“These frameworks are usually a trap,” notes Medeiros, who also served in the Obama administration. From 2009 to 2013, he was director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia on the National Security Council (NSC), followed by his role from 2013 to 2015 as special assistant to the president and senior director for Asia on the NSC.
The summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping on May 14-15 concluded with considerable fanfare, but produced limited publicly available detail. “This summit was long on symbolism, short on substance,” says Evan Medeiros, senior advisor at The Asia Group, during a media briefing on May 15.
A key outcome was the agreement between Trump and Xi to work toward a more stable and constructive US-China relationship. “The fact that the Trump team has signed up to that means that the government, Chinese interlocutors, will come back again and again on sustaining this framework, if the United States starts to take positions that China finds challenging, that so-called consensus,” notes Kurt Campbell, co-founder and chairman of The Asia Group. He served in both the Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations, including as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs from 2009 to 2013, and later as President Biden’s national security coordinator for the Indo-Pacific (2021-2024) and deputy secretary of state (2024-2025).
