After a meeting between senior officials on the weekend on May 10th, China and the US have formally announced a 90-day truce in their trade war. Both sides have since drawn back some of the excessive tariffs that were imposed in early April. They’ve committed to establish a new mechanism for dialogue and keep talks going. The White House has called this a “historic deal”; Beijing has been much more cautious in its language. So where’s all this going?

On this episode of The Great Power Show, geopolitical analyst Yanmei Xie unpacks the essential aspects of Sino-US economic competition. She has previously worked with Gavekal Research, and as a journalist in Washington covering US national politics. Yanmei believes that decoupling between China and the US is an inevitable trend. She argues that Beijing believes that Washington is engaged in a strategy of “grand trade encirclement”; so decoupling will only intensify regardless of talks.

Beyond the US-China trade war, our conversation delves into how Xi Jinping’s policies are reshaping China’s economic development model. And what’s the model of China’s "venture capital state" which is directing strategic investment, building industrial ecosystems, and taking calculated risks to dominate future technologies.

Zooming out, we ask: Why is manufacturing back at the center of global strategy? Is it a product of a failure of imagination of future economies? Or is it simply about the realities of configuring national power in an age of geopolitical strife?

I hope you enjoy this conversation. Please make sure to like and share the episode. If you would like to support the show or the work I do, please do reach out to me.

About: The Great Power Show is a bi-weekly podcast featuring candid conversations and thought-provoking interviews with leading scholars, thinkers and practitioners on the geopolitical and geo-economic changes shaping our world.

As great power rivalry deepens, old assumptions are crumbling and the rules of the international order are up for renegotiation. This moment demands a more clear-eyed realism—one that sees the world not as we wish it to be, but as it is.

Today, the US-China rivalry is reshaping the global order, while the institutions meant to stabilize the world seem increasingly brittle. Europe is lagging behind, Russia is resurgent, and the Indo-Pacific is a theater of shadow conflict. Middle powers are hedging as they try to avoid choosing sides. How do we make sense of all this?

In this episode of The Great Power Show, I speak to former Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan, who is among the world’s most incisive geopolitical thinkers. We discuss the return of great power politics, the failure of diplomacy to keep up with structural shifts in power, and why Southeast Asia’s experience navigating external pressures holds broader lessons for the world.

From American unpredictability to China’s coercive diplomacy, from the trappings of multipolarity to the dangers of moral grandstanding, this conversation challenges comfortable assumptions, and asks what it really takes to survive and thrive in a world where competition, not cooperation, is the natural state of affairs.

I hope you enjoy this conversation. Please make sure to like and share the episode. If you would like to support the show or the I do, please do reach out to me.

About: The Great Power Show is a bi-weekly podcast featuring candid conversations and thought-provoking interviews with leading scholars, thinkers and practitioners on the geopolitical and geo-economic changes shaping our world.

French President Emmanuel Macron has rapidly emerged as Europe’s most important national leader. France is not only one of the biggest economies in the EU, but is also the bloc’s only nuclear weapons power. With war in Ukraine continuing, frictions with China persistent and deep fissures between Europe and the US under Donald Trump, France is once again trying to redefine its role—both within Europe and on the world stage.

Paris sees itself not just as a middle power, but as a shaper of order, a proponent of strategic autonomy and a multipolar world. But what exactly guides French foreign policy? How does France perceive threats and opportunities, and how is power distributed across its institutions and leadership?

In this episode of The Great Power Show, I speak to Philippe Le Corre, Senior Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis and a Senior Advisor on Geopolitics to Asia Society France.

The conversation focuses on France’s foreign policy worldview, from its foundational principles to its evolving posture on Ukraine, the EU, and its partnerships with the US, UK, and Germany. We then zoom out to examine France’s global strategy: how it views the Indo-Pacific, China, India, and the shifting international order.

Read Philippe’s latest publication: A New Triangle: The Interplay Between China and EU-India Relations

About: The Great Power Show is a bi-weekly podcast featuring candid conversations and thought-provoking interviews with leading scholars, thinkers and practitioners on the geopolitical and geo-economic changes shaping our world.