Faculty Spotlight: An Interview with Evan Medeiros
Evan Medeiros is the Penner Family Chair in Asian Studies and Cling Family Senior Fellow in U.S.-China Relations at the Walsh School of Foreign Service and senior fellow with the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University. Medeiros joined Georgetown after serving for six years on the staff of the National Security Council (NSC) during the Obama administration. The initiative sat down with Medeiros to reflect on his career at the NSC and current research on U.S.-China relations.
Coordinating Asia Policy at the NSC
Before joining President Barack Obama’s national security team, Medeiros was a senior political scientist at the RAND corporation and served for a year as a policy advisor for U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson. He joined the National Security Council in 2009 as director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia, and he subsequently served as special assistant to the president and senior director for Asia, becoming the key architect and policy coordinator for Obama’s Asia policy.
You’ve previously talked about your “China story” and early interest in global politics on the initiative’s U.S.-China Nexus podcast. Focusing on your career in government, what was the path that led you to the National Security Council?
There is no obvious or fixed path. Seldom is there a clear path that leads anybody to the National Security Council because it's a small place, it's an exceptional place, and it's not for the faint of heart because it's a very, very intense work environment.
But basically, I had been at RAND for about seven years, and taken one year out from RAND to work at the Treasury Department. During that experience, I got to know Jeff Bader, who was working at [the] Brookings [Institution] at the time, and who himself was somebody that was interested in economic policy, having worked at [the Office of the United States Trade Representative] under Bob Zoellick for many years. So I got to know Jeff over that time.
In early 2008, Jeff became very involved in the Obama campaign and invited me to start working with him at a point at which foreign policy, let alone China policy, was not much of a priority for the campaign. But in our own way, we started writing policy papers and advising the campaign about what to say on China.
When Obama ultimately got elected, Jeff was looking to put together his team, and he needed somebody that was willing to work 24/7 and could write well and could write fast. In particular, the Obama team wanted somebody on China who wasn't necessarily detailed from one of the government agencies, had fresh perspective, had unique views, and was willing to be proactive.
You served during a really interesting period in the relationship. At the start of Obama’s presidency, the administration seemed more active in looking for ways to engage and cooperate with China, but by the end of the Obama era there seemed to be greater strategic distrust between the two sides and a stronger emphasis on managing competition. What accounted for that shift?
It's really a function of the fact that China changed, and so American policy toward China changed. Early on in the Obama years, our approach was to cooperate where we can, compete where we must. It was about trying to find the right balance. Nobody had any illusions about China—nobody was interested in pulling punches—so it was really all about trying to shape and prod China to be less coercive, less predatory, and trying to explain to them the costs associated with those approaches.
At the same time we were trying to communicate to them the benefits and the advantages of working with the United States on regional and global problem solving, and on issues such as Iran, North Korea and climate change, for example.
Over time what we found was Chinese behavior was far less receptive to the dialogue and incentives. Especially under Xi Jinping, we had to amp up the competitive aspects of policy, and we were getting far less return on our investment in the engagement and dialogue component.
But of course, we always felt that talking with the Chinese was important in part because, when necessary, you have to be able to communicate tough messages about the costs associated with their policy choices.
Can you recall any particularly challenging experiences when trying to facilitate talks with the Chinese?
I remember several very high-level meetings between Obama and Hu Jintao where we had a real difficult time trying to persuade them to put even more pressure on North Korea to dial back Pyongyang’s provocative activities, nuclear tests and missile tests. Those were probably some of the toughest conversations between Obama and Hu Jintao.
I remember Obama had several very pointed conversations with the Chinese about cybersecurity and especially cyber-enabled economic espionage. He really focused on our rejection of it, and how the Chinese needed to stop and it was unacceptable.
Probably the most heated conversations we had were over maritime territorial disputes, both the East China Sea and the South China Sea. The East China Sea Senkakus often get short shrift, but there are several episodes in particular in 2012 where the Chinese were starting to be pretty assertive around the Senkakus, and we had to communicate some pretty tough messages pretty clearly in order to deter them from escalating.
Cold Rivals: The New Era of U.S.-China Strategic Competition
After leaving government, Medeiros joined the Asian Studies Program in the Walsh School of Foreign Service as the inaugural Penner Family Chair in Asian Studies. In August 2023, Medeiros published Cold Rivals: The New Era of U.S.-China Strategic Competition, a landmark study on U.S.-China strategic competition that brought together contributions from leading authorities in both the United States and China. Medeiros served as editor and contributing author for the volume.
One of the key objectives of the book is to address the lack of a systematic definition for thinking about competition in the history of U.S.-China relations and its manifestations today. Tell us more about why the volume focuses on this topic.
Well, partly because competition is such a common word in conversations about the U.S.-China relationship, I thought it was important to do a little bit of conceptual spade work. What does it mean to compete? What are the conditions that need to exist for you and me to be in a competitive relationship?
And what my work revealed is that number one, the United States and China have been in a competitive dynamic for a very, very long time, arguably going well back into the 1980s if not the early 1990s. So competition has been at the heart of the relationship for a very, very long time, and that's meant to demystify the competition a little bit and focus the conversation a bit more on the scope and the intensity of the competition. Why is it that it broadened out? We moved from security competition to economic competition to technological competition. Why did it intensify?
The book was really meant to try to put a little rigor to our understanding about what competition was all about and to aid in our understanding about that dynamic in the relationship. But the core is there have been competitive dynamics in this relationship for a very, very long time.
The book fielded input from a number of established Chinese scholars in addition to U.S. scholars. How does the Chinese “U.S.-watching” community view U.S.-China relations, and what was it like working with them on this project?
I think Chinese researchers are concerned about the trajectory of the relationship. There's been a theme for a very long time about their unwillingness to accept competition or strategic competition as a way to describe the relationship. They reject the reference of the Cold War, which is a political statement on their part. It's not an analytic statement. It's a reflection of the [Chinese Communist Party] telling them that we can't accept these American terms because it's like accepting defeat.
There was a cottage industry for a while in China debating about how “it's not a strategic competition” when in fact the Chinese have viewed the relationship in competitive terms probably longer than the Americans have. Since Tiananmen in '89 they've seen the United States as a threat to their political stability. And so Chinese scholars of U.S.-China relations, China's Russia policy, China's Europe policy, they all labor under these political constraints of what is and is not acceptable to discuss.
The Chinese authors that I engaged are all very high-quality professionals who understand how to navigate the constraints they feel as [People’s Republic of China] scholars and are also very, very sophisticated thinkers. And I found the contributions from Wu Xinbo, Wang Jisi, and Li Chen to be really first-rate. They all wrote very, very meaningful things. They didn't just repeat the musings from the People's Daily or Global Times or something like that.
My fear is that Cold Rivals will be the last of that type of book where you can actually have American scholars and Chinese scholars actually working together, answering a common set of questions that allow the readers to draw the contrast between Chinese perspectives and American perspectives. In the past going back to the nineties, there were a variety of volumes with American and Chinese contributions. I fear that mine will be the last of a generation. I hope not, but we’ll see.
U.S.-China Relations at Georgetown
At Georgetown, Medeiros remains an authoritative voice in U.S.-China relations and is actively involved in convening leaders and experts from both the United States and China to participate in dialogues, research projects, and public events. With the initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue, Medeiros co-convened the Research Group on Managing Strategic Competition, and has led several event series, including the People-to-People Diplomacy series, Asia-Pacific Dialogue series, and Global Governance series. He also convenes the U.S.-China Cling conference, an annual forum discussing contemporary issues in U.S.-China relations.
What role can Georgetown play in facilitating dialogues and advancing U.S.-China relations?
Georgetown can and does play an important role in facilitating dialogue between U.S. and Chinese citizens. Myself and other scholars are in frequent contact with Chinese scholars and analysts to exchange ideas and share research. We don't seem to agree on much about China these days, especially on the sources of U.S.-China tensions, but it is important to keep the channels open and to keep the discussion flowing.
Perhaps more important are the channels of dialogue between Georgetown and Chinese students, as a way to build familiarity and understanding, even on those issues where we don't agree.
At Georgetown, we are committed to facilitating robust public discussion and debate about China issues, so we host meetings, seminars and webinars with U.S. and Chinese experts to contribute to public debates on all sorts of issues.
As a professor at the Asian Studies department, how would you describe the level of student interest in China and U.S.-China relations?
Since I joined Georgetown, interest in China and U.S.-China relations has only increased, and it's increased from all types of students–Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Europeans. The desire for access to teaching and research on these issues is sky-high. And that includes PRC students that come to me and say, "Hey, I wasn't really taught much of this during my university years in China. This helped me understand the Taiwan issue."
So I would say the appetite and the demand is only growing, which is great because we have faculty that have this unique combination of both academic skills and policy experience, which I think gives Georgetown students a pretty unique perspective and a broader skillset that they can use when they go out in their career.