The APEC Summit, With Matthew Goodman

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is the APEC forum in San Francisco. With me to discuss the upcoming meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation 2023 forum is Matthew Goodman. Matt is distinguished fellow for global economic policy and director of the Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Before joining CFR earlier this fall, Matt was senior vice president for economics and the Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. From 2010 to 2012, he served as director for international economics on the staff of the National Security Council. One of his duties in that job was helping President Barack Obama prepare for a variety of global and regional summits, which included the APEC forum, which the United States last hosted in 2011 in Honolulu. Matt, thank you very much for joining me.

 

GOODMAN:
Delighted to be here. Thanks, Jim.

 

LINDSAY:
So Matt, let's begin with sort of the big picture question. We're going to have this meeting in San Francisco later this week of APEC. What exactly is APEC?

 

GOODMAN:
Well, that is a good question. Some have called it four adjectives in search of a noun. It needs the word forum in there somewhere. But seriously, it's an important little organization that was founded exactly thirty years ago, or at least at leaders level. This is the thirtieth anniversary of the summit that President Clinton hosted in Seattle. And it's been working kind of pick and shovel work to promote regional economic integration in this critical area covering the United States and four other Eastern Pacific countries—Canada, Mexico, Chile, and Peru—as well as a number of major Asian economies.

 

LINDSAY:
So it covers both sides of the Pacific.

 

GOODMAN:
Yes, that was a very important part of it from the beginning. It was really set up during the Bush Sr. administration when there was a desire to show the flag, as it were, beyond the military and diplomatic presence we have out in that region in economics. And famously, Jim Baker, the secretary of state under President Bush Sr. said, "We will not allow a line to be drawn down the middle of the Pacific." So he wanted this to be across the whole Pacific Rim.

 

LINDSAY:
And so what are the major Asian countries that are members of APEC?

 

GOODMAN:
Well, pretty much anybody you can think of up to India. So India is not a member, but China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, most of the so-called ASEAN or Southeast Asian countries, not three of the smaller ones—Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos—but the other seven of the ten, and then a couple of odds and ends like Papua New Guinea, and then of course Australia and New Zealand. So it's twenty-one ... Oh, and importantly it includes Taipei; Chinese Taipei has a seat and Hong Kong has a seat. And that's a complicated history, but because it's an economic forum, Beijing was okay with that initially. They're less okay with it now. But as a result, we call these twenty-one economies, not countries.

 

LINDSAY:
And what about Russia? Is Russia a member of APEC?

 

GOODMAN:
I'm sorry. Yes, you're right. Russia is also a member.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. So we're having this meeting and we have these twenty-one countries who represent a sizeable proportion of the global economy. Numbers I have here say that the twenty-one members make up 40 percent of the world's population, 50 percent of global trade, and they are recipients of more than 60 percent of U.S. exports. So this organization presumably has some importance to the United States. Why is it meeting in San Francisco this year?

 

GOODMAN:
Well, the hosting role rotates among the twenty-one economies, and the U.S. last hosted it, as you mentioned in the intro, in 2011 in Honolulu. The U.S. agreed kind of late in the day about three years, well, less than three years ago. I think maybe the beginning of the Biden administration, so two plus years ago to host again in 2023. And they picked San Francisco as a big Pacific Rim city that has capacity to host a big thing like that at short notice, frankly, because it occupies probably thousands of hotel rooms and lots of logistics and so on.

 

LINDSAY:
It must be a massive security headache.

 

GOODMAN:
Huge issue with these twenty-one economies and lots of security and press and think tankers and others in the host city. So it's a big undertaking and San Francisco, you know, has the capacity to do that.

 

LINDSAY:
Well, help me understand, Matt, what the White House is doing right now to get prepared. As I mentioned at the top, you have experience pulling together these kinds of meetings, making sure the president is properly prepared. I would imagine a lot of back and forth with countries at least showing up about potential bilats—that is side meetings with leaders, talk about deliverables, and things like that. Before we talk about what the Biden administration is trying to achieve, just give me a sense of what it's like granularly trying to pull this off.

 

GOODMAN:
Sure. Well, the first thing to understand is that APEC, actually I said it started as a leaders meeting in 1993, but it actually started in 1989 as a foreign and later trade ministers meeting. So really a lot of stuff happens during the year. The State Department and the U.S. Trade Representative's Office in particular are involved in lots and lots of preparatory meetings and they agree on things at a ministerial level.

 

LINDSAY:
Can you just explain for me, Matt, when you say ministerial level, what do you mean? Because I note that the way it's set up, I think on the 14th and 15th or 15th and 16th, it's a ministerial meeting and then it's followed by two days of leader meetings.

 

GOODMAN:
Right, during the year, the cabinet level people—the secretary of state and the U.S. trade representative and their counterparts—meet with their counterparts. And they are, in fact, you're right, meeting I think on November 14th and 15th. So Secretary Blinken, secretary of state, and USTR Katherine Tai will be meeting with their counterparts on those two days to kind of finalize the cabinet level agreements in this group and then tee up the leader's conversation the next couple of days. And so this is a huge undertaking. APEC has just hundreds of committees and task forces and working groups, and it does a whole bunch of stuff that we can talk about. And some think it does too much, it's too spread too thin, but this all culminates in the leaders meeting.

 

And to your question, you know, presidents have a lot on their plate and we didn't, as I recall in 2011, other than occasional references maybe to President Obama that this was going to happen ... And I guess he had to make the decision to host it in Honolulu, so that was significant early on. But really, we didn't start briefing him until, you know, a few months out, maybe in the summer of 2011 probably, on what was going to happen. And then as it got closer, we gave him more and more detail. By the way, our new president at CFR, Mike Froman, was the senior official, the chair of what's called the SOM Group, the senior officials meeting group. So Mike was my boss.

 

LINDSAY:
What an abundance of acronyms.

 

GOODMAN:
It is. There are so many acronyms in APEC, it's not funny. But Mike was the senior U.S. representative for APEC, and I was his deputy. And Mike was doing a lot of other things, so I ended up doing a lot of the APEC work during that host year. It's a lot of work, huge amount of logistical preparations. Obviously, whenever the president goes anywhere, there's a lot of that. But because you had twenty other leaders and just thousands of press and business people and think tankers and others, there was just a lot of organizational elements to this. But ultimately, the president is the person who, you know, runs the show, and President Obama really kind of got into it at the end. And we can talk about that if you're interested.

 

LINDSAY:
Well, I imagine for President Biden, this is going to be a challenge because his foreign policy inbox right now is overflowing with problems. We have Ukraine. Obviously we have the Israel-Gaza conflict. So he's got to sort of shift gears. And I'm just curious from your vantage point, Matt, how does the coordination work within the U.S. government? You were on the staff of the NSC, but you mentioned the State Department's involved. That's a big bureaucracy. You mentioned USTR, which is not a big bureaucracy, but has a very small staff of people who are very focused on sort of the details of doing trade things. In the added layer, I would think, there's been a lot of talk today about how the Commerce Department has emerged as a major player in U.S. foreign economic policy. So how is the Biden administration likely putting all these pieces together so you have a coherent U.S. approach rather than the approaches of four different agencies or perhaps even more given the number of officials in each agency?

 

GOODMAN:
Yeah, it is definitely, APEC as a multi-tentacle beast that is very hard to tame. So as you said, the State Department has an ambassador level person who's called the senior official who is in charge of the overall effort. And then U.S.TR has an assistant USTR level person who is a senior person who is devoted to APEC issues during the year, and then they and their teams organize most of that. When the president gets involved for the leaders' summit, and particularly in a host year, there's a huge White House mobilization, including the advanced people and of course Secret Service and media people and many, many other policy people like Mike and me. And by the way, as I said, Mike was the overall coordinator. There's a similar person today, and then usually there's somebody like me to help that person out.

 

And then as you say, there are other agencies. Commerce is a very active ... has long been an active participant in APEC, but I think you're right that now this Commerce Department is punching a little above its weight and probably more active. I understand the Secretary of Commerce Raimondo will be in San Francisco, as will Secretary Yellen from Treasury and Blinken and Tai. So it's going to be quite a strong showing of senior people. And then there are other agencies: Energy, Transportation is definitely involved, Health and Human services. It's a huge undertaking because there are all these different strands of work which APEC does, so.

 

LINDSAY:
Because obviously issues don't care about jurisdiction or bureaucratic boundaries. Now as I understand it, Matt, the host country gets to pick the theme for the leaders' forum, and my understanding is this year that the theme is, let me quote it here, "Creating a resilient and sustainable future for all." Why this topic, and what does it mean?

 

GOODMAN:
Well, first of all, APEC is a sort of revolving feast. And so, each year the new host usually picks up the best of what was done the previous years and then puts its own little accent on it. And so as you say, the U.S. has come up with that framing. And the two adjectives, resilient and sustainable, are significant. As you know, there's a big debate about making our supply chains more secure, making our economy generally more resilient against various risks and threats from climate change to bad actors. So that's the resilience part.

 

And sustainable really gets to the ... well, it gets centrally to the climate change issue, making sure that growth is being done in a ... or growth and policies that are supporting growth are done in a sustainable way environmentally. And so the big part of the agenda this year is going to be focused on those issues. There's also another word they could have used in here and do use a lot in APEC is "inclusive." They certainly are trying to empower women to bring in small and medium sized businesses into the trading system in the regions. So those are the kind of key ideas and themes the U.S. is trying to accent here.

 

LINDSAY:
Matt, that may be what the Biden team wants to talk about, but do we have reason to believe that's what its APEC partners want to talk about? Because my sense is, from travel to the region, is that many—maybe most of the countries, certainly, in East Asia—want to see the United States more forward leaning on trade, want to talk market access, and the Biden administration has essentially indicated that's not what we want to talk about.

 

GOODMAN:
Yeah, no, I think that those are the expectations out in the region. Among our partners in particular, they want the U.S. more involved in formal trade arrangements that provide market access, and that means, you know, that the U.S. Congress has to be involved, which it really isn't in APEC. On the other hand, I mean there are things in APEC that are useful and, you know, especially because they're resigned to the U.S. not being in formal trade agreements in the near term, there's a lot of useful kind of, again, as I say, sort of pick and shovel work to promote better investment in the region, to improve health outcomes, to prepare against natural disasters, things that are appreciated and welcome in the region. But yeah, it's not quite the same as the big trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that a lot of our partners in APEC are also members of.

 

LINDSAY:
How does this talk about resilience and sustainability play with many of the members of APEC, given that part of the Biden administration's effort is designed to make the United States less dependent upon other members of APEC, most notably China, but also to a good degree Russia as well?

 

GOODMAN:
Yeah, well, this has been a tension in the group for a long time before those terms "resilience" and "sustainability" were really so central to our policy and to the regional debates. You know, China and Russia have been members, well China since the beginning, Russia a little bit later, and they have been more or less constructive partners in that organization. Because it's a non-binding sort of consensus based organization, they don't formally negotiate binding rules in this group. China has tolerated it and even found it useful in some ways because it needs some of those facilitation of trade or improvements in health or women's empowerment. And there are a lot of issues that China, you know, agrees it needs to work on with partners.

 

But you're right that China also is a big challenge in this group, and otherwise, you know, it's a big competitor of ours. There is a sense across the region that we're overly dependent on China for too many things: critical inputs and final products, and increasingly maybe technology. So that is a concern that's of course most prominent here in the U.S., but other partners also share it. And that does create a natural sort of tension in the group and it makes it harder to reach higher level commitments from the participants in this group.

 

LINDSAY:
I'm glad you pointed to the fact that other members of APEC, countries that are close to the United States, share those concerns about being overly dependent on China and, again, also on Russia, particularly for energy exports, and the tension that creates. How does that play out with the group sort of writ large? I was just at a meeting with someone from an ASEAN member country who introduced me to a term I had not heard before: DMUC, do not make us choose. So how does this work?

 

GOODMAN:
That's new to me too. I hadn't heard of that. I know the concept of not making us choose, but I didn't know there was an acronym. Because it's APEC, there's got to be an acronym. So look, these countries in the region ... I mean without exception, I think every country in this region covered by APEC wants to have good economic and other relations with the United States and China. We're the two biggest economies in the world. We have a lot to offer in terms of products and services and investments and money and a market that in both cases, that's pretty substantial, especially ours. China's is getting bigger, but ... And so nobody wants to cut off their economic relations, including us. We don't want to decouple. The national security advisor said in his speech earlier this year, that's not our goal, to decouple. That wouldn't make sense.

 

LINDSAY:
This is the idea that we're going to have small yard high fences. There's just going to be some things that are sort of carved off from everything else.

 

GOODMAN:
Right. I think a more targeted de-risking strategy, as it's being called, of making sure that we're not dependent on China for critical things or we're not providing them critical technologies, for example. That is a part of what we're doing. And other partners in the region, you know, they sort of share the concern about some of those things. Nobody wants to get all of their, whatever product you can think of, you know, 80, 90 percent of it from one source, and particularly if it's something really important like critical minerals or something, which China often has a lock on.

 

LINDSAY:
As we just learned with the recent decision to restrict exports of graphite, which is important in a lot of semiconductor and other high technology manufacturing.

 

GOODMAN:
Exactly. There's rare earth. There's another category. But gallium and germanium and all these things we learned in high school chemistry, China, turns out, either has a lot of them or, more importantly, processes most of the world's supply of a lot of those things. And nobody wants to have ... I mean, you don't want it either. You don't want to have everything that's sold to you from one source. You want to have multiple choices of where you buy things. So everybody feels this impulse to sort of reduce those dependencies, but nobody wants to completely cut off. And to the extent the U.S. is asking people to, you know, to make hard choices there, there is a lot of discomfort in this group with some of what we're asking for.

 

LINDSAY:
And I should note that China also wants to decouple or de-risk to some extent. Indeed, one could argue that Xi Jinping was the first decoupler or de-risker with his strategies dating back to 2015 when he identified, I guess, a dozen industries where he thought that China had to become dominant and not be dependent upon the rest of the world writ the United States.

 

GOODMAN:
Absolutely. This is a longstanding effort from China and really predates our efforts to de-risk or to reduce those dependencies. So yes, China's playing this game too. And, you know, again, it probably makes sense. Anybody who went through the COVID-19 pandemic knows how problematic it is to be dependent on one place for like say all your masks or all your ventilators. And so I think it really has brought home to a lot of people, we've got to change the way products and services flow around the world. And a lot of that had been concentrated on China, so I think that is a kind of shared impulse.

 

LINDSAY:
So Matt, what would have to happen at this forum for the Biden administration to be able to say we succeeded? Or is that really not the way administrations think about major events like the APEC 2023 forum?

 

GOODMAN:
No, they certainly do. Whenever the president's involved and especially when it's on our soil, there is a high stake there in terms of getting some kind of good outcomes and certainly talking points that come out of these meetings. I mean, as you alluded to earlier, there are just a lot of other things going on in the world that are going to distract attention from the specific APEC agenda. So as you said, Ukraine, the Middle East. You have the possibility of a U.S. government shutdown on the last day of the APEC forum on November-

 

LINDSAY:
There's that minor possibility.

 

GOODMAN:
That minor possibility. The president literally might have to get back on Air Force One and fly back in order to be down and not spending U.S. taxpayer money by that Friday. So there's a lot of distraction here, and that's going to make it hard to feel good about what actually happens at APEC. I think a lot of the outcomes the president's looking for are to show the U.S. is committed to this Asia-Pacific region, that we're engaged economically there, that we have a plan and some policies that we're pushing out that people are interested in, and also that we are doing better than China right now economically. I think that's going to be a theme that they're going to none too subtly highlight out there. The U.S. is growing-

 

LINDSAY:
That's trying to push back on the Chinese argument that the West, specifically the United States, is in decline. So don't make bets on the United States.

 

GOODMAN:
Exactly. I think there's going to be a, I'd say, not too subtle effort to show that we're doing well. They might highlight some investments, maybe in the Bay Area, that are hopefully Asian-oriented investments into the U.S. to show how we're tied in with the region, but that we're growing and doing well. And by contrast, China is struggling a little bit economically. Although, you know, they'll want to make sure they don't communicate a kind of complacency about that because these things can change pretty quickly. But then, you know, there will be the bilateral meetings as well, and that will have a big impact on how the White House feels the event went. If there are good meetings on the side, particularly with the Chinese president, then that will be seen as a very positive outcome.

 

And then finally, there will be some APEC outcomes that are useful. For example, they are going to probably agree to some principles for the "just energy transition" as it's called. How to invest in renewable and transitional energy sources in a way that doesn't disrupt economies or put people out of work and is inclusive and all the rest of it. That will be, probably, one of the big central kind of, not quite deliverables, but I would say something that will be prominently featured in the outcomes from APEC. So it's useful on that level, but overshadowed by many of these other things.

 

LINDSAY:
Matt, since you've been in the room, let me ask you, how often are these deliverables signed, sealed, and delivered before anybody shows up at the host city and how much actual new business is done in the host city?

 

GOODMAN:
That's a really good question. You know, on the one hand, sure, there's a lot of work done by the so-called "sherpas." Mike was a sherpa for the G20 and APEC-

 

LINDSAY:
Referring to Mike Froman, our mutual boss?

 

GOODMAN:
I'm sorry, Mike Froman, our boss, was the sherpa for the G20 and for APEC. And a lot of that work, working with counterparts, is to prepare the so-called communique, the declaration, or statement that the leaders issue at the end. That's all mostly cooked in advance. You know, sometimes there are a couple of words bracketed or sentences bracketed, meaning they're still open for debate right up to the time of the meeting. But that's kind of not good staffing if you leave too many of those. So you want to get most of that done. But I would say there is a power in the leaders' meetings. And I mean in the room, not just in the bilaterals, which definitely has power. But I was in a ... For example, in Honolulu in 2011, we set up a luncheon discussion about regulatory reform of all things with whatever that has-

 

LINDSAY:
Sounds exciting.

 

GOODMAN:
... seven syllables or something. And we put the leaders in a room together and thought, "Oh my God, how is this going to work?" And it turned out it was really a dynamic conversation. The leaders loved it because they were all struggling in one way with some problem of trying to get the government out of the business, out of the private sector, or deal with citizens that were concerned about some set of issues. And they all were sharing their experiences and best practices. It was really surprisingly powerful conversation. So remember that these leaders don't get to meet their peers very often. They're pretty lonely people. They got a lot of acolytes and people giving them things, but they don't actually get to talk to their peers very often. So there's a real power in putting these leaders in a room together and letting them, you know, go at it.

 

LINDSAY:
Let's talk about the power of those conversations, particularly in the context of bilateral meetings. Now, there will be no Joe Biden-Vladimir Putin bilateral meeting because Vladimir Putin will not be in San Francisco. This is nothing new. He was a no-show for last year's APEC forum in Bangkok. But there's big expectations that there is going to be a bilat between President Biden and President Xi. I'll just say at the point we're recording this podcast, that meeting has yet to be confirmed. It could fall apart at the last moment. But what would you expect to come out of such a meeting, and what would be the White House's goal in having a meeting with President Xi?

 

GOODMAN:
Well, there's no question that that meeting, assuming it happens, is going to overshadow a lot of the rest of the activities in San Francisco. Certainly the formal agenda will be dominated by this meeting. I think the White House is trying to signal that this meeting is important because it's the first meeting of the two leaders since Bali last in Indonesia last November when they kind of agreed that we would get on a path of more stable relations. We're not going to overcome all of our differences. We have huge differences in a lot of areas, but it was getting a little bit dangerous that we were not communicating with each other. And there was a risk of potential miscalculations or accidents in the South China Sea, for example. So that got disrupted earlier this year by the so-called "balloon incident." But then since then there's been a conscious effort by both sides to get cabinet ministers together. Several of ours have been to China, a couple of theirs have been here.

 

And I think that this meeting has meant to sort of reinforce that the U.S. and China need to have some kind of relationship, some kind of communication. There are issues on which we want to avoid problems, and there are others on which we may need to collaborate, you know, whether it's on health issues or North Korea or fentanyl flows. There's clearly a lot to talk about. I don't expect a lot of substantive outcomes from the summit, and I don't think the White House does either. I think it's mostly going to be about the photo ops and the handshakes and making sure that it all goes smoothly. But you could see one or two outcomes in military-to-military communication, in fentanyl, maybe in climate change. That would be a stretch outcome. But it's possible there could be an agreement on methane or some other sub-issue within the broader climate issue.

 

LINDSAY:
What is just quickly the issue about methane?

 

GOODMAN:
Well, you probably know better than I. It's one of the major greenhouse gases that comes off of a lot of things from cows to coal manufacturing plants. And China has been fairly laggard in trying to control its methane emissions. And the U.S. has been pushing for this for a long time. And so there's been sort of hints that there might be some kind of agreement. Exactly what's in there, I don't know. But it is certainly something that people are starting to talk about.

 

LINDSAY:
Matt, let me ask you what may be an unfair question, but try to put yourself in the mindset of Xi Jinping or the Chinese leadership. Why would Xi Jinping want to come to San Francisco, especially given that it's America's home turf? Chinese leadership has to know that Biden is hoping to use it as a political symbol showing that America remains the leading superpower. Xi Jinping has not traveled much outside of China since before COVID. This would be a very short trip, as best I can tell. This is not like when Deng Xiaoping came to the United States way back during the Carter administration, visited various parts of the United States. So why would Xi Jinping agree to show up in San Francisco?

 

GOODMAN:
Yeah, it's a good question. There are certainly risks for Xi Jinping from a trip like this, the ones you mentioned. But I would say the upside is it is important within China for the leader to be seen as managing, the leadership to be managing this critical relationship with the United States. So there would've been some downside for him if he had sort of somehow blown this off and said, "I can't, I'm not going to take the chance of meeting with the U.S. leader." It would've been a sign a weakness, in a way, domestically.

 

And then, there are a lot of other people in the audience that he's appealing to because there are all these other economies across this region that are going to be represented there. And China's trying to reach out to them and show that, "We are the partner of choice because we're doing Belt and Road and infrastructure investments. Or we're giving you other kinds of assistance, and we're a big market that you can sell into." So I think he wants to also speak to that crowd as well. But it is, you know ... There's no question it comes with some risk to him, particularly this sort of comparison of how China's doing versus the U.S. right now.

 

LINDSAY:
Also, if you see large anti-Chinese demonstrations in San Francisco, I would imagine that would not play well for him, though I have to acknowledge that China censors what the Chinese people can see. So those scenes may not make it back to Shanghai or Guangzhou or other places in China.

 

GOODMAN:
Having worked these issues in the White House, I can tell you that I'm guessing 75, 80 percent of the discussion between U.S. and China is about how to minimize the risk of any kind of disruption like that. There was a disruption, a sort of minor one, in another forum a few years ago when I was working there, you know, where one of these groups kind of pushed themselves in front of the leader and it caused a huge to do. And so China is certainly going to be emphasizing there better but not be any disruptions. But as you know, we're a democracy. It's a free country, and it could be disruptive.

 

LINDSAY:
Let me close with this question, Matt. The APEC forum is famous among forums, at least with people who follow these kinds of high level global and regional meetings, of having a tradition in which the attending leaders dress in the national costume of the host country. Do we have any idea of whether the Biden administration is going to continue this tradition, and if so, what would qualify as the national costume of the United States? Are we talking a polo shirt? Are we talking a T-shirt?

 

GOODMAN:
Cowboy hat?

 

LINDSAY:
Fill me in here.

 

GOODMAN:
I knew you would get to this eventually. It always comes up in APEC when APEC leaders get together. My understanding is that the White House does not want to have a silly shirt as it were. There is some talk of ties that might be somehow themed together in some way. Maybe a red, white and blue tie of some kind. I don't know whether that's true, but definitely I think no silly shirts.

 

LINDSAY:
I have a hard time imagining President Xi of China wearing a red, white, and blue tie.

 

GOODMAN:
Well, we'll see if they can pull that off. But I've got lots of war stories about the silly shirts, from trying to get leaders to put them on when other countries insist on them.

 

LINDSAY:
Give us one quickly.

 

GOODMAN:
Well, President Obama in Bali in 2011—not APEC, it was another summit, the East Asia Summit—was told he had to wear a batik shirt. And he actually turned to me and said, "You're the shirt guy, right?" 

 

And I said, "Well, I mean, not really sir, but what do you need?" 

 

And he said, "Well, I don't want to put on this thing. I like, of course, batik." He partly grew up in Indonesia. "But this is sort of cheap looking. I'm going to look terrible in it." 

 

I said, "Sir, the problem is, if you're the only person wearing a coat and tie and everybody else is wearing the shirt, it's going to be really awkward." 

 

So he said, "Well find out if all the other leaders are going to be wearing a shirt." And so we literally had the State Department go around to every other delegation and make sure all of their leaders are going to be wearing the shirt before President Obama agreed, reluctantly, to wear it. I actually think he looked great, but he was not comfortable. And he's not the first to have pushed back on this tradition.

 

LINDSAY:
I will say as someone who's had the good fortune to go to Indonesia several times, batik shirts are quite lovely.

 

GOODMAN:
They are.

 

LINDSAY:
And they come in a variety of styles and can be quite nice. So anyway, I'll give two thumbs up for the batik shirt. Listen, Matt, on that note, I'm going to close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Matt Goodman, distinguished fellow for global economic policy and director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies here at the Council. Matt, thank you for joining me.

 

GOODMAN:
Thanks, Jim. I enjoyed it.

 

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And leave us a review, we'd love the feedback. If you want to contact us, please email us at [email protected]. Again, that is [email protected]. A transcript of our conversation is available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed in The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

 

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with the Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go to Michelle Kurilla for her research assistance. This is Jim Lindsay, thanks for listening.