Party Time! Jon Czin on US-China 2025 and 2026

Jon Czin of Brookings spent years as a top China analyst at the CIA and served as China Director on Biden’s NSC. He returns to ChinaTalk to review 2025 and forecast 2026. [Recorded before the latest round of purges…see the feed later today for an emergency pod we’re recording together this afternoon]

We discuss:

• Why 2025 has become “the year of living quietly” in US-China relations.

• Trump as “his own China desk officer”: personality, personnel churn, deal psychology, and legacy-thinking.

• China’s “escalate to de-escalate” strategy: rare earth leverage, midterm timing, and a shift from defense to offense that traps Washington in a game of whack-a-mole.

• The “mosh pit” inside the Trump administration: competing factions, ideas that break through by accident, and the absence of a sustained China strategy.

• Why Venezuela, Iran, and covert drama don’t move the needle with Beijing and why the real stakes are in alliances, especially with Japan.

• Chaos Muppets and Double Sixes: a generational theory of why Bush, Clinton, and Trump all embrace(d) chaos, and whether Trump’s incredible streak of luck on high-risk gambles is finally about to run out.

The Strange Calm in US-China Relations

Jordan Schneider: Jon Czin of Brookings, formerly with the IC and Biden’s NSC, returns for our quarterly check-in on US-China relations. It’s been unnervingly quiet, hasn’t it? The rest of the world isn’t quiet — we’re abducting folks and bombing Iran next week — but the US-China front is very placid.

Jon Czin: Surprisingly so. That isn’t what I expected. I assumed that whatever accord we reached back in November, when the two presidents met, would have generated some “stray voltage” by now. As we rounded the corner to the holidays, I was ready to add a meeting between Scott Bessent and He Lifeng in some European capital to my Advent calendar.

Instead, we are in this strange moment. With everything happening globally and domestically, it feels like the beginning of a Western movie where they say, “It’s quiet... too quiet.” As a parent of young children, I fear the silence more than the noise. It forces you to ask: Is something dangerous happening beneath the surface? I don’t believe that’s the case, but this is a rare, fallow moment in the bilateral relationship. It’s a good time to analyze how we got here and where we might be going.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s diagnose this. In the early ...