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The reason for the snub is clear. The US is fleeing the Pacific theatre.
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China sent vice president to greet Trump in Beijing airport.
- Thread starter syed putra
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Arnaud Bertrand
@RnaudBertrand
What's going on? Are neocons having a come-to-Jesus moment?
After Bob Kagan writing an article on how the U.S. is facing "total defeat" in Iran (see ), you now have Max Boot - the very author of “The Case for American Empire” and one of the most vocal advocates for the Iraq war - publishing a Washington Post interview explaining that China has surpassed the U.S. in most military domains.
If anything, Boot’s interview is even more devastating than Kagan's piece, because it's not editorial opinion - he’s interviewing John Culver, a former top CIA analyst (he was national intelligence officer for East Asia) and one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Chinese military which he’s been studying since 1985.
This isn't a pundit opining - this is someone who spent decades inside the intelligence community staring at the actual data.
So what is Culver saying?
1) In case of war with Taiwan, the U.S. will flee the theater
This is undoubtedly the single most stunning revelation in the entire piece. Culver says that - as far as he is aware - the Pentagon’s plan in case of war with Taiwan is… flee!
This is the exact quote: "I think some of the thinking in the Pentagon, and it may have evolved since I retired, is that when we think there’s going to be a war, we need to get our high-value naval assets out of the theater, and then we would have to fight our way back in. From where, it’s not clear. Guam is no bastion either."
Why? Because, as he explains, any high-value U.S. assets would be sitting ducks in the entire area. China can strike U.S. forces deployed to Japan, Australia, or South Korea “in a way that Iran really can't” and, given that Iran has hit at least 228 targets across U.S. bases in the Middle East - forcing the U.S. to evacuate most of them - that's saying something. Also, U.S. aircraft carriers would need to operate within 1,000 miles of the fight to matter, which - given it’s well within range of Chinese missiles - they won’t.
As Culver bluntly puts it: “There's really no safe spaces.”
2) China leads in most military domains - and it's not even close
Culver says that “it’s hard to not be hyperbolic” about China’s military capabilities and that, at this stage, “it’s hard to point to an area other than submarines and undersea warfare and say the United States still has an advantage.”
In some critical areas, such as advanced munitions - which, when it comes to war, is pretty damn relevant - his assessment is that China leads by “magnitudes.” As a reminder, an order of magnitude means 10x so, by assuming he knows that and meant what he said, “magnitudes” means at least a hundred times more, meaning U.S. capabilities would be less than 1% those of China.
At the same time, Culver also says that “whichever side runs out of bullets first is going to lose.” So if China produces “magnitudes greater than our industrial base could produce” - as he puts it - then you don't need a PhD in military strategy to put two and two together…
The picture, if anything, is even more damning in shipbuilding capabilities. He reminds that a single shipyard in China - Jiangnan Shipyard, on Changxing Island near Shanghai - “has more capacity than all U.S. shipyards combined.”
Put all Chinese shipyards together and China’s broader naval shipbuilding capacity is 232 times larger than that of the United States (and this is from a leaked U.S. Navy briefing slide).
Culver helpfully adds that China “deploys enough ships every year to replicate the entire French navy” - which, as a Frenchman, hurts a little, but at least we'll always have the cheese (I hope).
3) Despite this, a war in Taiwan is highly unlikely
If your only window into China is Western media coverage, you'd naturally assume all of the above means war over Taiwan is about to break out. After all, if China is so powerful and the U.S. so outmatched, why wouldn't it just take Taiwan and be done with it?
Culver’s assessment - and mine, incidentally - is the exact opposite: China’s increasing relative strength vis-a-vis the U.S. makes war less likely, not more.
How so? As Culver explains Taiwan is “a crisis Xi Jinping wants to avoid, not an opportunity he wants to seize.” The stronger China gets, the less it needs to fight: why launch a war when you can simply wait for the military balance to become so lopsided that the U.S. quietly drops its security guarantee on its own? Culver himself foresees a future “when Americans might start to say, maybe Taiwan is a war we don’t want to get involved in.” That would almost automatically mean peaceful reunification, which has always been China’s primary objective.
This doesn't mean China views the U.S. as harmless. Quite the contrary - Culver says Beijing sees America “as a very militarily aggressive country” that is “declining in power and becoming more violent” as a result. Which he says is one further reason why “war over Taiwan is not something that Xi Jinping is looking for.”
China doesn't want to hand a pretext to a dangerously trigger-happy power - all the more when patience alone delivers what it wants.
4) The game is up
Last but not least, perhaps the most revealing aspect of the interview is that Culver doesn’t seem to see a way out: this is structural and irreversible.
Asked by Boot whether “the Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion defense budget, assuming it’s approved, [would] change the trend lines” (which, as a reminder, would constitute a 50% increase in defense spending), his reply is that “it would probably help to some extent, but I worry that we could be throwing good money after bad.” Not exactly brimming with optimism…
Similarly, when asked why the U.S. keeps investing billions in aircraft carriers and even “Trump-class battleships,” his answer is that it's because “the military services have a nostalgia for the things that meet their expectations for how you get promoted.” In other words, wasted money.
Same thing for the Pentagon's much-hyped “Hellscape” drone strategy to defend Taiwan. Culver asks the obvious question: “What drones are you talking about launching from where?” He points out that they’d “have to pre-deploy them if not on Taiwan itself then on Luzon or the Japanese southwest islands, all of which can be struck by the Chinese.” He adds that this is “the tyranny of time and distance when you look at war in the Pacific.”
The picture that emerges, both from Boot’s Culver interview and Kagan’s article, is remarkably consistent: the U.S. is “checkmate” in the Middle East, would need to entirely flee the Pacific theater before a war even starts, cannot produce enough weapons, cannot keep its supposed “allies” safe, and has no strategy to reverse any of it - nor can one even be produced given the structural nature of the gap. Even a 50% increase in defense spending, Culver says, would be “throwing good money after bad.” That's not my assessment - that's theirs.
Two of America's most prominent hawks, in two of its most establishment outlets, in the space of 48 hours, have essentially published the obituary of American military primacy.
Yesterday I concluded my post by saying that even the arsonists now smell the smoke. Today I'll say: the arsonists are now writing the fire report.
@RnaudBertrand
What's going on? Are neocons having a come-to-Jesus moment?
After Bob Kagan writing an article on how the U.S. is facing "total defeat" in Iran (see ), you now have Max Boot - the very author of “The Case for American Empire” and one of the most vocal advocates for the Iraq war - publishing a Washington Post interview explaining that China has surpassed the U.S. in most military domains.
If anything, Boot’s interview is even more devastating than Kagan's piece, because it's not editorial opinion - he’s interviewing John Culver, a former top CIA analyst (he was national intelligence officer for East Asia) and one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Chinese military which he’s been studying since 1985.
This isn't a pundit opining - this is someone who spent decades inside the intelligence community staring at the actual data.
So what is Culver saying?
1) In case of war with Taiwan, the U.S. will flee the theater
This is undoubtedly the single most stunning revelation in the entire piece. Culver says that - as far as he is aware - the Pentagon’s plan in case of war with Taiwan is… flee!
This is the exact quote: "I think some of the thinking in the Pentagon, and it may have evolved since I retired, is that when we think there’s going to be a war, we need to get our high-value naval assets out of the theater, and then we would have to fight our way back in. From where, it’s not clear. Guam is no bastion either."
Why? Because, as he explains, any high-value U.S. assets would be sitting ducks in the entire area. China can strike U.S. forces deployed to Japan, Australia, or South Korea “in a way that Iran really can't” and, given that Iran has hit at least 228 targets across U.S. bases in the Middle East - forcing the U.S. to evacuate most of them - that's saying something. Also, U.S. aircraft carriers would need to operate within 1,000 miles of the fight to matter, which - given it’s well within range of Chinese missiles - they won’t.
As Culver bluntly puts it: “There's really no safe spaces.”
2) China leads in most military domains - and it's not even close
Culver says that “it’s hard to not be hyperbolic” about China’s military capabilities and that, at this stage, “it’s hard to point to an area other than submarines and undersea warfare and say the United States still has an advantage.”
In some critical areas, such as advanced munitions - which, when it comes to war, is pretty damn relevant - his assessment is that China leads by “magnitudes.” As a reminder, an order of magnitude means 10x so, by assuming he knows that and meant what he said, “magnitudes” means at least a hundred times more, meaning U.S. capabilities would be less than 1% those of China.
At the same time, Culver also says that “whichever side runs out of bullets first is going to lose.” So if China produces “magnitudes greater than our industrial base could produce” - as he puts it - then you don't need a PhD in military strategy to put two and two together…
The picture, if anything, is even more damning in shipbuilding capabilities. He reminds that a single shipyard in China - Jiangnan Shipyard, on Changxing Island near Shanghai - “has more capacity than all U.S. shipyards combined.”
Put all Chinese shipyards together and China’s broader naval shipbuilding capacity is 232 times larger than that of the United States (and this is from a leaked U.S. Navy briefing slide).
Culver helpfully adds that China “deploys enough ships every year to replicate the entire French navy” - which, as a Frenchman, hurts a little, but at least we'll always have the cheese (I hope).
3) Despite this, a war in Taiwan is highly unlikely
If your only window into China is Western media coverage, you'd naturally assume all of the above means war over Taiwan is about to break out. After all, if China is so powerful and the U.S. so outmatched, why wouldn't it just take Taiwan and be done with it?
Culver’s assessment - and mine, incidentally - is the exact opposite: China’s increasing relative strength vis-a-vis the U.S. makes war less likely, not more.
How so? As Culver explains Taiwan is “a crisis Xi Jinping wants to avoid, not an opportunity he wants to seize.” The stronger China gets, the less it needs to fight: why launch a war when you can simply wait for the military balance to become so lopsided that the U.S. quietly drops its security guarantee on its own? Culver himself foresees a future “when Americans might start to say, maybe Taiwan is a war we don’t want to get involved in.” That would almost automatically mean peaceful reunification, which has always been China’s primary objective.
This doesn't mean China views the U.S. as harmless. Quite the contrary - Culver says Beijing sees America “as a very militarily aggressive country” that is “declining in power and becoming more violent” as a result. Which he says is one further reason why “war over Taiwan is not something that Xi Jinping is looking for.”
China doesn't want to hand a pretext to a dangerously trigger-happy power - all the more when patience alone delivers what it wants.
4) The game is up
Last but not least, perhaps the most revealing aspect of the interview is that Culver doesn’t seem to see a way out: this is structural and irreversible.
Asked by Boot whether “the Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion defense budget, assuming it’s approved, [would] change the trend lines” (which, as a reminder, would constitute a 50% increase in defense spending), his reply is that “it would probably help to some extent, but I worry that we could be throwing good money after bad.” Not exactly brimming with optimism…
Similarly, when asked why the U.S. keeps investing billions in aircraft carriers and even “Trump-class battleships,” his answer is that it's because “the military services have a nostalgia for the things that meet their expectations for how you get promoted.” In other words, wasted money.
Same thing for the Pentagon's much-hyped “Hellscape” drone strategy to defend Taiwan. Culver asks the obvious question: “What drones are you talking about launching from where?” He points out that they’d “have to pre-deploy them if not on Taiwan itself then on Luzon or the Japanese southwest islands, all of which can be struck by the Chinese.” He adds that this is “the tyranny of time and distance when you look at war in the Pacific.”
The picture that emerges, both from Boot’s Culver interview and Kagan’s article, is remarkably consistent: the U.S. is “checkmate” in the Middle East, would need to entirely flee the Pacific theater before a war even starts, cannot produce enough weapons, cannot keep its supposed “allies” safe, and has no strategy to reverse any of it - nor can one even be produced given the structural nature of the gap. Even a 50% increase in defense spending, Culver says, would be “throwing good money after bad.” That's not my assessment - that's theirs.
Two of America's most prominent hawks, in two of its most establishment outlets, in the space of 48 hours, have essentially published the obituary of American military primacy.
Yesterday I concluded my post by saying that even the arsonists now smell the smoke. Today I'll say: the arsonists are now writing the fire report.
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So yesterday he 单挑how many?
The negotiations went on one day before in S Korea between
US Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent ,
US Trade Representative, Jamieson Greer and
China's Vice Premier: He Lifeng
China’s Vice Commerce Minister: Li Chenggang
and majority of the discussions are already finalized before Trump arrival in Beijing for their signature
US Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent ,
US Trade Representative, Jamieson Greer and
China's Vice Premier: He Lifeng
China’s Vice Commerce Minister: Li Chenggang
and majority of the discussions are already finalized before Trump arrival in Beijing for their signature
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Key Findings from ASPI Technology Tracker (2025/2026 Updates)
- Total Dominance: China leads in 66 of 74 critical technologies, including artificial intelligence, quantum technology, and advanced materials.
- Research Output: For certain technologies, China’s research institutions produce times more high-impact papers than the second-ranked country, often the U.S..
- Monopoly Risk: Four newly added technologies show a high technology monopoly risk (TMR) due to China’s dominance: cloud/edge computing, computer vision, generative AI, and grid integration.
- US Leadership: The United States leads in only eight areas, most notably neuroprosthetics and geoengineering.
- Shift in Power: This represents a reversal from two decades ago, where the U.S. led in 90% of technologies; now, China’s research base has established a dominant position in over 90% of tracked areas.
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xi greets trump at great hall with honor guard….
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Since Trump pray at wIling wall in jerusalem, will Xi make trump pray at the temple of heaven?
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Enough to make trump agree to anything xi wants. And xi wants open trade like before trump came in his first term and started messing things up.
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scaremongering is to ensure taiwan buy as many weapons from US as possible. Good business
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Heads of state do not meet other heads of state upon arrival at the airport. The first handshake is almost always at the official residence of the host.
When Xi arrived in the USA on an official visit in 2017 he was met by Rex Tillerson the then secretary of state.
Xi Jinping Arrives in Florida of the US to Hold China-US President's Meeting with Donald Trump
Updated: April 07, 2017 15:19
On April 6, 2017 local time, President Xi Jinping arrived in Florida of the US by special plane, and will hold China-US President's Meeting with President Donald Trump of the US at Mar-a-Lago.
At around 1:50 p.m. local time, Xi Jinping's special plane arrived at West Palm Beach International Airport in Florida. Xi Jinping and his wife Mme. Peng Liyuan were warmly welcomed by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson of the US, his wife and others. The honor guard lined up on both sides of the red carpet.
Xi Jinping will exchange extensive and in-depth views with Donald Trump on China-US relations and international and regional issues of common concern from April 6 to 7, which will be the first meeting between the two heads of state since the new US administration took office.
Wang Huning, Wang Yang, Li Zhanshu, Yang Jiechi and other delegation members arrived by the same plane.
H.E. Cui Tiankai, Chinese Ambassador to the US also greeted Xi Jinping at the airport.
Xi Jinping arrived in the US after concluding his state visit to Finland. When he left Helsinki, Minister for Foreign Affairs Timo Soini of Finland and others saw him off at the airport.
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Jensen Huang wasn't on the Beijing list.
16 CEOs invited.
Tim Cook was on it.
Jensen wasn't.
Then Trump personally called him Tuesday.
Overrode his own China hawks.
Jensen flew to Anchorage.
Boarded Air Force One on the refuel.
Walked behind the President into Beijing.
Nvidia added $160B in market cap by morning.
The GPU trade outranks the cabinet now.
16 CEOs invited.
Tim Cook was on it.
Jensen wasn't.
Then Trump personally called him Tuesday.
Overrode his own China hawks.
Jensen flew to Anchorage.
Boarded Air Force One on the refuel.
Walked behind the President into Beijing.
Nvidia added $160B in market cap by morning.
The GPU trade outranks the cabinet now.
- Joined
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It was Trump who prohibited Nvidia from being sold to China.
President Xi greeted President Trump outside the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. The leaders toured the hall followed a meeting at the Great Hall of the People earlier that morning.
Jensen initially did not plan to attend the trip to China,
as he had not signed up for it like the other CEOs.
Why Jensen comes?
He was called by Trump, and feeling not to offend the President,
like gave excuses about not being free or having other commitments.
Then why Trump called Jensen at 11th hour?
Trump as usual, at the 11th hour called Jensen to fly along, was seen as a demonstration of the President's influence over top US companies,
which could not be opposed without consequences.
Ultimately, Jensen felt obligated to comply with the President's request and attend the trip.
All these have been proven over the internet and mainstream media reporting to capture Trump attention
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