Webinar | Trump’s Meeting with Xi: Will It be His Reykjavik Moment?

Will He Resist, as Reagan Did, The Temptation to Prop Up America’s Mortal Enemy?

President Trump is expected to meet tomorrow with Chinese Communist dictator Xi Jinping on the margins of this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conclave in South Korea. Arguably, not since President Reagan met with Soviet Communist dictator Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland in October 1986 has as much been on the line in such summits.

After all, like Reykjavik, this encounter comes at a time when the Communist side is in trouble. The Chinese Communist Party is on the ropes, economically, demographically and politically and seeking, as it has done repeatedly in the past, to be bailed out by America. While the Chinese have in their monopoly on processed rare earth minerals leverage the Soviets did not in 1986, they will likely be dangling as did their counterparts in the USSR five decades ago a tempting proposition: Not just a deal on trade (for Gorbachev on denuclearization), but the promise of peace for our time.

At Reykjavik, the Communists’ ask was that Reagan abandon the Strategic Defense Initiative. In Gyeongju, South Korea, their quid pro quo for continued U.S. access to their rare earths will likely entail the U.S. abandoning the comprehensive efforts President Trump has made to decouple (or as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent insists on putting it, to “derisk”) from our highly problematic engagement with the CCP.

Mr. Trump’s longstanding opposition to such engagement – reminiscent of Reagan’s adamant rejection of “détente” with the Soviet Union – is brilliantly captured in Lee Smith’s new book The China Matrix. It chronicles how successive presidents of both parties and countless leaders of America’s business, political and other elites have subordinated national security and economic strength to the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party, and often their personal enrichment.

By contrast, as Mr. Smith also documents, Donald Trump started warning about this sell-out pioneered by Henry Kissinger decades ago, and how as a presidential candidate and in office he has worked to put America First, instead.

This CPDC webinar addresses what is on the line tomorrow and why President Trump must, like Reagan, resist the temptation to prop up our mortal enemy, and press instead to put them on the ash-heap of history.

Moderator

- Frank Gaffney, President, Institute for the American Future; Vice Chairman, Committee on the Present Danger: China; Member, Victory Coalition; host, “Securing America”

Panelists:

- Dr. John Lenczowski, PhD, Founder, former President and current Chancellor, Institute of World Politics; former Senior Director for European and Soviet Affairs, Reagan National Security Council

- Yuri Yarim-Agaev, visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, a scientist and a leader of the human rights movement in Russia, working closely with Andrei Sakharov and other dissidents.

- Brian Kennedy, Chairman, Committee on the Present Danger: China, President, American Strategy Group; former President, Claremont Institute; author, Communist China’s War Inside America

- Col. Grant Newsham, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.); former Foreign Service Officer; longtime businessman and entrepreneur in the Western Pacific; author, When China Attacks: A Warning to America