ChinaTalk

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jordan@chinatalk.media

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Julian Gewirtz on Trump-Xi Summit, AI, and Mao Dead Fifty Years Ago!

September 22, 2026

Julian Gewirtz, author and former Biden NSC China director, joins ChinaTalk days before Xi Jinping’s first White House visit since 2015. With little substantive agenda on the table, what is the US getting in exchange for the symbolism and pageantry of a state visit? We discuss: Trump-Xi summit scenarios, Beijing’s management of uncertainty and protocol, and how the script of US-China diplomacy has flipped, with things once seen as American concessions to China now treated as concessions ...

Can AI Beat the Pentagon’s Bureaucracy?

September 22, 2026

Garrett Berntsen was last seen on ChinaTalk in his role as Deputy CDAO at the State Department. He then went to the Department of Defense for a little bit, and now makes a return in his new role as Chief AI Officer at Accenture Federal Services. We’re going to talk about what the national security community needs — beyond just API access to wonderful models — in order to really change how it does its mission. Our conversation covers: Why the U-2 spy plane offers a surprisingly useful le...

WarTalk: PLA, 2027, Nukes, and the Pivot to Asia Pirouette

September 19, 2026

In the deserts of western China sit 320 brand-new missile silos, and for a while, by the Pentagon's account, some of them simply didn't work. The gap between the PLA on paper and the PLA in practice is where Gerald C. Brown has spent his career. Gerald is two weeks out of government, where he covered Chinese nuclear strategy and the PLA Rocket Force at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Now a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, he joins Jordan and Wa...