Are We Ready? | Trump’s National Security Strategy, With Rebecca Lissner

Speaker 1:
Three, two, one.

LINDSAY:
The world has turned dangerous. Is the United States prepared to meet the new challenges it might face? In this special series from President's Inbox, we're bringing you conversations with Washington insiders to assess whether the United States is ready for a new, more dangerous world.
What are America's core foreign policy interests? What should the United States want in and from the world? The Donald Trump administration sought to answer those two questions with the release last week of its long awaited National Security Strategy.
The 29-page document lays out the administration's vision for how the United States should achieve its national interests in a complicated world. The strategy explicitly repudiates the foreign policy the United States has pursued since the end of the Cold War, arguing that it undermined American power, wealth, and decency.

PBS NewsHour: The congressionally mandated document reflects a shift from the stance of previous administrations, including Mr. Trump's first term.

LINDSAY:
So what is this new vision for the United States? Will it usher in a new era of American greatness, as it promises, or create a new series of problems for Washington to address?
From the Council on Foreign Relations, welcome to the President's Inbox.
I'm Jim Lindsay. Joining me today is Rebecca Lissner, senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy here at the Council on Foreign Relations. Rebecca, thank you for joining me.

LISSNER:
Thanks for having me, Jim.

LINDSAY:
So Rebecca, I know you've served in government. You were in the Biden-Harris administration. You ended your time there as a deputy principal advisor to the vice president, but before that, you were senior director on the staff of the National Security Council, where you were a lead author in the creation of the Biden administration's National Security Strategy. So tell me about the importance of National Security Strategies. Why do we have them and do they actually have an impact?

LISSNER:
Well, National Security Strategies exist primarily because Congress mandates them. And so in principle, the president every year is supposed to deliver a National Security Strategy together with the budget to Congress, as a way of framing out what the United States aims to do in the world and allocating resources accordingly.
Now, in practice, even as this has been the legislative requirement, it has very rarely happened this way. So by custom, each president does one National Security Strategy per term, at least over the past several administrations.
And what these documents aim to do is really capture the president's worldview. They're not typically strategic blueprints of the kind that give you point predictions, or point recommendations for discrete policy choices, of the kind that the president and principals make on a day-to-day basis. But what a good National Security Strategy should do is articulate the administration's theory of the case as it comes to America's role in the world, provide a messaging lodestar for the administration, so that everyone is singing from the same sheet of music, so to speak, and knows what the broad direction of travel is, and ideally also make some tough choices and indicate priorities in such a way that the administration can allocate resources accordingly, and allocate time and attention accordingly.
Now, it is very rare that any National Security Strategy meets all of those thresholds, but that's the intent.

LINDSAY:
So can I infer from what you've just said, that people in the bureaucracy, as they try to put plans and budgets together, are going to be referring to the National Security Strategy, or at least adapting their plans to the language of the National Security Strategy?

LISSNER:
Definitely. And when I was working on the National Security Strategy in the first year of the Biden-Harris administration, someone gave me some really good advice. They said, "Write this strategy as if you are writing for a mid-level bureaucrat, someone in the State Department who you'll never meet, but who wants to carry out the president's marching orders, they just don't know what they are."
And so the National Security Strategy has many audiences. Congress, the American people, allies and adversaries, but in some ways the most important audience is actually the government itself, because this is how many people throughout the vast national security bureaucracy that the United States has, know what it is that they're supposed to do.
And so if they need to frame a memo that they're writing, they will draw language from the National Security Strategy. If they need to draft remarks for their boss, they will draw language from the National Security Strategy. And so that kind of messaging guidance and high-level strategic guidance is one of the core functions of the NSS.

LINDSAY:
Okay. I want to begin with the strategy's critique of foreign policy for the past thirty years. It argues that that policy, conducted by both Democratic and Republican presidents, was fundamentally mistaken. Let me read one of the entries. "After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country." I suspect that line will have a lot of people listening to us nodding their head in agreement, but I have to ask you, is that a fair assessment?

LISSNER:
Look, I think there's no question that the post-Cold War trajectory of American grand strategy has not been perfect. And in embracing a sort of liberal universalism after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States definitely did overreach. And you look, for example, at the war in Iraq as a prime example of massive expenditure of American resources in pursuit of political objectives that weren't actually attainable, and at great human cost.
So I do think we need to take seriously elements of that critique, and you add onto that the fact that Gallup asks Americans every year whether they're satisfied or dissatisfied with America's role in the world. And every single year since 2006, the majority of Americans have reported that they are dissatisfied.
So you have some high-profile policy failures, you have broad public dissatisfaction, and so we do need to take a hard look at some of the core assumptions that have guided American foreign policy since the early '90s and question whether they need to be revised.
However, we need to do that alongside also a fair assessment of the achievements, because many of the elements of U.S. policy that this administration excoriate, for example, key elements of the liberal international order, have actually provided unprecedented prosperity and security for the United States.
So we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, and I worry that this take on the future of America's role in the world goes too far in correcting for these perceived failures, and turning us in a direction that will actually make the American people less secure and less prosperous.

LINDSAY:
Now, of course, Rebecca, a critique is a complaint. It's not a plan of action. So let's talk about what it is that the Trump administration is proposing as the new National Security Strategy. How would you describe it?

LISSNER:
Well, I think the first thing that's important to recognize is that this is a very different document than the first Trump National Security Strategy. So anyone who thinks they have a concept of what the first Trump administration did on foreign policy and is trying to extrapolate that to the second Trump administration is missing a key part of the plot.
So let's start by what this isn't. This is not a grand strategy of great power competition. So the 2017 National Security Strategy that President Trump put out was very clear in identifying China and Russia as the United States' core systemic competitors. It also highlights Iran and North Korea as sort of second tier, but still very salient threats. This National Security Strategy has none of that strategic clarity. Instead, it really elevates economics as being the key stakes in the U.S.-China competition, and puts other forms of systemic rivalry in a secondary place.
It provides no assessment of the threat posed by Russia to U.S. interests. It downplays the threat posed by Iran in the wake of Operation Midnight Hammer and the Trump administration's military campaign together with Israel against the Iranian nuclear program, and it doesn't mention North Korea at all.
So this is a very different strategic outlook than the one that we saw in the last Trump administration. Instead, what it emphasizes above all is the Western Hemisphere. It elevates the Western Hemisphere, and in particular Latin America, as the United States' highest priority. It places an emphasis on arresting migration, combating what they call narcoterrorists, and assuring U.S. dominance through what they're calling a Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. And in light of all of this, it calls for U.S. military posture to reflect those urgent threats in our hemisphere, a theme that I suspect we'll see in the National Defense Strategy when it comes out.
The other area of pretty remarkable departure has to do with Europe. So rather than Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin, this National Security Strategy actually reserves its greatest vitriol for U.S. allies in Europe. And it echoes some of the themes that we heard from Vice President Vance at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year. This idea that the greatest threat to Europe is what the NSS calls civilizational erasure. And this is a really dramatic departure from what we've seen before in terms of tone with respect to NATO and the EU. And I think we should unpack what it could mean for the future of U.S. foreign policy, because it's quite significant.

LINDSAY:
I want to draw out a little bit on this, Rebecca. I'm trying to understand to what extent there's real substantive change in this document, as opposed to rhetorical change. As I read this strategy, one thing that's notable is it's much more overtly political. The language really seems to be tied into putting forward the argument for the MAGA people, stressing issues of sovereignty, non-intervention in the rest.
I take it that China's not mentioned in the same way as it was mentioned in the Trump National Security Strategy 1.0. Nonetheless, there are plenty of passages in which can be read as speaking about China. I'll note that this National Security Strategy says that one of the goals of American foreign policy should be a free and open Indo-Pacific. China's not mentioned, but I would think if you are that mid-level bureaucrat over in the Pentagon or the State Department, you're going to read that as the pivot to Asia, that we have to concentrate on keeping China from dominating the Western Pacific. Am I misreading something here?

LISSNER:
No, I don't think you're misreading it. I would say that there are elements that sound quite familiar. So you talked about the commitment to maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific. To me, if you put the China piece aside, the language about the Indo-Pacific is actually pretty familiar. It reminded me of Trump one, and actually, pretty closely resembled what the Biden administration strategy was towards the Indo-Pacific.
But then when you layer in the China piece, it starts to look quite different. So whereas the Biden administration was very clear that China is the only power that has the military, economic, technological, and diplomatic heft to pose a sustained challenge to a U.S.-led order, this document doesn't make any such assessment or diagnosis. And we know that the key to a sound strategy is having a sound diagnosis. And what this strategy says is that actually, the key stakes in U.S.-China competition are economic, and trying to achieve a mutually beneficial economic relationship between the U.S. and China.
And so that says to me, yes, a free and open Indo-Pacific is a priority, but the paramount priority is the economic or the commercial one. And that, by the way, I think has been borne out in the way the president has been approaching China policy, at least to date.

LINDSAY:
So why is that wrong? Why is that the wrong diagnosis?

LISSNER:
It just misses the broader picture. So the idea that we have a massive problem when it comes to Chinese overcapacity, that China, through unfair market practices, has harmed American workers and American businesses is absolutely true, and remedying that should be a primary goal of U.S. foreign policy.
The problem is that the way Trump sees it, he's trying to strike a grand economic bargain with the Chinese. And I fear that he's willing to trade away other strategic policy issues in order to achieve that. So yes, it is important to try to address trade imbalances with China, but we need to do that in a way that is truly comprehensive, that truly addresses the threat that China poses to the U.S. economy and to U.S. workers, including through technology, and not sacrifice other strategic aims in the process.
So let me be more specific. If you really cared about maintaining U.S. tech lead vis-a-vis China, which is critical for the economic competition and the security competition, you would not sell advanced Nvidia chips to China. And yet President Trump has decided to do just that.
At the same time, if you really cared about the strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific, you would not do things like hold arms sales to Taiwan, or downgrade defense dialogues, or potentially change declaratory policy as it relates to Taiwan, because that would indicate that Taiwan deterrence is not a key priority for the United States, which of course it is.
So in aggregate, the Trump administration is not wrong to emphasize the economic piece, but the economic piece is just one part of the broader challenge that China poses, and we need to be very careful in trying to make trade-offs between that and other areas of priority.

LINDSAY:
Well, I would note there are other inconsistencies in the document. For instance, it talks about the importance of keeping America's technological lead, but this is an administration that has been cutting back government investment in science and technology, which has really been sort of the fountain from which a lot of America's tech dominance has flowed.

LISSNER:
Completely agree. Another inconsistency that we might point to is that the strategy indicates that U.S. foreign policy should have a preference for non-interference, and yet, we have an administration that is undergoing an attempt to change the regime in Venezuela to try to get Maduro out, and may potentially use military force in Venezuela to that effect.
So certainly there are a number of inconsistencies we can point to within the strategy, and it certainly reflects, I think, a number of different factions of the administration. Look, strategies like this are always the result of some kind of bureaucratic bargaining process. And when I read this, I see some paragraphs that sound very much like the vice president. I see other paragraphs that sound very much like Stephen Miller, see other paragraphs that sound much more like Marco Rubio. And so there's a little bit of everything in here, and it certainly doesn't have a high degree of internal consistency.

LINDSAY:
Well, it is a document written by a committee, after all. But I want to drill down on this issue of the Western Hemisphere, because that has obviously caught a lot of people's attention. What precisely is the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine? And I'll note from my historian friends that typically it's not presidents who name doctrines after themselves, that's the privilege of pundits and historians, but leave that be. What exactly is the Trump corollary?

LISSNER:
You're worried the president's getting too far into your lane, Jim?

LINDSAY:
Not that. No, I respect my historian friends who write books and christen concepts, so take away one of their privileges.

LISSNER:
Yes, no, exactly. Well, look, the primary gist of the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine is that other foreign powers, non-U.S. powers, should not be playing in our hemisphere. And so the idea is the United States should really be able to achieve dominance within the Western Hemisphere, and here we're primarily talking about Latin America.
Now, implicit in that, in the view of some analysts, is the idea that the United States should also give deference to other major powers in their own neighborhoods. I don't think we see that spelled out in this strategy, but you could certainly imagine, over the course of the Trump administration, an evolution towards something that looks more like spheres of influence, where we say we are going to claim privilege in our hemisphere, economic, security and otherwise.
And as part of that, we will also give more space to Russia, or give more space to China in their own spheres of influence, and pull back some of the U.S. presence or influence in those areas. That, again, not there yet, but that is a place this could go.

LINDSAY:
Well, I'll just note on that score, I was in Shanghai when the report came out, and my Chinese interlocutors were very quick to read the document, and that was something that they drilled upon right from the get go, because their notion is what's good for the goose should be good for the gander. They seem very comfortable with this idea of spheres of interest. They wouldn't put it that way, but there seemed to be some happiness with that. But how-

LISSNER:
And we've seen the Kremlin welcoming the document as well.

LINDSAY:
So how is this new policy, if I can call it that, toward Latin America, to be effected? Is it simply about putting more U.S. forces in Latin America? Is it about putting aside the idea of non-intervention and invening militarily in Latin American politics? Is it about reasserting control over the Panama Canal? Does the document give us any feel for how this policy should play out?

LISSNER:
I'm not sure that it gives us a clear sense of how the policy should play out, but I do think you mentioned a number of ways in which it could play out. So one, I would say elevating the Western Hemisphere makes considerable sense when you think about what region of the world most directly affects the day-to-day lives of the American people.
And actually, the Biden administration National Security Strategy said exactly that, that there's no region of the world that more directly affects Americans than the Western Hemisphere. So the idea of prioritizing the Western Hemisphere is not new. What's new here is the idea that that should be a military project, and that the U.S. should have now, I think, over ten thousand troops in the hemisphere in order to advance U.S. interests and aims.
Now, that deprioritizes, in my view, what ought to be the leading instruments that capture the opportunities in the Western Hemisphere, rather than just manage the downside risks.
So ideas like using our economic tools, using our diplomatic tools, continuing to modernize our economic partnerships in the region. That, to me, would be the better way to elevate the Western Hemisphere, rather than making it primarily a militarized campaign, which is more of what we've seen from this administration.
But yes, what does it mean to prioritize the Western Hemisphere? We see this pressure campaign on Maduro in Venezuela, and we've also seen a really interesting new playbook of political intervention that President Trump has piloted in the Western Hemisphere. We saw a pretty significant $40 billion bailout of Argentina on the eve of elections there, in support of President Milei. We've seen an attempt to influence internal Brazilian politics and avoid the imprisonment of former president Bolsonaro through the threat of tariffs against Brazil. And we've seen a really remarkable campaign of interference in Honduras ahead of their presidential election just recently.
And so all of this to me suggests a new playbook for how the president aims to shape politics in favor of his political allies in the hemisphere, alongside other tools as well.

LINDSAY:
That of course raises, I think, for many people in Latin America, the specter of Yankee imperialism. That the United States, while it talks in this document about how sovereignty is a fundamental value and principle of world affairs, it's really sovereignty for us, not for you. We're going to interfere.
And I'm also struck that there's very little of a sort of positive economic plan for Latin America. I mean, my conversations with people from the region, yours may be different, is they're very much focused on the tariffs that the administration has placed on them, because it's hurting their economies.

LISSNER:
That's exactly it. That's exactly it. And so whether that has to do with actions that reverse the integration of the North American market, whether that has to do with tariffs on large economies in Latin America, whether that has to do with, to your point, just the absence of an affirmative economic agenda. To me, that's a huge blind spot. Because again, yes, we should emphasize and elevate the Western Hemisphere, but that can't just be about combating narco traffickers and extending a militarized law enforcement function throughout the hemisphere. It has to have a positive vision as well.
And I would just say, of those political interventions that I just mentioned that President Trump has undertaken, some have succeeded and some have failed. And to your point, there is a long historical legacy of U.S. interference in the Western Hemisphere and in Latin America. And so how the people of Latin America respond in various cases to this type of policy, I think we'll have to see if it actually serves U.S. interests in the medium to long term.

LINDSAY:
And obviously, Rebecca, hanging in the background is the fact that China is very active economically in Latin America. It is a growing trade partner for many of the countries of Latin America. And my sense is Latin American countries want to do more trade with China, because it's in their interest to do so, and they're likely to bristle at this U.S. declaration, that it gets to decide what outside powers can be involved in the region.

LISSNER:
And not just trade, it's infrastructure investment as well, which has a really tangible impact for a lot of people in the region.

LINDSAY:
Okay. Let's shift gears and let's talk about Europe, since that was the other element of the National Security Strategy that got a lot of attention. How would you boil down the administration's message to Europe?

LISSNER:
The core message to Europe is that the greatest threat to Europe itself is the EU, in many ways. And so rather than economic stagnation, as the document says, or kind of lack of innovation, as the document says, it says really the greatest threat to Europe is civilizational erasure. That is the word that-

LINDSAY:
What does that mean?

LISSNER:
... they use. That means that what some view as the core characteristic of European civilization, that is, its Christian nature, its conservative nature, its fundamentally European nature, is under threat from migration, is under threat from growing diversity, is under threat from what they see as restrictions on free speech and political independence of far right populist movements in Europe.
And so this has been sort of a core MAGA complaint, that the EU has fostered a suite of policies that have undercut core European identity, and that at the same time they are censoring or excluding political parties, which tend to be far right political parties, that are attempting to preserve that heritage.

LINDSAY:
So do we have a sense of how European capitals are reacting to this pronouncement?

LISSNER:
There's been quite a bit of outrage, but less so from political leadership, and more so from people, the commentariat and the sort of chattering classes. I think that European leaders are quietly quite alarmed, but publicly trying to tread carefully, because they know that this could become a large scale crisis if they escalate and Trump escalates. And so I think there's considerable alarm about what this means for Europe, but actually, the public reaction has been fairly muted from European leaders.

LINDSAY:
And so how would this U.S. interest in preventing Europe's civilizational erasure translate into practical policies? What does it mean? Does the document give us some sense of what this will lead to in terms of concrete administration policy?

LISSNER:
Well, it calls for the U.S. to quote-unquote correct Europe's political trajectory, including by cultivating resistance within European nations. And-

LINDSAY:
I guess my question is, what does that mean?

LISSNER:
What does that mean? To me, it sounds like a mandate for political interference. And so if you think about some of that playbook that I was just mentioning in the Western Hemisphere, for new ways that this administration has been using U.S. financial power, U.S. political power, technological power, and just diplomatic power in order to help its allies, I could see a much more active campaign of intervention on behalf of European far right parties as the implication of this.
And even just in the past few days since the National Security Strategy came out, you've seen this growing echo chamber of critique of the EU across a number of senior administration officials, which then Elon Musk also jumped into to call for the EU to be disbanded.
And so I do think you're just seeing this growing chorus of antagonism towards the EU specifically that could also translate into support for right-wing populist anti-EU parties in particular European countries.

LINDSAY:
And what is the administration's complaint against the EU? Because there's a distinction between Europe and the European Union, and now we're talking about both of them.

LISSNER:
Yeah. So the critique is many-fold. Part of it has to do with attributing kind of economic stagnation in Europe to overregulation by the EU. And so there are quite a few complaints that have to do with regulation of technology companies, including U.S. technology companies, that have to do with climate-related regulations that this administration has aimed to roll back. So the regulatory agenda is an important piece of it.
A second piece of it has to do with migration, because to this administration, migration into the EU and into Europe is part of the threat to the civilizational identity of Europe, because it's people who are not from Europe or coming to Europe becoming European and diluting, I think, what they see as the core character of the continent. And so the idea that Europe and the EU has been too open to migration is a second key part of the critique.
And third is a free speech critique. They think that the EU and European countries within the EU have been too heavy-handed in censoring far right parties that have not been able to play the political role that this administration would like to see them play in governance. And this is most prominent, I think, in the Germany case, where when you saw Vice President Vance go to the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, he was very vocal in sort of saying that the firewall that excludes the far right AfD from government is a problem. And he met with the AfD, German's far-right party. And so just trying to break that down under the auspices of alleged free speech violations, I think, is the third big part of their critique of the EU.

LINDSAY:
So does the National Security Strategy level similar complaints against Russia, China, Iran, countries that clearly censor information?

LISSNER:
Sure doesn't. With respect to Russia, the main vision seems to be achieving strategic stability, and it's quite silent, not just on Russian internal crushing of dissent, but war crimes in Ukraine, any form of accountability is of course not included. China, no discussion of the human rights dimension, genocide in Xinjiang or anything like that, and not in the case of Iran as well. I would say throughout the document, there's a real de-emphasis that's notable in historical terms on human rights or democracy promotion as sort of core goals of American foreign policy.

LINDSAY:
What about humanitarian aid, foreign aid? Does the document tell us anything about the administration's thinking on this score? Obviously USAID was dismantled at the beginning of the Trump administration. And at least rhetorically, there was a commitment to re-imagining U.S. foreign aid programs. Again, does the strategy sort of give us some insight into where we're headed on that score?

LISSNER:
Well, we talked about contradictions before, and I think this is another one. The strategy calls for the U.S. to achieve soft power dominance, but it does that against the backdrop of, exactly as you said, the dismantlement of one of the core agencies of U.S. soft power in the world, which is USAID. And so I don't see a satisfactory answer to the question of where does U.S. soft power diplomacy go from here? What is the future of development in a world in which the prior model has been dismantled?

LINDSAY:
Can you help me understand the document's focus on soft power? Because as I read it, the document itself is not about soft power. It's about hard power, and that the United States is a big country, it has a right to dominate its neighborhood. It also has a right to reach out beyond its neighborhood, beyond the Western Hemisphere, to have a say in what is happening, for example, in the Western Pacific, because its economic interests are affected.
Yet, the document begins by talking about how soft power is one of America's great assets in the world. It's one of the reasons we have so many friends, partners, and allies. But much of what this document lays out, based on the reaction I'm seeing in foreign capitals, seems to be squandering that soft power. I don't see people in Europe, other than from the far right parties, standing up and sharing this. I don't see people in Latin America embracing the return of Uncle Sam sort of setting countries on the straight and narrow path, as it tried to do more than a century ago with the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. So does the strategy reconcile these ideas, or is there some way they fit together that I'm missing?

LISSNER:
I'm with you, Jim. I don't really see how it fits together. I was surprised, frankly, to see the emphasis on soft power in this document, because if there's one thing I think the Trump administration has been clear that it cares about, it's hard power, and hard power even at the expense of soft power. Hard power when it comes to the use of military force, and even sort of hard power when it comes to really coercive uses of U.S. economic might, including against allies and partners. And so that to me is one of the great contradictions, not just within the document itself, but between the stated aims for U.S. foreign policy that we see in the NSS, and the actual policy that we've seen coming out of this administration.

LINDSAY:
Now, obviously, Rebecca, you have a National Security Strategy, but there's another document, the National Defense Strategy, which I'm told is going to drop soon. How do you think the National Security Strategy will relate to the National Defense Strategy?

LISSNER:
I expect it will be quite consistent. And in many ways, the National Security Strategy has set the stage for the National Defense Strategy. The National Defense Strategy is a really important document because whereas the National Security Strategy provides kind of thirty thousand foot strategic guidance to the U.S. government, signals where the U.S. is headed to all the audiences we talked about before, the National Defense Strategy triggers a whole waterfall of activity within the Defense Department, that translates into very concrete outcomes as it relates to military posture decisions, as it relates to war planning, as it relates to procurement.
And so in many ways, I think the National Defense Strategy is going to be the document that is worthy of a much closer read, because one thing about the Pentagon is they take guidance very seriously, and they take policy guidance very seriously. And so whereas the NSS is open to quite a bit of interpretation as more of a strategic frame, the NDS is going to be much more policy prescriptive, and I think will give us many more clues about where U.S. defense strategy and policy is going from here.

LINDSAY:
Is there anything about the forthcoming National Defense Strategy that people should keep their eyes on, Rebecca? For example, changes in the size of the end strength of the United States Army?

LISSNER:
That's certainly one of them. I think at a macro level, the key thing I'll be reading for is what it says about China. Because the National Defense Strategy is a defense strategy, right? And so it's not going to be talking about U.S.-China trade, most likely. What it will be talking about is the extent to which the U.S. military still sees China as the pacing threat.
And furthermore, whether in the context of homeland defense being the top priority, which of course it was under Biden as well, whether the Chinese threat to the homeland is one that this administration is taking seriously alongside other threats that it perceives, for example, from drugs, from migrants and so on.
And so to me, the most important thing when we really think about the defining competition between the U.S. and China for this century is going to be whether the Pentagon keeps its eye on the ball in terms of the China challenge, or whether it pivots in a different direction in such a way that could cause us to lose some significant ground.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up the President's Inbox for this week.
My guest has been Rebecca Lissner, senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy here at the Council on Foreign Relations. Rebecca, thank you very much for joining me.

LISSNER:
Thanks so much, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Today's episode was produced by Justin Schuster, Molly McAnany, Markus Zakaria, Director of Video Jeremy Sherlick, and Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Our recording engineer was Jorge Flores. Production assistance was provided by Oscar Berry and Kaleah Haddock.