who say, yes, Donald Trump has made clear that he does not view the traditional alliances of the post–World War II era with the same sanctity as some of his predecessors. But the fact of the matter is, the American people voted him in twice. And if the American people voted him in twice—albeit with a break in between—it shows that there is an appetite for what he’s selling. And if there’s an appetite for what he’s selling, then increasingly—and especially with younger generations turning more isolationist—a Democrat would have to embrace some of those policies too.And so, instead of treating Donald Trump as a phenomenon, they’re now treating him as the norm. And who benefits from all that, at the end? It is China. And it’s not because China is a favorable benefactor for these countries. Most countries around the world do not trust China. But even just the slightest decoupling, whether it be militarily, economically, on industries—the slightest decoupling from the United States opens a window for China. It’s a little window of opportunity for China. And China is seizing that.And the Iran case is something very unique to the current situation, the current war. But China is also benefiting from the policies of the Trump administration, of whatever will come after it. And so it’s something to watch.Karma: And Adam, could I actually just add something in real quick? One thing I’ve been covering a lot with this war is oil markets. And I think one very underappreciated element of the meeting that’s going to be happening this week is the role that China has played in keeping global oil prices down.Almost every expert I talked to who, at the beginning of this war, believed that oil prices were going to spike to $150 or $200 a barrel, and then proceeded to not spike—we’re now well into this war. It’s been months and months and months, and oil prices are high, but they’re not nearly as high as the sort of doomsday predictions that everyone thought. And the single biggest reason is China. Because China, for reasons that no one fully understands—and no one even really knows exactly how they did it—they basically slashed their imports of oil by around half earlier this year. They are the single biggest importer of oil in the world, and so this is a huge deal. It was almost single-handedly enough to help keep oil prices down. But that kind of behavior can’t last forever.And so I think Donald Trump has a very vested interest in China continuing to consume a lot less oil. And to Vivian’s point, this fact that China has helped keep oil prices down not only buys it international goodwill, but I think does provide it some leverage in these talks. Because heading into the midterms, if China were to suddenly start buying a lot of oil again, that would suddenly send the price of oil much, much higher. It’s just one possible thing to think about as these meetings proceed.Harris: When we come back, Vivan and Rogé talk about what the government is doing about inflation and the UN General Assembly in New York.[BREAK]Harris: The U.S. economy is in this perpetual position of tumult. Last week, the Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh, raised interest rates for the first time in three years. What does that rate hike, Rogé, tell us about the U.S. economy at this moment?Karma: I think the most important thing it signals about the U.S. economy is the extent to which we have committed a series of own goals that have taken an otherwise very strong economy and weakened it.Listeners might remember that, heading into the fall of 2024, so about two years ago, the Federal Reserve was beginning to lower interest rates. Inflation was coming down, right? The labor market was strong. And the Fed basically declared victory. And then Donald Trump came into office, he instituted these global tariffs, and the Fed had to pause and said, Wait a minute, maybe we can’t be lowering interest rates, because inflation might come back.Then we had a period of stagnation. And then the Iran war came, and it has driven global energy prices, but also lots of other prices, up so much that now the Fed feels like we may be in a position where inflation gets out of control again. And so we have to raise interest rates. So I think the most important thing it tells us about the economy is that all of a sudden, the U.S. is facing—and really the world, because of this war—is facing an inflation crisis again.The Fed feels like it has to take pretty drastic action to address that crisis—that this crisis is almost entirely one that the United States, and Donald Trump specifically, created by launching this war. And in terms of what it means for this meeting, I think what it means is that the U.S. has a lot less leverage than it might have.You, Adam, at the beginning, you asked, What has changed about Trump between the first and second term? And one answer is that the economic context has changed.Salama: Totally.Karma: In Trump’s first term, inflation was low; the employment was strong. Now inflation is getting scarily high. Interest rates are much higher than they were back then. Consumers are much angrier than they were back then. If Donald Trump’s main way to negotiate is by threatening economic coercion, China now knows he doesn’t have much to use. They’re looking at these polls going into the midterms; they’re looking at the price of gas; they’re looking at how frustrated consumers are. And I think they’re probably saying to themselves, We have the upper hand going into this.Salama: But at the same time, the same is true in China, right? I mean there are inflationary pressures in China, and economically, Xi is up against a wall as well.I think they have a different kind of government and a different kind of society and so it may not threaten his regime in the same way that the administration would politically face consequences for something like that. But it is definitely something that weighs heavily on his mind as he comes to Washington.Harris: We’re talking a lot about Trump and China, but there are gonna be a lot of world leaders who are here in New York City. As they’re meeting this week, what are some of the things that you’re going to be paying attention to in this split-screen week of meetings?Salama: There’s so much. The UN General Assembly for a long time has not been as relevant as it once was. But there is this sense, on the theme that we’re talking about, about this departure of alliances, or the fracturing of traditional alliances from the post–World War II era, and whether or not the United States can be depended upon.Other things to watch out for—obviously the Iranians coming to town are going to lay out their case for the United Nations on the world stage to hear from them, and to hear where they stand on this war, is probably going to be interesting, and so we’ll watch out for that. The Iranians have traditionally set off fireworks at the United Nations, and this year certainly will be no different.The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is scheduled to speak later this week, and he is in an election season right now. He’s up for reelection next month. And with the Iran war and just the sentiment toward the Israeli government that has been souring it, not just in the United States but around the world—I think his comments are going to be interesting to watch.I do just want to also note, the Trump administration has been down on the UN in particular as an international body. Ambassador Mike Waltz, who used to be a Florida congressman and was very aligned with Trump, has really set out to lay out the case that the Trump administration makes that the UN is basically irrelevant and is not operating in the way it should be. And there are a lot of countries around the world who agree with him that the UN was in need of desperate reform, and so that’s also going to be an interesting sidebar to watch about the relevance of the United Nations in the current era and whether or not it actually serves the purposes that it once did, to unite and basically uphold international law and humanitarian issues. So we’ll watch out for that as well.Harris: And Rogé, same question to you. What are some of the things that you’re going to be thinking about and reporting on as the week moves ahead?Karma: I think the single biggest thing that I’m going to be watching is the language around AI. This is the issue that I think has been front of mind for a lot of legislators in the U.S. And as I was saying earlier, there is only one real way to engineer a global AI slowdown if that is really what people are worried about, and it is a U.S.-China deal.And I think the general view going into this is that neither Donald Trump or Xi Jinping are very amenable to this kind of deal. But already, the fact that I was reading this morning that Secretary Bessent and his counterpart were talking about an AI warning system, I think that is a signal that members of both governments are taking this more seriously. And I’ll just be very interested in what comes out of this, in part because on so many of these issues we’re talking about—whether tariffs are one; economic relations are another—there has been so much conversation for so long that it’s hard to imagine anything very substantive happening.Like, for example, the U.S. and China came to their trade truce that involved China purchasing a bunch of U.S. soybeans—China hasn’t been purchasing the amount of soybeans. There has been in a lot of these meetings this economic dance that goes back and forth, where Trump tries to pin down China with commitments; China sort of skirts them. That’s more, for me, more predictable, and I could see it happening again. With AI, this is a much more open space. It’s much more amenable and in flux. And so I am actually going to be interested in what both sides say, what positions they stake, and what, if anything, they can agree to—even if it’s just some rhetoric around what even the nature of the problem is.Harris: Well, Vivian, Rogé, there will be a lot to watch out for this week, and we will be reading your reporting as it goes along. Thank you so much for joining us.Salama: Thanks, Adam.Karma: Appreciate you having us.[Music]Harris: That’s all for today’s show.This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli and edited by Hadley Robinson.It was engineered by Miguel Carrascal and has original music by Rob Smierciak.Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.If you like what you saw here, new episodes of Radio Atlantic drop every Monday and Thursday.You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, on Apple or Spotify, or wherever it is you get your podcasts.And if you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.