MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Today, the two most powerful men in the world came face-to-face at a South Korean airport. We're talking about President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, their first meeting in six years. They talked tariffs, appeared to step back from the brink in what has amounted to Trump's economic war with China during his second term. NPR White House correspondent Deepa Shivaram has been traveling with the president. She's in South Korea today. Deepa joined me, along with NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman, on our national security podcast Sources & Methods. We talked through the summit, including the curveball that Trump delivered right before it got underway.
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KELLY: On Truth Social, President Trump wrote, and I quote, "because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis." Deepa, I think I can sum up the collective reaction here in Washington as, wait, what? What was the reaction there in Asia?
DEEPA SHIVARAM: It was sort of one of those things that went out and we were like, oh, very focused on a Trump-Xi summit. And then all of a sudden, you know, in a very Trumpesque (ph) way, this other thing, like, flies out of left field.
KELLY: Did it come up in the actual summit?
SHIVARAM: It didn't. And it sort of - or if it did, we don't know that they spoke about it. And to be honest, like, there hasn't really been much follow-up. Like, we don't really know a lot of detail. What does an instruction to the Department of War/Defense look like? Where would testing take place, and what would Trump even want that to look like? So there's just - it's sort of one of those things that Trump fired off, and we're sort of left asking a lot more questions.
KELLY: Tom, any details from the Pentagon? Any reaction?
TOM BOWMAN: Well, first of all, the Pentagon doesn't do testing. It's done by a division of the Department of Energy called the National Nuclear Security Administration, No. 1. No. 2 is the testing site is in the Nevada desert. So even if you want to do testing, setting it up with diagnostic equipment and figuring out where you wanted to do it and what you wanted to do would take many months, I'm told, if not years.
KELLY: So do we know why this was on President Trump's mind as he's walking into a big summit with Xi?
BOWMAN: Well, we think it was precisely because Russia has tested these delivery systems - again, not weapons, just how you would deliver a nuclear weapon. So everyone's speculating that's precisely why he's doing it, because of what Putin announced.
KELLY: OK. So let's go to what actually did get discussed at this summit and what we were expecting to be the big headlines, which have to do with trade, have to do with tariffs. Deepa, give us the very quick rundown on where they landed.
SHIVARAM: Yeah. I would say it comes down to, like, a big three on this - like, the takeaways from this meeting. One is basically that China agreed to pull back on some of the limits they had put on rare earths exports. The other element was that China would resume buying soybeans from the U.S. immediately, and that's, of course, been a major issue for American farmers since China halted those shipments. And then the other thing is that Trump said - this is the big number part - that tariffs on China would be lowered from 57% to 47%. And that 10% drop, Trump says, is because Xi committed to decrease the flow of fentanyl coming into the U.S. That is the reason that Trump said he would lower the tariff rate.
KELLY: Yeah. The captain basic question, have we figured out what U.S. policy on China is, what the goal of all of the threats of tariffs and then walking back the threats of tariffs is?
SHIVARAM: It's a really good question, and based on a lot of people I've talked to, there isn't exactly an answer. I did talk to Ryan Hass, who's the director of the China Center at Brookings, and he said that Trump policy is really different than his first term. But he said in the second term, it's essentially kind of like this.
RYAN HASS: The China policy is the president's policy. He drives. He's in charge. And it's really not looked warmly upon if other people encroach upon his territory without his guidance or direction on how to do so.
SHIVARAM: And think about how Trump does a lot of diplomacy, right? It's very personality oriented. It's very - you know, a lot of compliments, a lot of fanfare, and that is essentially how he's treated his relationship with Xi. Like, China is not a friend or ally to the United States. And he really, you know, kind of comes at this very big issue with sort of a personal diplomacy end to it. And of course, we know Xi does not really share that same level of diplomatic relations or diplomatic personality, I'll say.
KELLY: NPR White House correspondent Deepa Shivaram and Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman. You can hear more of our discussion on Sources & Methods wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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