TRANSCRIPT

McFaul: Hey everyone, you're listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanfo rd University. I'm your host, or maybe I should say I'm your co-host, or maybe I should say this is the last time I'll be hosting World Class from Stanford University. Because as listeners and followers of FSI’s news may know, after eleven years, I just stepped down as the director a few weeks ago and I've handed the baton to my guest today, Colin Kahl, who's the brand new director of the Freeman Spogli Institute.

And it is fantastic, Colin, that you agreed to take on this assignment. This is another form, I consider, of public service just like what you've done for the U.S. government and the United States of America.

Colin, as you're going to hear in a few minutes, is the perfect mix of scholar and practitioner that we so value here at FSI. And we are really lucky that you are taking up this assignment.

So Colin, welcome to World Class where everybody will be listening to you forthcoming for, I hope, many, many years.

Kahl: Thanks Mike, it's a real pleasure to be with you and most especially thank you for your tremendous decade plus—eleven years—of service to FSI and the Stanford community. And I look forward to continuing to work with you as you transition to the next thing. And we should talk about that too. But it's great to be on the pod with you.

McFaul: Glad to be here. And just so everybody knows, I stepped down from FSI, but I'm not retiring from Stanford. I still have my various day jobs here. We can come back to that a little bit later.

But Colin, why don't you just tell our listeners and our viewers a little bit about your road to this present position.

Kahl: Yeah, sure. So I grew up in the Bay Area. I grew up in the East Bay in Richmond, California. I applied to Stanford as an undergrad, didn't get in. Applied again as a graduate student, didn't get in. So I got educated elsewhere. I went to the University of Michigan, which is a great school.

McFaul: Very fine institution.

Kahl: And then I went to Columbia University where I got my PhD in political science, focused on international relations and conflict studies. I did my PhD work in the 90s when the field of international relations was trying to figure out what the field even meant after the end of the Cold War.

So it was an exciting and very kind of plastic moment to be doing scholarly work.

I then started my first teaching job at the University of Minnesota in 2000. And of course, a year after that, 9/11 happened. And it was a terrible event for the United States and for the world. For those of us who lived in New York City—I did my graduate work there—it was especially painful.

And it really drove me to want to figure out a way to both do the academic side of understanding the world, but also see if there was a way to engage in public service. So my fifth year at the University of Minnesota, I actually got a fellowship through the Council on Foreign Relations . . .

McFaul: Right.

Kahl: . . . that put me at the Pentagon for a year and a half. This was during the George W. Bush administration. Don Rumsfeld was still the Secretary of Defense. I worked there for a year and a half. I kind of caught the bug, the Washington bug.

McFaul: What was your portfolio back then, Colin? Just remind everybody.

Kahl: So I worked in a small office called the Stability Operations Office. It was only 24 of us. worked within the office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. It had historically been called the Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Affairs Office

McFaul: Right, right, I remember that. They changed it, right.

Kahl: But Rumsfeld was not a fan of peacekeeping, so they changed it to ‘stability operations.’

But at the time, most of what our office did was try to help the U.S. military reform itself in the face of the struggles that the U.S. military was facing in Iraq and Afghanistan with the stabilization missions there.

There's a lot of dark humor at the Pentagon, but we sometimes joked that the 24 of us were doing stability operations while the other 24,000 people in the building were doing instability operations.

McFaul: [laughing] Instability operations, yeah, that’s right.

Kahl: But anyway, it was totally exciting. You know, we were there when when U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine was being revised and a bunch of other things.

So that was 2005, 2006. I kind of caught the bug and decided to try to stay in Washington. So I actually took a job at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service where they were kind enough to give me tenure and I taught in the security studies program there for a decade.

McFaul: Let's just . . . hold on, hold on. Let's be clear. They were not ‘kind enough’ to give you tenure; you earned tenure. Nobody gives tenure anywhere. Congratulations that you landed that job.

Kahl: So, I was in the security studies program there for ten years, about a half that time I served in the Obama administration. We served together . . .

McFaul: Together, yes!

Kahl: . . . in the first few years. I was back at the Pentagon as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East during the drawdown of our forces from Iraq during the Arab Spring.

McFaul: Right.

Kahl: During the first flare up of Israel-Iran tensions over Iran's nuclear program. By the way, none of that was my fault, but I was there when all that stuff happened.

And then I went back to Georgetown for a few years and then I got pulled back into the Obama administration at the end to work at the White House as a deputy assistant to the president and as then-vice president Biden's national security advisor. So I was there for Russia's first invasion of Ukraine . . .

McFaul: Right.

Kahl: . . . and the Central American migration crisis and tensions in the South China Sea and the campaign against the Islamic State and the Iran nuclear deal. A lot of interesting things.

And then, when Trump was elected the first time, Mike, you reached out to me with this amazing opportunity at Stanford, the Steven C. Házy Senior Fellow chair that I currently occupy. Applied for the job and got it. It was an opportunity to come back to Stanford. I’ve sat at CISAC, the Center for International Security and Cooperation here at FSI. And I was the co-director of CISAC for a couple of years.

And then last but not least, when Biden was elected president, he asked me to serve as the undersecretary of defense for policy back at DoD, which is essentially the number three civilian and senior policy advisor to the secretary. And I did that for the two first two and a half years of the Biden administration.

Also also very interesting times: fall of Afghanistan . . .

McFaul: Yes.

Kahl: . . . Russia's further invasion of Ukraine, rising tensions with China, dealing with the aftermath of COVID, lot of changes in the world.

So anyway, I'm glad to be back at Stanford. I've been back since the summer of 2023, and I'm excited to try to fill the very big shoes that you've left at FSI after eleven years.

McFaul: Well, let's talk about the future in a minute, but just two follow-up questions on your history. You've had lots of government jobs you just described. I can't think of anybody that's had a more diversified set of experiences in national security. We are lucky to have you here.

Tell us about the best day of any of those jobs and tell us about the worst day and maybe reverse that. Worst day first, best day second.

Kahl: So first of all, I'm fortunate to have had the opportunity to serve my country. I believe in it strongly. I've served in Republican administrations and Democratic administrations. I've worked for two Republican secretaries of defense and two Democratic secretaries of defense. So I think I've demonstrated my nonpartisan bona fides in how I've served my country.

And I just want to mention that because I think it's important.

McFaul: Yes, it is important.

Kahl: Because, of course, FSI is a nonpartisan place.

Worst day and best day: in a sense, it's almost the same. There was no more harrowing experience than the collapse of Kabul.

I was actually at the NIH getting a medical treatment when I got a text message from the secretary's chief of staff that I needed to hurry back to the Pentagon. So I literally pulled an IV out of my arm and raced back to the Pentagon because Kabul fell.

And obviously that was a tremendously terrible event for Afghanistan. It was a particularly harrowing way for the 20-year U.S. involvement in Afghanistan to end. But it also put us on the clock. You know, we had basically 17 days before the deadline for all American forces to be out of Afghanistan, and we suddenly had to do a lot of things.

We had to flood forces back into the country to occupy an airport that was now in hostile Taliban territory when the Taliban took over Kabul. We had to secure that airport. We sent five or six thousand soldiers and Marines to that airfield. We had postured them in the region previously to be able to do that, but we had to get them there.

McFaul: Right.

Kahl: And then we then had to oversee the evacuation of 125,000 human beings in two weeks, which had never happened in human history and no other country in the history of the world would have been capable of doing. And it was pretty horrible.

McFaul: Yeah.

Kahl: A lot of terrible human tragedies. Obviously, we got a lot of people out. A lot of people weren't able to get out. There was the terrible ISIS bombing that killed 13 of our brave service members. Toward the end of the evacuation, there was an errant U.S. strike on what we thought was an ISIS operator that turned out to be an aid worker and his kids. It was horrible.

But I'm also incredibly proud of what we were able to do. I mean, in the macro sense, because we were able to project our power back into Afghanistan, lock down that airfield and get all of those people to safety, including the family members of some Afghans who worked for me. We were able to get a lot of people out.

We were able to bring them to bases and facilities that didn't even exist when the crisis . . . I mean the bases existed, but the facilities to house these people in the Gulf and in Europe and back here in the continental United States . . . the amount of diplomacy that required, the amount of logistics by the U.S. military that it required. It was an unbelievable operation.

And so it was terrible. But it was also an extraordinary demonstration of what the United States was capable of doing even at these dark moments.

McFaul: That's a great way to put it together. I would guess we would not have been able to do that if we did not have NATO allies and bases in that part of the world, or is that incorrect? I don't know the logistics of that part of the world.

Kahl: If anything, it's an understatement. I think one of the things that distinguishes the United States from every other superpower or global power in history is the depth and breadth of our network of allies and partners. At the heart of that are our treaty allies in the NATO alliance, but also in the Indo-Pacific region, so think South Korea, Japan, Australia.

McFaul: All of them, right.

Kahl: But we also have very close security partnerships in the Middle East. And so literally it would not have been possible to fly aircraft into Afghanistan, fly people out from Afghanistan into places like Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia. But then we brought them to Germany and Spain and other U.S. bases in Europe. And then we brought them back to bases here in the United States.

And that network, literally that network made it possible. And had we not had those allies and partners when that happened, we couldn't have done what we did. We couldn't have done any of it. We couldn't have gotten any of our people out.

And so that really is like some of the secret sauce to America's power and influence in the world. And it remains the case that we have more allies and partners than any other country in history.

But it's also the case that those alliances and partnerships are probably more strained than they've been in my lifetime.

McFaul: So, one other historical question about you. Why did you come to Stanford? I mean, you've got this great job at Georgetown. You obviously are connected to the policy community. We're far away out here. Tell us about that decision.

Kahl: Part of it is I grew up in the Bay Area. Part of it is that, mean, Georgetown is a remarkable place, but Stanford's one of the two or three best universities in the world. We had a great community of scholars out here. And a lot of the issues that I'm particularly passionate about now—especially the intersection of technology and geopolitics— I mean, this is ground zero for a lot of that.

And so it was for a mix of kind of lifestyle reasons and professional reasons. And it's been awesome.

McFaul: Well, that's a great segue to what I wanted to ask you next, which is about the big agenda items. I mean, FSI has a lot going on: we have lots of centers here, as our listeners know, because we've had many guests from all, I think all of our centers over the time I've been here.

But you've got some particular things that you want to focus on. I know, because I talked to people that were part of the selection committee, that that was what was most impressive about you, is that you have a big agenda. Tell us about that agenda, Colin.

Kahl: As your longtime listeners undoubtedly know, FSI is an interesting place because FSI Central, where you were the director until three weeks ago, and now I sit, essentially sits over nine main research centers that cover everything from democracy to international security to regions like Asia and Europe to issues like technology and defense innovation, food security, global health.

And the breadth of this place is extraordinary. But it's also a highly decentralized place. Yes, we oversee the centers, but in many respects, the centers are kind of quasi-autonomous nation states.

McFaul: Exactly, exactly.

Kahl: So this isn't about trying to micro-manage our centers; that would be a fool's errand. It is actually, though, trying to look for ways to have the whole of FSI add up to more than the sum of its parts. And to look for synergies across our centers on really big questions.

You took the helm of FSI, I believe, back in 2015?

McFaul: Yes.

Kahl: To state the obvious, the world in 2026 is a lot different than it was in 2015. And so, FSI has to adapt to that world. And I think there are four really big questions of the moment that I think FSI really needs to be impactful on.

One is that we're in this new age of geopolitics. And it's become kind of trite to note that, you know, we have a resurgence of great power politics and competition between the United States and China and Russia and other major powers. But it actually runs deeper than that.

The distribution of power in general across the world is fundamentally different than it was 15, 20 years ago, let alone 50 years ago. The United States remains the world's most consequential actor, but China is nipping at our heels as a global superpower. And while Russia can't dominate the world, Russia can blow up the world. And we also know that countries like China, Russia, North Korea, Iran are working more closely together.

At the same time, the traditional role that the United States has played in the world since World War II or since the end of the Cold War is changing. And our relationship with our traditional allies is changing. And I think anybody who kind of paid attention to the World Economic Forum in Davos over the last few days heard speeches from the Prime Minister of Canada referring to the rupture in the international order.

And there's just the sense that things are fundamentally changing. And some of that may be a direct reaction to some of the policies of President Trump. But frankly, I think a lot of it is structural, that the policies of the current administration are as much an artifact as they are a cause even if they are accelerating some of the structural dynamics.

And then of course, there's big chunks of the world that doesn't want to be on anybody's team.

McFaul: Right.

Kahl: That wants to be non-aligned and multi-aligned. A lot of countries in the so-called ‘global south’ fall in that category. So we should be studying this new era of geopolitics

I would encourage you to say more about how you plan to study it, because I know you have a really fascinating project in this space that brings FSI and Hoover scholars together on some of these questions.

Kahl: So, one issue is the new geopolitics. The other though is what I call the new techno politics. It's actually a term I think Ian Bremmer coined.

But it's not just the notion that technologies like AI, biotech, quantum, space, clean energy are transforming our world, but also that the actors at the heart of these innovations are these multinational corporations that if their market cap was translated into GDP,

they would rank as G20 nations, right? When you're Nvidia and you have $5 trillion

McFaul: That's a great point.

Kahl: Like that would be the top half of the G20. But it's not just that. They have global presence. And for a lot of these companies, they have near sovereign control over the environments through which we live our lives.

McFaul: That's a great point.

Kahl: So, think cloud service providers, social media platforms, but also the infrastructure: undersea cables, low earth orbit constellations. And all of these things are under regulated spaces. So, it's not just that the technology is changing the world, but the companies are international actors. And again, where else should we be studying that but here at Stanford?

McFaul: Right.

Kahl: The third thing is there's a broader category of what people might refer to as existential risk. Nuclear weapons and the salience of nuclear weapons are back with a vengeance. For the first time, we're entering a world in which there are not two but three nuclear peers as China quadruples its nuclear arsenal. India and Pakistan are at loggerheads. They both have nuclear weapons. Israel and Iran are at loggerheads over Iran's quest for nuclear weapons. North Korea is expanding its arsenal. And arms control is breaking down.

So we know that the nuclear age is back with a vengeance. Simultaneously, we're facing the climate crisis. We all lived through COVID. It won't be the last pandemic, unfortunately, I think, in our lifetimes. There are other biosecurity risks emanating from emerging technologies. And then there's also the possibility that technologies like AI will produce their own existential externalities in the form of things like rogue super intelligence or other things.

So we should be studying those things. And then lastly, I think we have to be studying the future of global democracy because democracy is under siege around the world from revisionist authoritarian powers like Russia and China. But it's also eroding in many traditional democracies that are becoming increasingly illiberal.

And advanced democracies no longer agree on what democracy is. A big divide between the United States and Europe at the moment is both laying claim to being democratic, but in fundamentally different ways.

And so the point just is, we have 150 researchers at FSI, 50 of them are tenured faculty, many of them were working at the intersection of these issues. I want to support that and I also want them to do more together.

McFaul: That sounds fantastic. That is the agenda for our moment. And I think you're right that we have some people that work on some of those things, but we have holes to fill. And I wish you success in doing that to compliment what we have here, but also to try to get these different scholars that work on these different pieces to understand how they are intertwined, right?

The future of global democracy is also highly impactful on geopolitics and vice versa. I think that is a great agenda for FSI for the future.

I mean, on my own piece: I would just say in terms of what I want to work on, I have a lot of interests, but the main research one is I just did finish this book, as listeners will know, called Autocrats vs. Democrats, China, Russia . . .

Kahl: Available now!

McFaul: Available now! Available while you're listening on your phone. You can get it, and it's highly discounted now. And I'm going to tell you a little story about that actually, Colin. I don't think we've talked about it. The original title was ‘American Renewal.’ That was like two or three years ago. Then it switched the title to ‘Autocrats vs. Democrats.’ But the subtitle, until just a few months ago was ‘China, Russia and the New Global Order.’ The now title is ‘China, Russia, America and the New Global Disorder,’ reflecting a year ago what I thought was going to be a pretty tumultuous time. And I think I underestimated how tumultuous it is and your agenda is addressing that.

But I would say two things that I want to do here at FSI. One is, when I was working on this book, I knew a lot about the Cold War, so there's a debate, are we in the Cold War or not? And I addressed that. My answer is yes and no.

But I knew a lot about the Cold War. I know quite a bit about Russia. I know a fair bit about America and America's place in the world, both from teaching and being in the government. But I had to learn a lot about China. And I've been going to China for three decades, but I'm not an expert. It took me a long time. That's why it took me eight years to finish this book

But there were two big gaps that I saw at the end of it. One is we have a lot of great people working on capabilities of these various great powers. We have a really great literature on intentions of America, Russia, and China. And big debates, by the way, on the intentions, especially on the China side. I would say comparing the debate in the Russia field to China field, there's a lot more consensus in the Russia field about intentions of Putin's Russia than there is of Xi's China, and that's a good thing. I think that debate is unsettled and we should keep interrogating our hypotheses.

But what I was really struck by is very little examination. And with some exceptions, I'm looking at my shelf. There's some really great books. But there's not that many books that look at impact of this competition on other countries in the world. And when you do find great books—there's a great one on China and Zambia, for instance—it's just China and its impact on Zambia. There's no Europe in that story. There's no Russia in that story. There's no America in that story. So that's the academic kind of research project that I want to do here with Liz Economy from the Hoover Institution, Jim Goldgeier—he's going to cover the European part. And that'll take many, many years because we want to really get into the nitty gritty of these countries. And we want to find country experts to be the main people that write that.

The second part in my book—you know, my book looks at the debate, examines where we're at, and then has these three prescriptive chapters. And even had Vice President Harris won the election last year, the structural things that you identified would have been still a part of our trying to figure out where we're going and the debate about international order and how to manage the decline of democracy, technology and the global order, that would all been there. But to your other point you made earlier, it's been accelerated by President Trump.

And in my public policy life, I want to keep engaging that debate because yes, the old order is broken. We're not going to go back to it. But the idea that we have to just go back to some Hobbesian jungle that Trump seems to want to fight in, I don't accept that as an inevitable consequence. And even if it is analytically, and I'm wrong about that, I want to do everything I can to avoid it, even if it's going to be in failure. In a way, Trump has moved us in a different direction and I want to be part of that debate.

And one of the things I would add to that is part of the reason liberal internationalists like myself have lost that debate is because we lost the American people on it. And we didn't focus enough on trying to explain why being a NATO is in our interest or explain why it's better off to have a foot in even something like the United Nations than to pull out. Why we're better off to support ideas of democracy and freedom rather than just think that it's just all about power.

And so I'm going to be spending a lot of time speaking, not just in Silicon Valley—I'm still doing that—and not just Washington and New York or Brussels and Beijing, but my next stop for my book tour is Boise, Idaho. And I've done this for a while and not everybody agrees with me. I even had a few people walk out before I even said a word because they saw that I'd worked for Barack Obama.

But what I can tell you and report is people are curious. All my talks are sold out. And the agenda you just outlined, Colin, is an agenda I think that when we have things to say with our scholars, we should bring those ideas through things like World Class. I think there's a demand and a thirst for trying to figure out this new world order/disorder that we're in, and FSI has a great role to play in that.

Kahl: Hard agree. And also I'm thrilled that this is going to  be so much of your focus.

I would just say on the alliance piece: my view is that as the distribution of power changes, it's clearer than ever that foreign policy is a team sport.

McFaul: Yes.

Kahl: I used to make this reference: Michael Jordan, probably the best basketball player who ever lived. Although I'm sure there are people who claim it's LeBron or Kobe or somebody else. But if you believe that Michael Jordan was the best basketball player who ever lived, he still needed four other Bulls to win championships.

And as we go around, and address every problem that I've ever encountered as a policymaker, whether it's the rise of the Islamic state or the invasion of Ukraine, we need our team.

McFaul: Exactly.

Kahl: And our allies and partners are our team. So I think we have to tell that story. We also, as we enter this new world, have to figure out a way to re-anchor our alliances in a way that are politically sustainable on all sides, and that actually deliver benefits for the American people.

So it's not just telling a better story. There's an interesting example of this. Recently the Trump administration agreed to help South Korea with their submarine program. But South Korea in exchange is making tens of billions of dollars of investments in American shipyards . . .

McFaul: Right.

Kahl: . . . to build up our capacity. And I do think these ideas about joint industrial capacity across the free world might be a way to generate jobs, to generate political incentives on all sides to keep those alliances intact and give some people confidence on both sides of our alliances that we're not going to have these violent swings every four to eight years.

McFaul: I could not agree more. And that example you gave is a great example. And we have to be more creative about re-anchoring and win-win for everybody. I think that's a great idea.

Colin, I'm going to hand this over to you. We've already gone longer than we should have because you're so interesting. Tell us a few of the guests you have coming up on World Class.

Kahl: First of all, not only big shoes to fill on the FSI director position, but big shoes to fill as the host of World Class. We're going to try to start off with a bang in the near future. So stay tuned. We hope to have a great conversation involving H.R. McMaster, who is at Hoover, but as many of your listeners will know, was President Trump's national security adviser at the beginning of the first Trump administration.

And we're going to pair H.R. with Jake Sullivan, who was Joe Biden's national security advisor.

McFaul: Wow! Both on the same show?

Kahl: On the same show!

McFaul: Oh my God, that's fantastic!

Kahl: And the idea is to ask two of the smartest minds on different parts of the political spectrum to help get us smarter about the state of the world and where things are going for the rest of 2026. I have to say for the rest of 2026, because like we're not even a month in and we had Venezuela and Greenland and Iran, and Iran could come back and like, we're three weeks in.

But people should stay tuned because that's going to be an awesome conversation.

And then without naming names, I'm very hopeful to bring on leaders from the tech community here in Silicon Valley to interface with our scholars about some of these technology trends we talked about earlier.

McFaul: Great, excellent.

Kahl: So it's gonna be great. If you're a geopolitical nerd, you're going to love it. If you're into technology, you're going love it. And we're gonna find ways I think to both highlight the extraordinary work being done here at Stanford, but also Stanford's role in the broader ecosystem. It’s going to be fun.

McFaul: Sounds exciting, Colin. Well, first of all, thank you for taking on the role of leading FSI. We need you because of all the things you just described. Second, thanks for taking on World Class. And third, just with that teaser, I know that World Class is going to get a lot more interesting in the weeks and months to come. So congratulations.

Kahl: Thanks, Mike.

McFaul: You've been listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. If you like what you're hearing, please leave us review and be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to stay tuned, to stay up to date on what's happening in the world and why.

And for the last time, this is Michael McFaul signing off as your host of World Class. Stay tuned for the next episode hosted by Colin Kahl.

The January 3, 2026, U.S. “Operation Absolute Resolve” in Venezuela to capture and remove President Nicolás Maduro has raised urgent questions about its repercussions for the U.S.-China competition, Taiwan Strait security, American strategic priorities in the Indo-Pacific region, and U.S. allies and partners.

In two new episodes of the APARC Briefing series, Stanford scholars Larry Diamond, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and APARC faculty affiliate Oriana Skylar Mastro, a center fellow at FSI, join host Kiyoteru Tsutsui, the director of APARC, to unravel what happened in Venezuela and the implications of the U.S. actions in Latin America for Taiwan, security and alliances in the Indo-Pacific, and U.S. relations with stakeholders in the region.

Both scholars agree that the U.S. mission in Venezuela is a precedent that likely emboldens rather than deters China in its Taiwan calculus, warning that the shift it represents in U.S. national security policy might detract from American capabilities in the Indo-Pacific region at a crucial moment. They also provide sobering advice for U.S. allies struggling to adjust to rapidly shifting geopolitical realities under the second Trump administration.

A Shocking Action in World Affairs

There is no dispute that the Maduro government has been deeply authoritarian, deeply corrupt, and deeply illegitimate, says Diamond, author of Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency. Yet the United States “has probably violated international law to intervene forcibly in the internal affairs of Venezuela and remove its political leader," creating enormous implications for the international community. If it does not pursue a strategy of systemic democratic change in Venezuela, “all of this will have been for naught, and it will have paid a tragic price in terms of international precedent and international legitimacy,” Diamond argues.

Beijing is already using the operation as a "discourse power win," depicting the United States as crushing sovereignty and international law, Mastro notes. Moreover, in addition to Venezuela, President Trump continues to make statements about Greenland, reiterating its importance for U.S. national security and his interest in acquiring the territory, which has alarmed European partners and exacerbated strains with NATO.

“For the first time since WWII, some European countries have declared the United States to be a security threat,” Mastro says. “So I am curious to see if the Chinese try to bring along the Venezuela case as well, to convince U.S. allies and partners to distance themselves from the United States, which would have significant repercussions for the global order and for the United States' role in it.”

A Risky Strategic Reorientation

By unilaterally bypassing international norms to wield power in its own "backyard," the United States may have set a precedent that China can now exploit to justify its own ambitions in Taiwan as a legitimate exercise of regional dominance.

Diamond remarks on this line of thought: “If the United States, as a hegemon, can just do what it wants to arrest and remove a leader, in its kind of declared sphere of influence, what's to stop Xi Jinping from doing the same in his sphere of influence, and with a democratic system in Taiwan, whose sovereignty he does not recognize?” 

On the other hand, many commentators have argued that Operation Absolute Resolve serves as a deterrent to Chinese aggression. Granted, there is no doubt that the operation was a remarkably successful military attack showcasing the capabilities of U.S. special forces, notes Mastro, who, alongside her academic career, also serves in the United States Air Force Reserve, for which she currently works at the Pentagon as deputy director of research for Global China Strategy. Nevertheless, she emphasizes that the United States cannot carry out a similar attack in Asia.

“There is no situation in which we ‘neutralize’ Chinese air defenses and then somehow do some sort of infiltration,” says Mastro, author of Upstart: How China Became a Great Power. The U.S. intervention in Venezuela, therefore, “does not tell us a lot, operationally, about what the United States is capable of in a contingency via China.”

More troubling, Mastro identifies the Venezuela operation as demonstrating a fundamental shift in U.S. strategic priorities, with the raid conducted just weeks after the Trump administration released its 2025 National Security Strategy, which prioritizes restoring “American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” Mastro characterizes it as “the one region where U.S. dominance faces no serious challenge.” Thus, Venezuela suggests “the Trump administration means business about the renewed focus on the Western Hemisphere, and, unfortunately, that makes me concerned that there might be strategic neglect of the Indo-Pacific moving forward,” she points out.

Diamond stresses that, virtually throughout the entire presidency of Xi Jinping, dating back to 2012, China has been rapidly building up its military capabilities, prioritizing those specifically suited for coercing, isolating, or potentially seizing Taiwan. Against this backdrop, “I am much more fearful about the future of Taiwan in the week following U.S. military action on January 3 in Venezuela than I was before that action.” 

Mastro agrees with this assessment about the ripple effects of the operation in Venezuela. “I would say that it probably emboldens China.”

Frank Advice for U.S. Allies

For U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, including Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia, as well as allies and partners in Europe, both scholars offer pragmatic counsel for coping with the Trump administration.

Diamond urges U.S. allies to manage Trump diplomatically while staying focused on core interests, namely, prioritizing the preservation of the alliances and strengthening autonomous defense capabilities to demonstrate commitment and hedge against potential U.S. retrenchment.

“It takes constant, energetic, proactive, imaginative, relentless, and in some ways deferential working of the relationship, including the personal relationship between these leaders and Donald Trump [...] The future will be better if the leaders of these countries internalize that fundamental lesson about Trump.”

Mastro is equally direct about the limited alternatives ahead of U.S. allies: "You don't really have an option. That Chinese military – if it gives the United States problems, it definitely gives you problems. There's no hope for a country like Taiwan without the United States. There's no hope for Australia without the United States."

Counterintuitively, U.S. assertiveness may indicate its insecurity about the balance of power with China. “It seems to me that the United States also needs to be reassured that our allies and partners support us [...] And if we had that confidence, maybe the United States would be less aggressive in its use of military force.”

Watch the two APARC Briefing episodes:

🔸 What the U.S. Raid in Venezuela Means for Taiwan and Asia - with Larry Diamond >

🔸 Does Venezuela Provide China a Roadmap for Taiwan? – with Oriana Skylar Mastro >

So how did the meeting in Anchorage actually play out?

In commentary on social media, FSI Director and former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul summarized the talks in the context of the Yalta Conference, an agreement between the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union made in the waning months of WWII that quickly fell apart when Joseph Stalin broke promises made to Western leaders to maintain and support democratic elections in Eastern Europe.

Speaking on NPR’s Morning Edition, McFaul elaborated on his concerns: 

“What I think the worst outcome would be is if President Trump starts negotiating on behalf of the Ukrainians without the Ukrainians in the room. Trump needs something tangible, and I hope that doesn't make him too anxious to start negotiating on behalf of the Ukrainians because that would be a disaster. If he jams President Zelenskyy with something he can't accept, that would be the worst of all outcomes.”

Pifer echoed his relief about the lack of discussion over particulars about Ukraine between the two leaders, but also pointed out that the broadest goal of the meeting also hadn’t been met.

“The good news is, President Trump didn’t give away the store. I was concerned he might get into bargaining on details about Ukraine without the Ukrainians there, which would be to their detriment. But it seems Mr. Trump failed in his stated goal to achieve a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine,” said Pifer. 

But even without a concrete policy outcome, Pifer says the Alaska meeting was an optical victory for Russia: 

“The significance for Vladimir Putin is that the meeting happened in the first place. Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine back in 2022, there’s been a boycott by Western leaders of any kind of face-to-face meeting with Putin. And by hosting him in Alaska, Trump broke that boycott. That is being played up in Moscow as a huge victory that Putin has been legitimized again.”

On Monday, August 18, President Zelenskyy and a cadre of other European leaders met with President Trump at the White House to discuss the Friday meeting and reinforce Europe’s positions and redlines against capitulation to Russian demands.

In analysis for Foreign Policy, Pifer outlined the stakes of this follow-up meeting for the European delegation:

“Zelenskyy and his European colleagues face a tricky challenge. They have to diplomatically offer suggestions to walk Trump back from a position that he does not appear to understand would be bad for Ukraine, bad for Europe, and bad for American interests. And they have to do so without setting off an explosion that could disrupt U.S.-Ukrainian and U.S.-European relations.”

McFaul is also cautious about the tone and tack of the discussions moving forward:

“I think it’s a good thing [the Europeans and Trump] are talking about security guarantees,“ he told Alex Witt on MSNBC. “But the devil is in the details. We keep hearing something about ‘NATO-like security guarantees.’ Why not just NATO security guarantees?"

The argument for building a lasting ceasefire in Ukraine based on NATO membership is a proposal McFaul has long supported.

“This notion that these guarantees are going to be something like NATO but less than NATO . . . if I were the Ukrainians, that would make me nervous. They had guarantees like that in 1994 called the Budapest Memorandum, and it meant nothing. It didn’t stop Putin from invading in 2014, and it didn’t stop him from launching a full-scale war in 2022,” McFaul reminded viewers.

“To me,” he argues, “it has to be NATO, not NATO-lite. The only way to do real, credible security guarantees for Ukraine is membership in NATO.”

In assessing the White House meeting with President Zelenskyy and European leadership, Rose Gottemoeller, the William J. Perry lecturer at CISAC and former deputy secretary of NATO, is cautiously optimistic. 

“This was a major step along the road, and it was vital that the Europeans were there as well as Ukraine,” she told the CBC.

A seasoned negotiator with direct experience working on high-level diplomacy with Russia, Gottemoeller is no stranger to the long process of dealmaking with the Kremlin.

“There are many steps to get through. We are not there yet. As much as Trump would like to walk out of the Oval Office and say, ‘We got the deal done,’ I think there will be many more hoops to jump through before that is possible.”

Additional insights from our scholars on the Trump-Putin summit and White House meeting with Zelenskyy and other European leaders can be found at the following links:

Russia, Ukraine, and Trump on Katie Couric
Trump Meets with Putin: Experts React in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
There Are No Participation Trophies in High-Stakes Diplomacy on Substack

TRANSCRIPT:

McFaul: You’re listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. We bring you in-depth expertise on international affairs from Stanford's campus straight to you. I'm your host, Michael McFaul, the director of the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Today I'm joined by Oriana Skylar Mastro, a Center Fellow here at FSI, an active member of the United States Air Force Reserve, in fact, a recently promoted officer of the Air Force Reserve, and Deputy Director of Reserve Global China Strategy at the Pentagon. Oriana combines all that expertise in her latest book called Upstart, How China Became a Great Power.

I strongly advise you to buy this book. I don't care if you read it, but I want you to buy it now. In all seriousness, I've read lots of books on China in recent years. This is one of the best. It's one-stop shopping for all you need to know about China. It examines China's climb to great power status through a careful mix of strategic emulation, exploitation, and entrepreneurship on the international stage.

So Oriana, let's get right to it. Let's talk about Upstart. So, Upstart sounds like a Silicon Valley topic. Tell us about the title and tell us why you decided to write this book.

Mastro: Maybe I'll start with why I decided to write the book because it leads into the title. In my academic work and in my policy work, looking at how China was building power, the conventional wisdom was the same. Academics called it something a little fancier, but it was basically mirror imaging. There were a lot of arguments being made.

McFaul: What was the academic words? I'm curious.

Mastro: Oh, Kenneth Waltz, like, “emulation,” diffusion” . . .

McFaul: Got it, got it, got it, okay.

Mastro: Kenneth Waltz argued that success breeds the same type of competitive tendencies. Meaning, if you want to be a great power, if you're China in the 1990s, the way to do it is to act like the United States.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: You go into the policy world and you see the same exact things. Constant arguments about, Is China going to build overseas bases? Is China going to, you know, have a military the same as ours? that were all basically predicated on the understanding that they wanted to mirror image the United States.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: As a China specialist, I'm a political scientist, I'm also doing this policy work, but I'm also a China specialist. And I speak Chinese, I spend a lot of time in China. And on the surface, it just didn't really make any sense. Like, why would China do exactly what we do? How would that make them competitive?

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: And it really was an introduction in my life to literature on competition from business and management. Partially being in Silicon Valley inspired that, and partially it's because the rise and fall of great powers is very rare, but the introduction and destruction of companies is actually very frequent.

McFaul: Good point.

Mastro: So I discovered this whole other literature on, how are you competitive in trade and in commerce? And a lot of the arguments about competitive advantage, about being entrepreneurial, innovative, trying to find a different way of doing things, really resonated with how I saw China. And so that's what sparked the original idea. It takes writing a whole book to try to convince people that there is very strong evidence and a logical argument for why we have to look at this situation differently than past historic cases of rising powers.

McFaul: Dig into it a little bit. Give us some examples, especially about military power, which is your strong suit. And then if we have time, we'll talk about economic power. So, give us some examples of the “upstart strategy.”

Mastro: So the upstart strategy has three components: emulation, entrepreneurship, and exploitation. Now the first one is based on the conventional wisdom, right?

China does emulate some aspects of U.S. power, but the book tries to evaluate the conditions under which they do so. When are we most likely to see them take the old strategies, whatever the United States is doing, and apply it in the exact same area? That's my definition of emulation.

McFaul: Okay.

Mastro: And they tend to do this when it's reassuring to the United States. So think of examples like engaging in free trade, joining international institutions. In the military realm, they started to participate in humanitarian aid and disaster relief campaigns. They started to participate in peacekeeping operations, right? They're the number one contributor to PKOs on the Security Council of the United Nations.

And so they did decide to do certain things that they thought, Listen, this will help us build power — mediation diplomacy is a great example, helping to mediate between different countries when they're engaged in conflicts —it helps us build power and it makes us look good and it makes the United States calmer about our rise. Because one of the main reasons why you don't want to act exactly like the United States, is that actually could seem very threatening, right?

If you're trying to build the exact power the United States has, it would be very easy for people in the United States to say, Hey, wait a minute, what's going on here?

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: Right? And the example I give, if China built overseas bases, like our network of 120 bases, we would have seen that a lot differently than what they ended up doing, which was the Belt and Road Initiative, like economic policies. So those are in the emulation category.

For military power, most of them are about reassurance. And then there's a few times where they have such a competitive advantage and this area of power is so important that even though there's a downside in terms of how the U.S. will perceive it, they go for it anyway.

So, an example in the military realm is building what we call C4ISR network, or Command Control Computers Communication Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance, which in the most simple way...

McFaul: That's what — ISR, you just spelled out the acronym, right?

Mastro: Yeah, right.

McFaul: Thank you.

Mastro: So in the most simple sense, it's building a space architecture.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: Having their own navigation systems, having their own precision timing, you know. So, they realized that was really important for the nature of warfare. They needed it. The United States might not like it, but it was just so necessary. And because their engineers are cheaper, because they're actually really advanced in certain missile technologies, they knew they would have an advantage there.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So that's emulation. Exploitation is when they use the U.S. strategy, but in an area where the United States isn't competing. There's disincentives to do it directly. And this largely could be because of competitive advantages. So one area is like arms sales, Chinese arms sales around the world. China really only sells arms to countries that cannot buy them from the United States. Either because they're under some sort of human rights arms embargo, they’re poor countries that are not strategically relevant enough to be gifted arms by the United States, so the Bangladeshes of the world get a lot of their military equipment from China.

McFaul: Because they're too poor? I did not know that.

Mastro: Yeah, well, Chinese stuff is a lot cheaper. Now, there's some countries who are poor that still have U.S. stuff, but that's because we've decided, like . . .

McFaul: They're important.

Mastro: They're important for strategic reasons, so we have gifts and loans and things. And then there's certain technologies that because of treaty obligations, the United States wasn't exporting. And this is how China got sort of a stronghold in the market on unmanned systems, for example. On the diplomatic side, elite visits, right? A Chinese leader like Xi Jinping makes as many overseas visits as a U.S. president, but they go to fundamentally different places, right?

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: The U.S. president is mainly going to the UK, Germany, Japan, Australia. Chinese president is visiting Africa.

McFaul: A lot.

Mastro: A lot! So Xi Jinping has visited three times more countries than President Obama did, and President Obama visited more African countries than any previous U.S. president. He also goes to the poorest countries in the world, the 70% of the poorest African countries Xi Jinping has been to, that no U.S. president has ever been to. So it's kind of filling in those gaps.

And then the military realm, for those of you out there with military background, the example that's just perfect for this is something we refer to as A2/AD, or the Anti-Access/Area Denial strategy.

What is that? Very simply put, China deliberately evaluated the types of things the United States needs to project power, and then they developed specific capabilities to target those. So things like the aircraft carrier. So China developed a missile designed to hit and sink an aircraft carrier, right? Or a need to refuel because our bases are far away, you know, or blinding satellites because we need satellites more because we don't have the home-court advantage.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So in the military realm, this exploitation strategy is very strong.

And the last category, entrepreneurship, is when they do something completely different. And this, I would say, is the most controversial aspect of the book. I briefed it to a lot of military audiences. Just on Friday I got a note that a four-star wanted my address to send me a letter about the book. And I'm like, Is this– I don't know if it's going to be like I loved your book or it's gonna be like I hate everything you say about the following chapters, because it is a Navy admiral.

So I imagine that they're sensitive about, one, my argument that China is not seeking an overseas basing network despite all the concerns over the past 20 years that they're, you know, they're on the cusp and they're going to build when they're going to build one. One of the reasons China sometimes does things differently from the United States is that they think U.S. strategy is stupid. So, one of the parts of the argument is trying to look at how China might change in the future. And it's important, the rationale.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So the book looks at thousands of Chinese . . .

McFaul: Startups are not always startups, right? They get old, and…

Mastro: . . . They evolve. This book relies on thousands of Chinese sources to also evaluate the rationale of why they chose certain strategies. So you could imagine if they chose a strategy because they were weaker or didn't have an advantage, as they get more powerful, they might start emulating.

But this is an aspect when they're like, you know, the war in Afghanistan cost the equivalent of ten Belt and Road Initiatives. Why would we be engaged in sort of foreign military intervention, which tends to go hand in hand with these overseas basing networks, when we can achieve our goals better with economic and political means of power? And that's outside of Asia. China does clearly want to dominate Asia militarily, but they don't need bases for that because they have China.

So, that's one of those arguments that says this is not for lack of ambition. Of course, they will have certain military roles in some places. We'll probably see some more intelligence gathering, you know, sensors being put places, but not offensive combat operations.

And the second very controversial one is about China's nuclear forces. And I had a follow-up piece in The Economist last month by invitation to talk about China's nuclear arsenal. China has, basically, since 1964, every aspect of their approach to nuclear weapons has been different than the United States: posture, doctrine, readiness, delivery systems, number of nuclear weapons, structure of the organization for nuclear weapons.

I mean, besides the initial decision to build them for the sake of nuclear deterrence, nothing has been the same. And part of that, again, is about inefficiency arguments, that China never understood why the United States needs thousands and thousands and thousands of them. And from a competitive point of view, up until the mid 2000s, the United States spent more on its nuclear weapons than China spent on its whole military.

McFaul: Wow.

Mastro: So, one of the reasons they've been able to get this conventional power that people like me write very openly about being concerned of, right? I'm not as concerned about their nuclear weapons. But, I'm absolutely concerned about the tipping of conventional power in China's favor. They've been able to do that by not overspending on nuclear weapons.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So there's a lot of debate right now because they're increasing their numbers. They used to just have like 200 and 320. There's a debate right now about whether or not they're going to push up to 1,000 or 1,500 in the next 10 years. But even so, I sort of argue that there's other reasons for that, dealing with advancements in technology and changes in U.S. doctrine that has made them concerned that their deterrent has weakened.

McFaul: Their nuclear deterrent has weakened.

Mastro: Their nuclear deterrent has weakened. And so they still have the same sort of minimal deterrent posture that they've had before. So that hasn't changed. But those are kind of the two most controversial entrepreneurial areas that I discuss in the book on the military side.

McFaul: So, if you had the chance to . . . in fact, I learned this term from military folks when I worked in the government: the BLUF, right? “Bottom line up front”. Really great phrase for all people having to do briefings.

But if you got, say, 45 seconds with President Trump, and he asked you, Lieutenant Colonel - can I call you that now?

Mastro: Yeah, sure. Yeah.

McFaul: Lieutenant Colonel Mastro. He probably wouldn't call you Dr. Mastro, but Lieutenant Colonel Mastro.

Mastro: He'd probably be like, “Hey lady!”  But, yeah. Yeah.

McFaul: Congratulations on being Lieutenant Colonel, by the way. That's a fantastic achievement. But if he just asked, What's the balance of military power between the United States and China today? How could you answer that in 45 to 60 seconds?

Mastro: I would say that we're outgunned in Asia. We have the advantage everywhere else. We're deterring China from a large-scale protracted war.

But the problem is in conflicts close to China, in particular over Taiwan, the United States is outgunned. And we need to put more bombers, submarines, and land-based missiles closer into China, which means we have to be nicer to countries in the region because they have to agree to let us put that stuff there. And we have to reform the defense industrial complex so that we can innovate in those areas, in particular land-based anti-ship ballistic missiles, and be able to produce them in mass in a cost-effective way.

McFaul: Fantastic answer. You know how to do this. I can tell.

Mastro: You usually get more than 45 seconds, but sometimes they get right to it.

McFaul: You hit it, I saw it. Now we have a little more time to dig into that. Because that was a very profound thing you just said. Take us through the pieces that you think are inadequate. And then let's talk about whether the Trump administration will begin to realize those solutions. But first, just articulate the threat posture that — you had three big buckets there — maybe more, but I heard three. Tell us a little more in detail about what is alarming about that balance of power in Asia to you?

Mastro: So, if you can humor me, right before I do that, I just want to really hammer home a point that I said in that answer, that I feel is clouding some of the debates among policy experts and academics, okay?

McFaul: Please.

Mastro: Which is, we are adequately deterring China from engaging in a large-scale war with the United States. So people are always like, China doesn't want to fight a war with the United States and all of our allies and partners. And, the economic costs will be huge. And it's like, yes, but that is not what people in the defense department are worried about. We're not worried that tomorrow China attacks the United States and we're fighting World War III.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: What we're worried about is that there are certain aspects of contingencies like Taiwan that they can move and gain, in this case, control over Taiwan before the U.S. military can come in mass. Okay? And the coming in mass is just a more diplomatic way of saying, Before we can really start blowing things up. So, let me just start with that because what people say . . .

McFaul: That's very important. I'm glad you did that. Yeah.

Mastro: It's very important because it's not the case that I think, like, China's like, gunning for whatever. Or, I do a lot of media interviews when I'm walking my kids to and from school and once my four year old was like, “Does the United States lose all the wars that we fight?” after they hear me on the phone, I'm like, “Mom did not say that!”

What I'm saying is that there's this particular scenario, and if China initiates conflict, they're going to initiate it when it's most favorable to them.

So the problem is, the United States, we have forces close to Taiwan, right? In Japan, for example. But there are so few of them that if we actually mobilized them after the immediate attack on Taiwan, for example, they're not survivable. Which, again, is the military diplomatic speech of saying everyone is going to die.

And if that were credible, if China thought we were going to do that, then they're in the major war with the United States, right? They’ve just killed thousands of Americans. So, that doesn't become appealing. But the logic is, most U.S. presidents are not going to send in those forces — in this case, it's mainly air power — when they're all going to die. And then we also lose in this sort of exchange about 70% of our most advanced aircraft? Which means then, now we're transitioning to that major war with China. It's like, we're not in a great position.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So we have stuff there, but we don't have enough. The question is like, what does enough mean? Very simply, you gotta keep the ships that are carrying the people across the strait from landing on Taiwan. And so, I'm kind of a broken record on this with the military when people are always like, “Well I'm contributing to deterrence. You know, I'm doing this dance, I'm doing this messaging.” Or even certain weapon systems like, well, you know, “I got this tank . . .”

I'm like, if it does not sink ships, I do not care. Right? Because then you're in this realm of cost in which people say they're trying to deny China the objective of Taiwan, but really it's like, well, I could sink a ship or two. And I'm like, well, when you got thousands of them, you know, one or two is not going to do it.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So the thing I laid out, basically, are designed to sink a lot of ships quickly. Submarines, the United States has the advantage undersea still. There's an apocryphal story that I talk about in my book that when they devised that strategy to target the key platforms of the United States in the 1990s, the Navy, for some odd reason, was changing their patrolling schedule. So the submarines just weren't patrolling them.

And so when China was like, we got to get the aircraft carriers, we got to get the satellites. We got to hit the fixed bases where the aircraft are taking off. They just didn't think of the submarines, you know? So that's the story. I don't know how true it is, but that's the apocryphal story.

So we have, full reign with submarines. The problem is we just don't have a lot of them.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: And then the munitions they carry, they can only sink a few ships. And then we have no capability to replenish them in the region. So they have to go all the way back to Guam or Hawaii. So I talk about tenders, submarine tenders, a lot of military personnel being like, I need that stuff and I need it in the Philippines and Japan. Like, that's where we need it.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: And then the bombers are very controversial because those are an offensive capability that are designed to penetrate into China and bomb mainland targets. Mike, we're just throwing it out there. That's what they do.

McFaul: That’s what they do.

Mastro: That's important because the biggest threat are all the missiles that China is going to be shooting at us.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: Missile defense on the back end is hard, like missiles coming towards you. It's a lot easier if you just took out the launcher where it's coming from.

And so that's really what that is about. Like, okay, if we're going to stop all these missiles from being shot at Taiwan, from being shot at our carriers, from being shot at our bases that we need to operate, we're going to have to get in there, we're going to have to take care of it, and that's where the strategic bombers come from.

And then the last component was the land-based anti-ship ballistic missiles.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: Missiles are a lot cheaper than everything else. Because they're land-based, they tend to be more powerful, more precise. There is a deterrent against China, just a little bit more, because they have to attack the country where the missiles are based.

McFaul: Right. Good point.

Mastro: That's an additional thing that imposes caution on them. So yeah, those are the things that I would want more than anything else. And I really believe that if we put those things in place and so China couldn't do this quickly, the two-and-a-half to three weeks that they might consider, that they'll never do it.

And then this problem will just persist forever, but at least we won't fight a hot war over it. So that's why I really focus on some of those issues and focus on just understanding that China sees a lot of things differently than we do. So, that's what really the book… the heart of the book is about convincing people to keep an open mind about how they're understanding and interpreting Chinese actions so that we can be more entrepreneurial ourselves about how to deal with great power competition.

McFaul: That's a great point. Your recommendations are crystal clear. Who is listening in the Trump administration? And I mean that as our last question.

Don't talk about the specifics, but at the end of the Trump administration, as you know better than I, they focused pretty heavily on diagnosing the China threat. And they put out all sorts of speeches. And Secretary Pompeo did this big long paper about the threat.

It's a little curious to me, and it's only a few weeks, of course, so let's give them time, but it's a little curious to me how we're focused on a lot of other things besides what you just described so far.

Is that unfair or is it too early? And what do you expect in the coming weeks and months in terms of the Trump administration doing some of the things that you just outlined?

Mastro: Well, I think the fact that it's been quiet, I'm very hopeful.

McFaul: Mmm. Explain that, that's good!

Mastro: Because generally speaking, you want the experts to have the space to do the things they need to do. And I see a lot of those policies being driven by some of the domestic political stuff. Like we know tariffs is not going to help anyone get their jobs back, but the people who voted for President Trump believe that.

And so when you say, Who is listening? I mean, this is one of the main reasons that 15 years ago I enlisted in the military, when I was doing my PhD at Princeton, is because people explained to me the pathways that academics could be influential.

And I thought, Okay, so I could write an op-ed and hope someone read it and hope they did this. Or I could go into government, which is a great pathway, but as a woman who, I knew I wanted to have children, the in and out of government thing could be disruptive to the move, and I didn't want to wait 10 to 15 years before I got to do anything interesting.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: So, for me, there are people listening. I feel like I do have the ear of some pretty important people. And then, as someone who works in the system, I make changes directly.

So I get to see, here's the national defense strategy. It's done. Here's our war plan. It's done. Here's our force posture, our force modernization. I get to physically just go in there and change it and then hope no one notices and changes it back.

But that's how I tend to focus on my influence. And as long as the Trump administration, the more they stay out of that space, the easier it will be, I think, for us to devise good effective strategies.

So if you have that top level of support, and respect for the expertise of the people in the building, which I think we've seen some signs that maybe that's going to be a problem, you know, we'll give them the benefit of the doubt. They respect their military advisors and that expertise. Then we can really make some advancements.

My biggest concern is that we're going to upset a lot of other countries in the region. And Biden made a lot of improvements in our force posture by getting countries to agree to certain things, in particular, Japan and the Philippines and Australia and some second island, you know, Pacific Islands, that if that's reversed, it's going to make it harder for us to deter China.

So I just hope that . . . the way I articulate it to people who have some of those more isolationist views, or unilateralist views, is like, this isn't about your love for this other country or even about multilateralism or legitimacy. If you want the United States to be powerful and that you want to do whatever you want, you need to have these countries willing to host you.

Hopefully they won't disrupt those relationships too much. But on the other hand, they're not as worried about provoking China, which a lot of my recommendations, like with the bombers or something, previous administrations might be like, Oh, I don't know, that might be a little touchy.

McFaul: Right.

Mastro: But maybe with the Trump administration, they're like, yeah, get in there, what you need to get in there. So there could be some pros and there could be some cons, but I think it takes this type of academic research is important because then we can really stand from a position of knowledge and authority and confidence, when you're making arguments that are controversial that people might push back on, that, at least I believe they better inform policy.

So, I stick to them even when people try to push back in more emotional ways about stuff. I think that is really the role of the academic practitioner, and I hope this book serves that purpose.

McFaul: Well, that's one of the most optimistic things I've heard in the first weeks of the Trump administration. As long as they're not talking about the issue, that's a good sign, not a bad sign.

And we can't see what you write for the Pentagon and inside the Pentagon and who you brief, but we can read your book, and everybody should. It's called Upstart: How China Became a Great Power. Thanks for talking with us about some of the ideas here. And I encourage everybody to go out and get this book.

Mastro: Thank you, Mike.

McFaul: Thanks for being here.

You’ve been listening to World Class from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review. And be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, to stay up to date on what’s happening in the world and why.