Thanks. It's a great question.
I spent my entire professional career studying the U.S.-China relationship, and then, when I was at the National Security Council, I was fortunate enough to basically be at the control panel. My considered judgment today is that the relationship is on a trajectory toward not only strategic competition but perhaps strategic confrontation if the Trump administration continues in the different direction. I worked for President Obama, so I have a lot of differences with the current trajectory, but you have to understand that there are structural problems at the heart of the U.S.-China relationship. We have differences over security issues like Taiwan, and U.S. forces in east Asia. We have differences over economic issues. We have differences over technology and increasingly on questions of ideology. Those are hard-wired differences in the relationship that have to do with interests and identity.
What I see is that we're in a period of greater divergence than convergence in our long-term interests. Combine those structural differences with the fact that we have lots of issues to argue about, such as Hong Kong right now, growing Chinese coercion over Taiwan, the South China Sea, and then, of course, technology policy, which seems to be in the news every day. As a Democrat who worked for President Obama, I am deeply concerned about the trajectory of the relationship.