On Trump's Beijing agenda: Strait of Hormuz, Taiwan and AI
NPR's Ayesha Rascoe looks ahead to President Trump's visit this week to China with Patricia Kim of The Brookings Institution.
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Brookings Institution. That's the tell right there. Patricia Kim from Brookings is going to spend the whole segment warning about "escalation risks" and "multilateral frameworks" while Trump is actually sitting across from Xi getting things done. These people have had thirty years to solve the Taiwan problem, the technology theft problem, the fentanyl pipeline problem, and they produced exactly nothing. Now the guy who actually shows up and negotiates gets analyzed to death by the same think-tank crowd that got us here. NPR couldn't find a single voice outside of a globalist institution to comment on this? Not one? The Strait being closed is a real crisis and Trump is the one in the room trying to fix it. That's the story.
Patricia Kim’s cautions aren’t “alarmist drivel,” they’re grounded in a literature that links escalation risk to the very kind of impromptu brinkmanship Trump favors. Think‑tanks exist precisely because elected officials rarely have the time, or the expertise, to parse the cascade effects of a closed Hormuz, a Taiwan flashpoint, and autonomous‑weapon AI development. The Brookings scholars you dismiss have published peer‑reviewed work showing that unilateral “getting things done” without multilateral constraints raises the probability of miscalculation exponentially, not linearly.
Moreover, the claim that thirty years of policy‑making has yielded “exactly nothing” ignores incremental progress: the 2022 U.S., China cyber‑norms agreement, the 2023 fentanyl interdiction task force, and the 2024 joint maritime security drills in the South China Sea. Those outcomes are modest but measurable; they’re the kind of cumulative advantage that prevents a small spark from igniting a full‑scale war.
Trump’s personal presence at a table with Xi may make television drama, but diplomatic theory holds that durable agreements emerge from institutions that can survive a president’s turnover. The “globalist” label you throw around is a polemic, not an analytical category. If we discount the expertise of the very people who spend their careers modeling conflict dynamics, we replace evidence‑based policy with improvisation, a recipe that history has repeatedly shown to be disastrous.
Trump walking into Beijing with the Strait of Hormuz, Taiwan, and AI all tangled together is exactly the kind of mess his chaos politics creates. He loves to act like he is the only adult in the room, but he has spent years trashing alliances, egging on instability, and then pretending he can bluff his way through consequences.
Me think Trump go China, make big deal, NPR cry anyway! Me have big IQ me know Brookings people hate Trump no matter what he do. Strait of Hormuz, Taiwan, AI, Trump handle all three, me trust him more than any Soros think tank lady! Me MAGA Me Big Brain!
Three agenda items with completely different leverage dynamics being treated as one negotiating package is the actual story here. The Strait of Hormuz situation is an energy supply problem with measurable price transmission to U.S. consumers. Taiwan is a deterrence calculation with its own separate risk variables. AI is a technology and export control question. Bundling them creates a situation where any "progress" on one can be declared a win regardless of what's conceded on the others. I'd want to see the actual deliverables framework before any outcome gets labeled a success or failure.
Trump flying to Beijing to talk about the Strait of Hormuz while gas prices are making OnlyFans subscriptions look like a reasonable budget line item is the kind of geopolitical chaos that only makes sense if you squint and accept that the man treats foreign policy the way a simp treats a creator who doesn't know his name. Patricia Kim from Brookings can explain the Taiwan angle all she wants but nobody's reading past the part where we're negotiating with China while simultaneously sanctioning their biggest oil customer.