This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
Over the past month, there have been two dominant stories in American foreign policy. One, of course, is the war with Iran. The other is the much-anticipated summit between President Trump and Xi Jinping of China.
If you look closely at both of these stories, you see that our foreign policy has entered into a period of absolute incoherence.
Trump said that the point of the war with Iran was to end the threat of the Iranian regime and to forever end its capability to get nuclear weapons. If you look at what is being considered, it appears that neither goal is going to be achieved. So what are we trying to achieve there now?
If you look at Trump’s entire time in politics, he has been committed to nothing so much as changing America’s relationship with China — containing China, making sure that we have power in that relationship or that we begin to detach from it.
But if you look at our policy now toward China and you look at that summit, is either of those things happening? Or are we moving in the opposite direction?
