The Vandenberg Coalition has described last week's Washington summit between President Donald Trump and Chairman Xi Jinping as "all style and no substance," saying it left significant questions about the future of the U.S.-China rivalry.
In its newsletter, the group said little was revealed about the content of the discussions beyond a two-month extension of the trade truce, a slight alleviation of tariffs and a continued AI dialogue. It was the second of four meetings between the two leaders scheduled this calendar year.
Writing in the newsletter, the coalition's executive director said pageantry was the word that came to mind for events such as the U.N. General Assembly, where real outcomes are rare and the fanfare rarely feels worth the taxpayer money spent on hotels, flights and trains for staff travelling to New York City. The same word, the director said, came to mind during the Xi-Trump summit — but pageantry, the newsletter argued, actually serves a purpose.
The coalition said the summit left open questions about technological competition, China's malign influence operations and Americans currently being detained by the Chinese Communist Party. Sunny Cheung, a Fellow for China Studies at The Jamestown Foundation, joined Vandenberg Executive Director Carrie Filipetti on the group's "Vandenberg Flash Focus" podcast to recap the summit and its implications.
The newsletter also highlighted recent commentary from its contributors, including a Wall Street Journal piece by Senior Policy Director Corban Teague and Tod Lindberg arguing that "strategic stability" is a comforting foreign-policy fantasy, and a New York Post article by governance board member Mark Dubowitz and Miad Maleki calling for a land blockade of Iran alongside existing naval and air blockades.
Other items included a Foreign Affairs piece by Dan Driscoll on scaling allied defense production, and commentary from Vandenberg figures on Iran, Taiwan, Greenland, Cuba and Europe.