He and his father, the director Rob Reiner, also worked together on a film that was loosely inspired by the son’s early life.

© Laura Cavanaugh/FilmMagic, via Getty Images

The shooting attack in Palmyra, Syria, on Saturday struck troops deployed as part of an antiterrorism mission. Two were killed, along with an American civilian interpreter; three others were wounded.

朝鲜领导人金正恩的妹妹金与正日前被拍到手持一款疑似中国制造的折叠屏手机。联合国目前正对朝鲜实施制裁，禁止智能手机输入，但平壤精英似乎仍能获得最新的电子产品。

12月10日，福建医科大学附属第一医院官网发布情况说明：近期，我院依规依纪对张水华违规兼职取酬、以虚假理由获取调休问题进行处理。根据此前在网络流传的《福建医科大学附属第一医院关于对张水华的处理决定》，张水华被医院给予警告处分，为期6个月，并且2025年度考核不能确定为优秀档次。

该处理决定在网络上引起广泛关注和热烈讨论，网络舆论几乎一边倒地为医院的处理决定“拍手叫好”。只有少部分人认为，医院的处理缺失温度，对于张水华这样的特殊人才，可以考虑为其创造发展空间，实现双赢。

早在今年8月底，张水华在哈尔滨马拉松比赛夺冠，接受采访时曾哭诉希望单位领导支持其调休参加比赛，引发舆论风波。

一部分人认为，张水华并未要求额外假期，只是希望在周末调休参赛，其在如此繁忙的工作之余还能将个人爱好发展到接近专业的水平，这种坚持的勇气和出色的天赋无疑值得肯定。另一部分人则代入同事立场，认为张水华争取周末调休的权利，必然以牺牲他人周末休息的权利为代价，在公开场合喊话领导支持其调休的行为更是道德绑架。两极分化的舆论，折射出职业责任与业余爱好、工作与兴趣的平衡难题。

01 平衡是一种动态的智慧

就个案而言，护士工作的超负荷和紧张性，与马拉松运动的时间投入和身体恢复似乎存在天然冲突，难以协调和平衡。但跳出个案现象本身：本职工作与业余爱好是否真的能够平衡？

这其中存在一个潜在的悖论。当我们谈及平衡两种事物，本身就意味着这两种事物在现实状态之下存在着内在的矛盾和冲突，无法实现完美、和谐地共存。于是，潜在的悖论逐渐浮现出来，我们追求平衡往往出于避免失去的本能，但实现平衡的过程本身却要求主动舍弃。这种看似矛盾的悖论，却恰恰是平衡的智慧。

本职工作与业余爱好的平衡同样以舍弃为代价，当然并非舍弃二者之一，而是有选择地舍弃两者之外的其他事物，比如时间、精力、金钱等。于张水华而言亦是如此，做好本职工作与坚持参加马拉松比赛之兼得，背后必然意味着舍弃休息时间、日常精力和工作状态。但无论为了平衡而选择舍弃什么，至少不应该也不能舍弃他人的权利。

网络上一个很高的呼声是，让张水华在稳定编制工作和职业运动员之间做出选择。但如前所述，本职工作与业余爱好的平衡并不意味着必然要舍弃其中之一，而是需要在二者中寻找动态的平衡。“工作轻松、时间充裕”的理想状态固然完美，但“工作忙碌、时间紧张”却是常态。这种动态平衡意味着，在必要的时候有选择地做出部分性压缩和暂时性妥协，并且学会舍弃。

02 “不患寡而患不均”的真实写照

在加班文化盛行的当下，普通职场人仅是应对高强度的工作状态就已身心俱疲，遑论培养一项愿意为之投入时间和精力的业余爱好。甚至可以说，或主动或被动，很多人早已失去了在工作之余培养并坚持个人爱好的能力。

张水华“享受稳定的编制待遇、突破个人的跑步成绩、获得业余爱好带来的经济利益”的三赢局面，在很大程度上使其成为职场人士长期压抑情绪的爆发点和宣泄口。

这背后，多少可说是“不患寡而患不均”思维的真实写照。工作的总量是恒定的，对于长期面临高强度工作负荷、“三班倒+周末轮休”的护士岗位，周末休息的机会成为一种宝贵“资源”。在调休这种零和博弈中，一人周末调休必然意味着另一人周末“被迫加班”，这也是为何广大民众会快速代入同事的角色，为“被迫”周末加班的同事鸣不平，其本质是将调休视为一种“特权”。

在张水华的“三赢局面”之前，每个职场人都平等地身处于“寡”之下，平等地承担着高强度工作，平等地在夹缝中寻找周末休息的机会，平等因此稳定。但当这种耀眼甚至“刺眼”的“三赢局面”打破“寡”的稳定与平衡，享受调休“特权”的人成为“不均”的代表，自然成为众矢之的，更不论此“不均”还在“试图”争取更多的调休“特权”。

上述所言，绝非在为张水华的行为“开脱”，也不是在为她的行为寻找合理性依据。在调休的零和博弈中，张水华周末的休息权利，无疑是用他人的休息权利换来的。权利和义务是相对应的，但先有权利还是先有义务，这似乎是一个“鸡生蛋、蛋生鸡”的问题。

可仔细思考不难发现，任何一种权利的享有都是以另一方义务的承担为前提，例如我们享有生命权，是因为他人承担着尊重生命权的义务，故而义务具有先于权利的属性。张水华此前“喊话领导争取调休”引起不满的关键在于，其享受了他人牺牲自身权利承担义务的成果，却似乎将之视为“理所应当”。

但是，跳出“最快女护士”事件本身，“不患寡而患不均”的固有思维导致我们在很多热点事件中，将关注点过多集中于对“不均”的抨击，而忽视了“寡”本身的问题。

03 “不患寡而患不均”的破局关键

当我们沉浸式讨论个人如何实现本职工作与业余爱好的平衡，却忽视了对“为何要平衡”“为何要由我们去平衡”这个前置性问题的思考。在医护人员超负荷工作现状之下讨论张水华的做法，确实可以对其予以道德谴责。但是，谴责的目的不是单纯的情绪宣泄，情绪化和极端化的讨论，往往容易让人失去解决问题的可能和机会。

在我们抨击张水华牺牲他人休息权利以满足自己参赛诉求的同时，是否也可以将部分的讨论焦点置于，周末参赛诉求的实现是否仅有强迫他人牺牲休息权利这一种方式？能否通过扩大医护人员队伍、提高医护人员待遇、灵活调整调休制度等途径稍加改变？以上方案，现在或许不具有可行性。

但每一次错误的尝试，都是在向最终可行方案靠近的过程，而这个过程的实现不能只有单纯的情绪宣泄，还需要更多理智的声音和思考。

情绪之所以是情绪，正是因为它并非人的理智所能掌控，情绪宣泄固然无可厚非，但不能让情绪宣泄演变为彻头彻尾的人身攻击。

在“一切人反对一切人”的战争中，每个人可能都是“受害者”。破局的关键或许在于，尊重人之所以为人之本身，对我们每一个人而言都是如此。

一企业拖欠农户粮食款超10年，超千万，被曝出来了。我觉得热评真得是一针见血，指出了最关键的问题：老百姓买东西需要贷款，买老百姓的东西却可以先欠着。

为毛无论如何，承担风险的那一方，始终都是普通人？你要保障银行的利益、要保障企业的利益、要保障开发商的利益，如何却独独不保障老百姓的利益呢。

我上网搜了一下，这条新闻起初可能是“百姓关注”或者“大河报”发出来的，但目前已经找不到，只能看到其他一些媒体所转发的消息。

为什么？在我看来应该是这样：即便曝光了，想解决也极其困难。

湖北孝感一家大型企业，通过“打白条”的方法从农户手里收粮食，之后这笔钱就一直拖着不还，时间跨度长达10年，欠款总金额超过千万。于是一些被欠账数目较多的农户，聚在该企业门口放烟花控诉……记者打电话到该欠钱的企业了解情况，对方一听闻粮款问题，立马挂断，此后再也打不通。

而据当地有关部门回应：涉事企业法人已被判刑收监，企业账户上无可执行的钱款。

所以，谁来还农户们的钱呢？

有人说，当地官方来还呗。那请问，地方官方的钱，又来自哪里，又属于哪些人？由官方去替企业平账的话，在情感上或许能安抚人心，可又真是我们所谓的“公平、公道”吗。

因此，问题回到源头，“打白条”这种操作就非常危险。普通的借款、欠款，甚至还有个第三方担保，出了事可以找他。像这种，风险全部转嫁由农户自行承担。

可农民一不是股东，二也无法审计企业账目，作为最弱的一方，如何承担最大的信用风险？

情况再次回到监管身上，他们只监督企业有无营业执照、是否完成备案、是否完成统计报表，但却不评估收购企业的支付能力、不建立收购款保证金或托底资金池、不在早期发现拖欠时及时止损、冻结经营。如此一来，一旦企业被掏空、法人进去了、钱没了，那么倒霉的就是那些被欠款的一方，就只能通过各种“奇怪”的方式去要债。

简而言之就是什么呢？我们的法律支持农户索要被拖欠的账款，也就是支持农户事后追责，但却暂无事前兜底、风险预防的相关内容。

千万别讲什么“不给钱就不卖”。粮食，在普通人那里是无法一直存放的。不卖，就等着梅雨等着坏，等着降价等着一年到头变成白干。

说到这里，大家有没有想到另一领域——房地产，买房人为什么相对“安全”？因为它有专门的“预售资金监管”，让买房人不必为开发商承担经营风险。

当然，有没有是一回事，有没有问题是另一回事。

这大家应该都懂，买房人交的首付款和按揭款，不是直接进开发商口袋，而是先进一个“被锁住的账户”。如果没有违规操作，那么这个账户开发商就只能看得见，但动不了。由银行和住建部门共同监管。

为什么？风险隔离。万一你房子还没建好，开发商跑路了呢？万一你资金链断了呢？或者像上面一样，万一你企业法人被抓了呢？这种时候，钱还在，就还有回旋余地。政府可以指定新的施工单位，用这笔监管资金继续把楼盖完，当然也可以直接把钱退给购房者。

这就是我对这次曝光出来的、看似无解的问题的一点点看法：农民面对的这类风险，也应有一些提前预防的措施。

一碗水要端平，你不能因为房地产更涉及城市稳定，甚至金融系统和大量中产阶层，就优先级高，搞得相对完善很多。而当风险被分散在无数农民身上时，觉得他们声音小，后果体现的慢，就连个兜底的方案都没有，搞得他们只能在粮食企业门口放烟花。

这合理吗？

这不合理！！

【一】

上午转发了一篇文，举报还是围剿？“普通人”的私信，竟然让大V噤声

先转述一下文中几句话：

1.据说事发前，一位自称“普通人”的网友，给六神磊磊发去了私信——不是争论，不是反驳，而是赤裸裸的通牒：“已举报（给各方面）……（如果他们）不处理，就找你所有合作方‘宣扬’，不死不休。”他反复强调自己是一个“普通人”，没职务、没头衔，却把举报流程玩得极其娴熟：举报、定性、升级、施压、围堵，步步为营。

——嗯，一个网络争论，零帧起步，用上了“不死不休”一词。而起因仅仅是，六神写了一篇嘲讽近段时间冒出来的“悼明”怪象。

我想起了我这公众号，当时“外国网友涌入小红书”时，我写过一篇小红书对账，还对出自豪感来了？不是应该“哇”的一声哭出来吗？，就有网友说要举报我，而且报出了他的经验和战绩。不知道啥原因，他后来没啥动静，估计也是嫌我这号太小，胜之不武。

2.“历史虚无主义”“煽动对立”“性质恶劣”……这些术语，他说出来如同填表格般顺溜。好比一个没穿制服的人，却熟练掌握了鸣笛、贴条、拖车的全套操作。

——这一组词语……让人似乎回到了某个特定历史阶段。作者使用了一个很好玩但细思极恐的比喻，“一个没有穿制服的人，熟练掌握了鸣笛、贴条、拖车全套操作。”在那个历史阶段，整个社会的运行模式，非常接近这个状态，原有的社会规则形同虚设，任何一群没有穿制服的人，只要他们站在了某个立场，就能走进你的家翻箱倒柜拿走你的东西，包括拿走你这个人。

当越来越多的人发现这个大秘密，世界就陷入了英国哲学家霍布斯所言“所有人对所有人的战争”状态，每个人都睁大眼睛寻找他者过去的言行错误、睁大眼睛等待着你“犯错误”，然后痛下杀手，“不死不休”。

而且它必然存在一个“先发置人”的模式，谁先喊出来，谁就站到了制高点上。

而且，更严重的是：哪怕“先发”错误，也毫无后果，无须承担任何责任、不会遭受任何损失。

这也是让老司机们也深恶痛疾的碰瓷能够蔚然成风的原因。

读过六神磊磊公众号的人肯定能发现，六神绝对是一个不折不扣的老司机。——那又如何？只需要区区这么一个“普通人”，照样让他干瞪眼。

【二】

在转发的时候，我附了一段话：

【一个正常的社会，举报本身不可怕，甚至告密本身也不可怕——它败坏的只是举报者、告密者个人“人之为人”的品质——真正可怕的是“无论怎样的举报、告密都有用，而且反复有用”。它背后显示的东西才可怕。】

六神不是第一次被举报、被限制功能。更不是唯一的一个。

有的举报理由甚至比六神这个更怪异。个体的例子不必举，你就看他们理直气壮、得意洋洋举报教材插图而且成功，举报朱自清父亲违反交通规则……

幸好动画片《大头儿子小头爸爸》没有生在这个时代，否则恐怕必被举报：

你看，它画得怪异不怪异？这是不是在恶毒暗示他们之间可能存在基因问题？这是不是在影射老一辈畸形、大脑容量不足也就是智商有问题？

“举报、告密本身可恶，但不算太可怕，真正可怕的是它有效、它显示的隐藏在背后的东西。”那么，它的背后，可能有哪些可怕的东西存在？

1.是非不明的愚蠢。这是最善良的可能。当事者没有清晰的是非判断能力，见风就是雨，一收到举报，就觉得“咦，好像确实如此”。

2.不动脑子的盲听。当事者有正常的认知能力，但他不动用它，反正世界的运行与他没啥直接关系，只要你举报，那么我就封禁，不过就是动动手指，不影响收入，不耽误时间，懒得动用他珍贵的大脑，脖子上那个东西就是摆设。

3.不敢担当的怯懦。他知道发生了什么，同时又能精准地评判风险，可能心中并不愿意动不动封禁、而且确知不封禁也很安全、没必要，但民意难料，为了不让自己受半点波及，还是按流程走吧。最明显的例子就是南宁地铁的折扇图案被人恶意截取扇柄部分污为日本旗，面对难料的民意，干脆一撤了之。

4.宁左勿右的鸡贼。近似于第3点，但比第3点严重。他知道这样的封禁实在莫名其妙，而且也知道封和不封其实可以取决于自己，但在民族感情这个点上，喊得响一点、做得猛一点，肯定更好，于是，在可不封之下而封之，领导问起来，比“软弱、没政治敏感性”要好。

5.精确判断后的定向和稀泥。知道可不封，知道举报的网友挺无聊、挺没劲，甚至也觉得挺恶心，但不封可能还需要向领导、甚至向民众解释，这可太麻烦了。在领导、网友和六神磊磊之间，谁最讲道理？谁最有素质？谁最文明？好，就欺负那个讲道理、有素质的文明人。

6.权力的蛮横。这个点，是我能展开的吗？我也很鸡贼，所以我不说。

【三】

如果世界就这样动行，那么，六神磊磊的今天，就是所有人的明天，包括那个叫嚣“不死不休”的普通人。莫道君行早，更有早行人，世界粪坑化的那一刻，你觉得你能不臭？

做什么春秋大梦？

讲完。

沙特今年的死刑执行数量为340人超过了去年的338人，创下了自1990年代初开始有记录死刑案件以来的最高纪录。

12 月 11 日北京朝阳法院作出了一项备受关注的判决——中国首例进入刑事程序的宠物投毒案，被告人被以 “投放危险物质罪”判处有期徒刑4年。

事件追溯到三年前。2022 年北京朝阳区一名 65 岁男子，声称因为不满小区宠物“扰民”而故意下毒。共有 11 只宠物狗中毒，其中 9 只死亡。受害宠物主人李女士不惜辞去工作、自学法律、坚持推动案件进入刑事程序。判决结果公布后，在中国社交媒体上引发热议。很多网友对判决表示肯定，同时也引发对中国现行动物保护法律缺失的讨论。

根据《2023年宠物市场消费白皮书》数据显示，中国的宠物数量超过1.2亿只。但由于长期没有专门的动物保护法。宠物在法律里常常被当作“物品”，很多虐待、投毒、伤害动物的行为最后都不了了之。

这一案件已被视为中国在动物保护司法上的突破。

（责编：李诺）

© Reuters

Democrats are mourning the death of actor and director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner after they were found dead in their California home on Sunday. The Hollywood star was known not only for classic films like “The Princess Bride” and “When Harry Met Sally,” but for his outspoken support of progressive causes.

Former President Barack Obama said he and Michelle Obama were “heartbroken” by the news. Former Vice President Kamala Harris said Reiner “fought for America’s democracy.” And former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called him “remarkable and excellent” in everything he pursued.

“Rob’s achievements in film and television gave us some of our most cherished stories on screen,” Obama said in a statement. “But beneath all of the stories he produced was a deep belief in the goodness of people — and a lifelong commitment to putting that belief into action. Together, he and his wife lived lives defined by purpose. They will be remembered for the values they championed and the countless people they inspired.”

Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer called the news of the Reiners’ death “horrific.”

“Not only was Rob an incredibly talented actor & director, he was also a relentless defender of democracy and the values so many of us share,” Schumer said. “He will be missed dearly. My prayers this morning are with the Reiner family and all those who loved his movies and what he and Michele stood for.”

In her own statement, Pelosi reflected on Reiner’s contributions to Democratic causes.

“Personally, Rob cared deeply about people and demonstrated that in his civic activities — whether by supporting the First 5 initiative or fighting against Prop 8 in California,” said Pelosi, referring to the California Children and Families Commission, which supports programs for children under 5 years old. Proposition 8 was California’s 2008 ballot proposal to ban same-sex marriage.

Pelosi continued, “Civically, he was a champion for the First Amendment and the creative rights of artists. And professionally, he was an iconic figure in film who made us laugh, cry and think with the movies he created.”

Reiner and Singer Reiner’s bodies were discovered in their Los Angeles home on Sunday after the Los Angeles Fire Department responded to a medical aid request shortly after 3:30 p.m., according to The Associated Press.

Authorities are investigating their deaths as an “apparent homicide,” said. Capt. Mike Bland of the Los Angeles Police Department. Police are continuing to investigate the deaths.

The son of legendary comedian Carl Reiner, Rob Reiner was a strong supporter of LGTBQ+ rights and early childhood education. Reiner often held fundraisers and campaigned for Democratic issues. In 2008, he co-founded the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which challenged California’s ban on same-sex marriage. In 1998, as chair of the campaign for the state’s Proposition 10, which led to the creation of the First 5 initiative, Reiner advocated for funding early childhood development services with a tax on tobacco products.

He was also a sharp critic of President Donald Trump, previously accusing the president of “treason” and being “mentally unfit” to serve in office. In an October interview with MSNBC, now MS NOW, Reiner compared the current political climate under the Trump administration as “beyond McCarthy era-esque.”

“Make no mistake: We have a year before this country becomes a full-on autocracy and democracy completely leaves us," Reiner said at the time. “I believe the way to stop it is to educate people who may not understand what democracy is. They may not know what the impact of losing it is. We have to explain it, us storytellers have to explain to them what they’re going to wind up with if an autocrat has his way."

Harris on Monday said she was “devastated” to hear of Reiner and his wife’s deaths.

“Rob Reiner's work has impacted generations of Americans,” she said. “The characters, dialogue, and visuals he brought to life in film and television are woven throughout our culture. Rob loved our country, cared deeply about the future of our nation, and fought for America's democracy.”

California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom praised Reiner — who he called a “big-hearted genius” — for his empathy.

“His boundless empathy made his stories timeless, teaching generations how to see goodness and righteousness in others — and encouraging us to dream bigger,” said Newsom in a statement. “That empathy extended well beyond his films. Rob was a passionate advocate for children and for civil rights — from taking on Big Tobacco, fighting for marriage equality, to serving as a powerful voice in early education. He made California a better place through his good works.”

Newsom added that Reiner will be remembered for his “extraordinary contribution to humanity.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass called the Reiners’ deaths a “devastating loss” for both the city and the nation.

“Rob Reiner’s contributions reverberate throughout American culture and society, and he has improved countless lives through his creative work and advocacy fighting for social and economic justice,” Bass said in a post on X.

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© Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Human Rights Campaign

is president of the Council on Foreign Relations, former U.S. Trade Representative, and a substacker. He joins ChinaTalk to discuss:

• Why his 1992 dissertation on détente is suddenly relevant again – and why “positive linkage” fails to change adversary behavior,

• How mutual assured destruction has shifted from nuclear weapons to rare earths, supply chains, and technology, and why the U.S. and China are stuck in a costly, uncomfortable stalemate,

• How think tanks work — salary levels, where the money comes from, and what to expect from Mike’s tenure.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

Détente Redux

Jordan Schneider: We’re going to take it all the way back to 1992. You did your dissertation about this idea of détente and how it evolved from the ’50s all the way through the end of the Reagan administration. Coming to your conclusion, the echoes of where we are today and that theme seem to be very striking. Why don’t you pick a quote and then kick it off from there?

Mike Froman: “To retain the support of the American public, U.S.-Soviet relations must be based on reciprocity. Détente suffered no greater liability than the public’s perception that the Soviets exploited it at the United States’ expense. To be reciprocal, however, U.S. policy must embody reasonable expectations.”

Mike Froman: I thought I was writing a historic piece. The end of the Cold War came. I put the book on the shelf, thought it would never be opened again. And yet, Jordan, there you found it and indeed have highlighted that there might be some relevance to the U.S.-China relationship today.

Jordan Schneider: I played this game with Kurt Campbell. He did his thesis on Soviet relations with South Africa and the tensions of how the U.S. navigated that dynamic. Everything’s coming back.

We’re sitting here in the fall of 2025. We have a president who is probably as far towards the “let’s do détente” mindset as you could have gotten in this political moment. What do you think are the bounds of what an American president today could domestically go towards if they were in a détente mindset?

Mike Froman: The issue of détente back in the old Soviet days was — was it a strategy to transform the Soviet Union by engaging with it, or was it a reflection that we had to engage with it because we had overwhelming common interests? Some of those are the same questions that come up today in the U.S.-China relationship. Do we think we can fundamentally change the trajectory of China, or do we just simply have to accept it and live with it, coexist with it, and create some rules of the road for managing potential conflicts?

Any president right now figuring out how to coexist with China will have to determine — where do we need to cooperate on issues of national security? Where do we have to compete around the economy and technology? And where do we have to be very careful to manage potential conflicts that could blow up and create a kinetic conflict between us — whether around Taiwan, the South China Sea, or otherwise? Balancing those different baskets of interests is the most challenging thing for any administration to deal with.

Jordan Schneider: You wrote, “The theory of using détente as a means of transformation was based largely on the misguided assumption that the U.S. could use cooperation on common interests as a source of leverage over conflicting ones. Positive linkage was not particularly effective, however, because success in areas of common interest did not easily translate into success in areas of divergent ones.”

You published this book in 1992, which is a key moment of translating that kind of — in your estimation — flawed thinking of how we went about this with the Soviet Union to the next 25 or 30 years of American policy towards China. Can you talk about those parallels?

Mike Froman: Yes. The U.S.-China relationship is quite a bit different than the U.S.-Soviet relationship, first and foremost because of our economic interdependence. Russia and the Soviet Union were never terribly significant economic players in the global economy, whereas China very much is. We have developed over the last several decades a great deal of interdependence with them.

The leverage question’s a little bit different. Could you use economic leverage — the fact that we have a common interest in maintaining strong trade relations — as positive linkage into other issues? Or could you cooperate in areas like climate change, which both sides thought at one point were of common interest, and translate that into broader cooperation in other issues?

Having said all that, you’re right to point out that it’s proved to be relatively limited. In China’s view, they in many respects separated areas of common interest from areas of potential conflict and from areas of competition, and were unwilling to allow cooperation in one area to really affect their interests and how they pursue them in the others.

Jordan Schneider: What is your sense of why the theory of the case was so directly ported over to China? The argument through the Clinton administration, Bush administration, first half of Obama was basically — we’re going to develop leverage, develop these common interests and they’ll see the light. We didn’t get that these are both two party-led systems. There are some commonalities, but there are pieces of learning that maybe folks overlooked from that experience. It felt like a brave new world. Given your view over the past 30 years of this arc, what do you think got lost in translation there?

Mike Froman: If the Cold War was defined at least in part by an ideological battle between Western liberal, capitalist, market-oriented, democratic-oriented principles and the communist totalitarian principles of the former Soviet Union, the view at the end of the Cold War was that it was much more of a unipolar moment. Not necessarily U.S. hegemony, but the hegemony of the open liberal democratic capitalist perspective.

That was embraced by China. If you go back to the days of Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji and the reform trajectory that they laid out, they were very much on the path towards market-oriented reforms, opening up — not necessarily democracy. Those who thought that opening up on the economic side would lead to political pluralism were probably being overly optimistic. But there was certainly a view that China was on a path towards greater integration in the global economy, which they have been, and greater market-oriented policies to help lead them there.

They were on that trajectory for quite a while. It didn’t go as far or as fast and it wasn’t as linear as people expected. The advent of President Xi, who was willing to either stop or reverse some of those reforms, was probably not as anticipated as proved to be necessary.

There was this dominance of a set of principles that we thought could bring China into the international system and bring the U.S. and China into a more cooperative relationship. What happened was that China changed course and didn’t go as far as we expected. Indeed, China reversed many of the gains that we thought we had seen.

Escalation Dominance and Stalemate

Jordan Schneider: Escalation dominance — a phrase we thought was dead and dusted in the bin of history — is now back. Is this the right mental framework folks should be using when thinking about these trade wars? What is and isn’t useful when trying to take the arms control frameworks and put them onto what you’re seeing with the U.S. and China with respect to economics and technology?

Mike Froman: There certainly is a rigorous competition between the two in technology, economics, and military. The Chinese buildup of both its conventional and nuclear forces is very much top of mind.

Where the analogy may play out — it does come from nuclear weapons, but it’s not necessarily the escalation issues. It’s really back to the notion of mutual assured destruction. What we’ve seen more recently in the U.S.-China relationship is we have leverage in terms of access to our markets and access to our technology, but China too has leverage in terms of their capacity to control critical choke points of key technologies — whether it’s critical minerals, rare earths, magnets, et cetera. That’s, in my view, probably just the tip of the iceberg of the kinds of technologies and products that they control and that they have now demonstrated a willingness to use their leverage with us.

If anything, we’ve reached a stalemate where both sides realize that neither can escalate in a costless way. Indeed, it may require them to sit down and come up with some rules of the road for managing the relationship going forward.

Jordan Schneider: There’s this misreading of the history of the Cold War that once you had mutually assured destruction, everything was cool by the 1970s, which, as you as well as anyone know, was not necessarily the case. You had both countries developing new weapons systems and wrestling for that nuclear primacy and escalation dominance.

If we are in a world now where the U.S. and China both understand that they can take big, painful chunks of GDP without going to war or doing incredibly aggressive cyber attacks, where does that lead us? Because the game doesn’t stop, right? We’re still having different moves that both sides can play.

Mike Froman: Exactly. The competition doesn’t stop. As you said, back in the Cold War, it wasn’t all sweetness and light once you hit mutual assured destruction, but it did prevent a direct nuclear exchange between the two largest nuclear powers. They had to find other ways of positioning vis-à-vis each other, whether through proxy wars or other elements that allowed them to try and gain some advantage over each other.

That’s probably true here in the China relationship as well. It’s likely to lead to a certain degree of selective decoupling, whether it’s on advanced technology issues where we’ll go our way and China will go its way. The question is for the rest of the relationship — to what degree can there be a normalization of trade and other interactions?

There is a lot of non-strategic trade. The Trump administration is evolving in its views towards — what can we actually grow or produce here in the United States and where do we actually need to import from other countries? Can we take T-shirts and sneakers and toys from China without compromising our national security? I would think so. Allowing them in at a decent rate is good for particularly low-income Americans who spend a disproportionate amount of their disposable income on the basics of supporting their family.

But there are likely to be some technologies that we’re going to want to keep out of China’s hands, and China is going to have some choke point technologies that they can control over us. Hopefully that again reaches some sort of balance.

Jordan Schneider: Say we’re in 2028 and both countries have had three years to do more economic securitization and the size and amount of the bites that each country can take out of the other one diminishes. America has a few more mines. China does a better job of making semiconductors. Is the world in a more or less safe place? Or does just the fact that each side is still going to have this leverage — if they are the world’s two largest economies and still do trade — is that still the salient thing? Does playing around the edges even mean all that much?

Mike Froman: It’s unclear at this point because it’s very much a work in progress. It’s only been in the last few months that we’ve seen China’s willingness not only to turn off access to a particular batch of technologies like the magnets back in April 2025, but demonstrate a willingness to put in place a whole export control licensing system which could disrupt global supply chains in fundamental ways. They’ve now demonstrated their capacity to do that. We’ll see how they actually go about implementing it.

This ultimately could be, ironically, a force for stability with each side recognizing that the other side has some significant leverage. But to me, the bigger issue is we’re not really dealing with the other very significant questions in the relationship. The summit that President Trump and President Xi had in Korea — the main issues were fentanyl, soybeans and TikTok. We’re not asking ourselves: how do we get to the fundamental relationship between the two economies around China’s strategy of export-led growth, excess capacity, high subsidization of critical areas? How do we deal with that and the potential ongoing tensions that’s likely to create going forward?

Whether we’re on a more stable or a less stable path, in my view, depends on whether we get to those underlying issues and try and resolve some of those. Those have not yet been put back on the table, let alone issues like Taiwan, South China Sea, North Korea, nonproliferation, et cetera.

Jordan Schneider: We just had a whole conversation about how using international diplomacy as a means of domestic transformation is a bit of a fool’s errand, right?

Mike Froman: It’s not about domestic transformation. If you remember back in the Soviet Union, the idea was if we engaged with them or took other actions vis-à-vis them, somehow their system would collapse. They would see the values of democracy, the values of market orientation and everything would fall apart. They would inevitably collapse.

This isn’t about making China collapse. It’s about seeing whether we can come up with rules of the road so that China and the rest of the global economy can coexist without undue tension. Right now we’re not really dealing with those issues.

Jordan Schneider: If we’re defining “dealing with those issues” — for my first job out of college, I covered trade policy for the Eurasia Group. I was listening to every single one of your speeches trying to figure out if this meant like the U.S.-China BIT was 7% more likely to happen.

With the second Trump administration, there are two disjunctures that we’ve seen from the past 20 years of American foreign policymaking. The biggest one is just the risk tolerance and the ability to take big swings that may end up being either illegal or backfiring horribly, which the presidents that you worked for were a little more reluctant to do, for better or for worse.

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If you’re sitting as USTR and you have the threat of putting 50% tariffs on the countries you’re negotiating with — be it China with a U.S.-China BIT or with all the allies that you were talking around with the TPP — to what extent do you think that unlocks new political economies and new negotiating paths that weren’t possible if at the end of the day you have a president who just wants to be nice to the countries that we have treaty allies with?

Mike Froman: The Trump administration’s threat and use of tariffs has created very significant negotiating leverage and has gotten countries to come to the table on a whole range of issues — whether it’s fentanyl, migration, or economic issues — and to agree to things that they previously would very likely not have agreed to. The administration in the short run has very much demonstrated that access to the U.S. market is a source of negotiating leverage and other countries have responded to it. They haven’t been happy about responding to it but that’s okay.

The question is what are the longer-term implications and whether it makes it more difficult to gain their cooperation on some other issue down the road. But only time will tell. In the meantime, if you had asked people a year ago whether we would have this raft of agreements that the administration has rolled out with anywhere between 10% and 25% or 30% tariffs on other countries — quite asymmetric agreements in many respects — most people would have said it was highly unlikely, but it has proven to be the case.

Purely from a negotiating point of view, if you have the capacity with credibility to put tariffs on regardless of your international obligations and regardless of the long-term implications, you can probably get a fair amount done in the short run.

By the way, the Trump administration’s skepticism about some of the mechanisms of engagement with China — like these big bilateral fora that we managed for years: the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, the Security Economic Dialogue, et cetera — I share some of that skepticism. They involved thousands of person-hours of work and produced communiqués which I don’t think necessarily advanced the ball that far and show the limitations of that form of diplomatic engagement.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t other forms of engagement that make sense, including ones backed up by a series of potential actions. But certainly it’s healthy to look back and say, what did these things accomplish and where can we do better?

Jordan Schneider: Looking forward, if there is a Democratic president in 2028 — a president that you would want to work for, who was less scared to play hardball the way the Trump administration has when it comes to access to the American domestic market — a president that you would be more sympathetic to in terms of their ultimate aims, where would you want to see the new leverage that has clearly been brought to the fore when it comes to domestic market access? How would you want to use those cards?

Mike Froman: Ultimately, it’s in the U.S. interest not to go it alone in a lot of areas, but to bring allies and partners into the arena. Using whatever leverage we have to get allies and partners to work with us on difficult issues — including a common approach to competition, a common approach to adversaries, a common approach to national defense, whether it’s support for NATO or engagement vis-à-vis China — those are all very important.

We don’t have to have everything reshored to the United States. If we have coalitions of the willing, coalitions of the ambitious, trusted allies and partners who we can work with to make sure we’ve got adequate supply to critical inputs that we need for our national security and for our competitiveness more broadly — I would use whatever leverage the U.S. has to bring our allies and partners to the table with that goal in mind.

Jordan Schneider: This idea of economic security is very nebulous. The Fed has this clear thing they’re trying to do — 2% inflation, full employment. It feels like all these discussions about what economic security is very quickly go into here’s what we should do for this sector, here’s what we do for that sector, here’s what we should do for this technology. But there’s not an overarching framework of what the end state we’re trying to achieve or work towards is.

I want to run an essay contest around how to define it in more concrete ways with numbers attached. How would you frame that question? If you had an answer or an equation off the top of your head, I’d be curious for that as well.

Mike Froman: First of all, you should read our recently released CFR task force report on economic security. The task force was co-chaired by Gina Raimondo, former Commerce Secretary, Justin Muzinich, former Treasury Deputy Secretary in the Trump administration, and Jim Taiclet, who’s the CEO of Lockheed. We had a couple dozen CFR members with a wide range of backgrounds in technology and defense.

I flag that because one of the fundamental sets of questions that the task force was focused on is — what are the parameters? What are the guardrails? What are the limiting principles on economic security?

For decades, the focus of economic policy really had been on efficiency — the most efficient supply chains around the world. Companies put their factories and sited their suppliers where it made most economic sense to do so. A lot of that ultimately led to China, given not just the labor differential, but also its infrastructure, its management practices, and just how efficient it was as a manufacturing floor for the U.S. We found ourselves overly dependent on one country, or in the case of semiconductors, on Taiwan and China.

What economic security fundamentally means is really proper risk management. The number one principle of risk management is diversification. You want diversified supply chains, resilient supply chains. Particularly when it comes to national security core interests — such as the materials that go into a missile or into an F-16 — we can’t be dependent on our adversary for them. Figuring out where to draw that line is the goal.

It’s easy to say missile parts, F-16 parts — we should not be dependent on China for those. But what about active pharmaceutical ingredients? What about the supply chain for semiconductors? What about PPE that we saw during COVID? Where do you draw the line?

That’s the big challenge for policymakers going forward because each of these involves a trade-off. There’s a reason the manufacturing was sited in China — it was the economically most efficient thing to do. Any other approach is going to be, almost by definition, more expensive, less efficient. That may well be worth the cost. The question is, how much are we willing to pay additional for whatever product it is in order to have more resilience, more redundancy, more diversification, and better national security?

We ought to be willing to pay something. The question is how much. Maybe we’re willing to pay a fair amount to make sure our semiconductors, our missile parts, our F-16 parts are made in the United States or in a close ally’s jurisdiction. But we may not be willing to pay quite as much to make sure our sneakers and our T-shirts and our socks are made in the United States. That’s the kind of conversation we should be having — really about trade-offs.

Jordan Schneider: My question was an implicit critique of that report because I think it skipped the base question and then went pretty quickly to this sector, that sector, the other sector.

Mike Froman: Let me push back on you, Jordan. It decided, instead of focusing just on the theoretical, to say — here are three critical sectors. We could have picked a dozen. Here are three critical sectors. Let’s see what it looks like through the lens of a particular use case. Whether it was AI, quantum, or biotechnology, those each have particular needs that need to be addressed. Everybody would agree that at least in those three areas, we need to be a leader in those technologies. How do we maintain that leadership?

Jordan Schneider: The core issue here is escalation dominance — when can China inflict enough politically visible pain on American policymakers to force them to back down?

When we define it down to even the non-perishable consumables — I am the father of a young child and hit this weird crunch where the tariffs made it such that you couldn’t find car seats because every car seat in the world is made in China, apparently. It just seems to me that there’s just so much that is going to be dependent on the two countries.

Maybe there’s some 80/20 or 90/10 principle where we’re still going to rely on China for 90% of the screws that go into the F-16s, and if they take 10% away, we’ll still have this much of our military capacity back. But closing the loop for all the things like you did in the 1960s relative to the U.S. and Soviet Union is not feasible.

It seems like there are two relevant variables here. One is the long-term GDP cut that China can make from being dominant in something. The other is how much short-term political pain can an adversary use to squeeze American policymakers to do something that they wouldn’t otherwise want to do. Is there another aspect to it? Am I missing something here?

Mike Froman: That captures it. But what you’re pointing out is very much the importance of distinguishing between the strategic and the non-strategic. That points to the broader relationship as well.

In the Biden administration, it was the phrase “small yard, high fence.” What goes in the yard for control, and how small can you keep it? They were pretty selective and pretty targeted in terms of how they viewed that. Maybe some things would need to be added, maybe some things can come out of it. But the question is: what should be deemed as strategic either from the perspective of keeping key technologies out of China’s hands or ensuring that we have redundancy so we’re not overly dependent on China? And what can go anyway? What can be sold anyway?

Even in the height of the Cold War, we were buying wheat from the Soviet Union. Wheat was seen as non-strategic and we could buy wheat from them and still be at odds over various issues. With China, where are we willing to draw that line? To me, that’s really the question for the next phase. As the Trump administration engages now, there’s been a stabilization of escalation and de-escalation. The next phase should be: how are we going to define this relationship going forward?

Jordan Schneider: The ability to cause pain to the other side is always going to be there, but what tool you use to cause pain is the question. We’ve thankfully had some great norms develop around the use of nuclear weapons. We’ve had some norms around the use of conventional forces — TBD on those. All of the cyber stuff between the U.S. and China thus far has been of the snooping, not of the blowing up power plants variety.

But the fundamental question I have around economic security is — say that China wants to retain leverage on the U.S. and get politicians to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do in their druthers. It just seems like there are so many levers that you can pull as a peer competitor in the 2000s. It makes me worried that we’re working toward an end state of being resilient if the other side doesn’t want you to be resilient. It seems like a marathon where the end isn’t even something that’s realistic. You see what I’m getting at, Mike?

Mike Froman: I do. I sense that you’re feeling overwhelmed by the challenge. But that should be our opportunity to rise to the challenge. There’s a certain urgency, I believe, in one, assessing what the key dependencies are. And two, assessing what it takes to address them. Is it a combination of tariffs, industrial policy, investment, and regulatory changes? What is the toolbox that we need?

Thinking very strategically about that — including where allies and partners can play a role because they’ve got capacity in certain areas that we don’t, or because they can supplement our capacity and help us get to scale more quickly — and building a bipartisan, ongoing consensus around what it takes is an urgent need. That helps you get to that point of saying, yes, it may seem overwhelming, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

That’s what we’re doing right now. That’s what the CHIPS and Science Act did during the Biden administration. It said we cannot be 100% dependent on Taiwan and China for the packaging, etc., of chips. We’re going to begin to rebuild chip manufacturing capacity in the United States. The question is, what additional sectors do we need to do?

Take shipbuilding. Everybody believes we need more ships, whether it’s for the Navy or for merchants or otherwise. We don’t have a huge amount of shipbuilding capacity anymore. Can we work with Japan, Korea, and Finland on icebreakers? Who can we partner with to get there?

Mission, Money, and Talent at the CFR

Jordan Schneider: You gave me a little transition there — building a bipartisan consensus for decades of policymaking going forward. That seems to double as your vision for what the point of a think tank or CFR is, particularly now. What are the KPIs we’re going to give for Mike Froman’s reign as president of the CFR?

Mike Froman: Our mission is to inform U.S. engagement with the world. There are lots of different ways to engage. Our job is to flesh out what are the different mechanisms for engaging with these goals in mind that we’ve just been talking about. What are the trade-offs involved? What are the costs and benefits of going down one path or the other and helping policymakers in their decision of how to pursue that? Also helping opinion leaders and the broader American public understand and get their input on which of those trade-offs they’re comfortable with. That’s an important part of what the Council does.

We’re focused on policymakers like most think tanks, but we’re also focused on the broader American public through broad education efforts and media efforts, digital, etc., programs around the rest of the country with the goal of getting their input into how they view the role of the U.S. in the world and to help inform policymakers accordingly.

Jordan Schneider: How are you going to do things differently? What’s the Mike Froman twist on all this?

Mike Froman: We’re taking a step back and saying, just as the Council did — the Council was founded in 1921 after the end of the First World War, after the defeat of the League of Nations — to organize around trying to push back against trends of isolationism. In 1948, it was a place where the Marshall Plan and NATO were very much being worked on. In 1991, at the end of the Cold War, there was a lot of talk about geoeconomics and bringing economics into the national security sphere as well.

This is another one of those inflection points. As a Council, we’re going to take a step back and say, where do we go from here? We’re going through a major disruption right now. Fundamental questions about the nature of the global economy, of the trading system, of alliances, of how to manage adversaries, how to compete — these are all on the table. How can we help policymakers and the broader public understand different options for pursuing U.S. national interests and the trade-offs involved in each?

It’s a major studies effort, a major research and analysis effort, but also a major education effort — engaging with more audiences, non-traditional audiences, different kinds of media to engage with the rest of the country and get a sense of their input as well.

Jordan Schneider: From an internal organization structure perspective, what do you think of the model? What needs to change?

Mike Froman: The Council’s been around for a long time and is actually well-positioned for this moment in history because we’re not just a think tank focused on trying to influence the couple thousand people in Washington that are sitting in these meetings and trying to make decisions. We’re also focused — as a membership organization, a publisher of Foreign Affairs, an educational organization that provides material to high schools and colleges — on the broader American public. We do events all over the country. We’re relatively well hedged to both work with policymakers on one hand and work with the rest of the country on the other hand.

Jordan Schneider: Let’s talk about money for a second. I assume you were on the other side of this in terms of large corporations funding various research efforts. What do you think about where funding comes from for think tanks in general, CFR in particular, and what makes sense and what doesn’t?

Mike Froman: Our funding’s obviously all public. It’s all on our website. It’s transparent. We don’t take any money from any government institution, including the U.S. government. We don’t take any money from corporations for research. Corporates can be members like other members and send their employees to our events, but they can’t involve themselves or set the agenda or influence our research agenda. That allows us to remain nonpartisan, allows us to remain independent. It’s one of the reasons that both our research and analysis and our publications are viewed highly as being independent and credible in that space.

What that means is we rely on — we’re a membership organization, so individuals pay dues. We’re blessed to have members who are philanthropic. We get money from foundations, some of the standard foundations that work in this area. That’s where our funding comes from. We have an endowment that’s been built up over the years as well, again, because of the generosity of our individual members.

Jordan Schneider: I’ve been on the other side of this, where you have a funder who is a corporation that wants you to write a certain thing. Do you think it’s unseemly? The dance is tricky, right? But without that, it would kind of only be CFR and Heritage left standing. There’s a lot of foreign government money as well.

Mike Froman: I’m not going to criticize my peers. I would just say that we’re lucky and we have a concerted strategy to make sure that we’re able to remain independent. That means no government money, no corporate money for research. That allows our fellows total freedom of speech. They can write whatever they like. As an institution, we take no institutional positions. We try to put our best research and analysis out there and make it available as broadly as possible.

Why are salaries so low

Jordan Schneider: Entry-level research associates come in with a $55K to $58K pay band at CFR. What are your thoughts on that, Mike?

Mike Froman: We would love to — we’re very lucky to have a great set of research assistants and entry-level people. There are a lot of people who want to go into the field of international relations. This is their first job. By the way, we view one of our core objectives of CFR as helping to identify, promote, and develop the next generation of diverse foreign policy expertise. We spend a lot of effort and time — whether it’s our interns, our research assistants, our junior staff, our term members — really focused on who the up-and-coming generation are, and what we can do to help them develop the skills and the expertise to succeed in that field.

As a nonprofit, obviously we’re subject to constraints, but we always look at what the market is and try our best to make sure we’re getting the very best quality people for the resources that we can expend.

Jordan Schneider: But it’s not a lot of money, right? These are really big, hard, important questions. It bums me out that we lose talent because folks who are coming out of school with debt or just see an opportunity to make 4x right out of college look at this field and say, “How can I go down this route?” It breaks my heart, really.

Mike Froman: Having been at the beginning of my career once upon a time, I can relate to that. Luckily, we have a lot of interest in the Council by people coming out of college, coming out of graduate school. There’s significant demand for the openings that we have. We have a great group of junior staff and research assistants. I’m really impressed with them, and we take a lot of effort to make sure we’re doing everything we can to develop them professionally.

But I also say, Jordan, we’d be delighted to take a major donation from you to the Council to help endow a new research assistance endowment program if you like.

Jordan Schneider: That was my next question. I am surprised that there isn’t some rich person out there who doesn’t want to have the next generation all be Mr. and Mrs. X fellows. Then they get to make $10 or $20 grand more. It’s not that much money in the grand scheme of things for all of the kudos and accolades you would get and all of these fresh young faces saying thank you so much, Mr. or Mrs. Whoever.

Mike Froman: We have been very fortunate to have some of those donors participate.

Jordan Schneider: How do you split your time? What’s the weekly daily pie chart? You’re now a take artist on Substack as well. How do you think about where your time should be spent?

Mike Froman: I live in Washington, and I spend about three days a week on average in New York and two days a week at our office here. Every week’s a little different. I travel around the rest of the country as well, doing events for CFR members and others.

I split my time between my own research and writing — as you say, I have a weekly column that I put out on Fridays that then gets posted on Substack. It’s part of our newsletter as well. I spend a lot of time working with our senior leadership team on our programming here, making sure that we are presenting a nonpartisan slate of participants here on our stage for events on all the major issues. I spend a certain amount of my time on internal management. We’ve got a great management team here, so I’ve been able to defer to a lot of them in terms of managing people and systems and things here, budgets, etc. Of course, a certain amount of time on fundraising. I do a bit with the press, a bit with the media to be helpful and out there. That fills a week.

Jordan Schneider: If you took a pill and could sleep 10 fewer hours a week, where do you think you would spend it? Doesn’t have to be on the job.

Mike Froman: On the job, I would probably spend it digging further into our research and analysis and doing more in that area. That’s the direction I’m heading in. I’ve been here for a couple years. I wanted to spend the first couple years really getting my arms around the place as an institution. Now I’m working more closely with the fellows on this big project of taking a step back — our Future of American Strategy initiative — and looking at some of these big questions going forward.

Jordan Schneider: It’s a weird time, right? Doing the work that I do in Trump one or Biden felt like the residence was much more direct to the sorts of wavelengths that the most important decision makers in the country were on. Now we’re in a brave new world. There are lots of strains of thinking in American policymaking.

Going back to the 1940s and the origin story of CFR — man, isolationism is back. We got Nazis going on the most popular right-wing podcasts. Doing things in the normal, mainstream way, trying to optimize for the solutions that you, me, George H.W. Bush would all see as reasonable goals for American policymaking is not shared by a significant chunk of one of the two parties in America.

In this new paradigm we’re in, to what extent do the bounds of thinking, the ways of working in a mainstream foreign policy think tank, have to change? On the other hand, in which ways should things stay the same?

Mike Froman: First of all, I don’t view President Trump or his administration as isolationist. You can’t be isolationist and talk about taking over the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland. That’s expansionist. This president has spent more of his first 10 months on foreign policy — whether it’s getting involved in particular conflicts, traveling abroad, hosting foreign leaders — probably more than just about any other president in recent memory. He is deeply engaged in the world.

As I said, our mission is to inform U.S. engagement in the world. There are lots of different ways to engage. He is engaging with it in a different way than several of his predecessors, but he is deeply engaged. For a think tank that’s focused on that, it is to say — this is the way this president is engaged. What are the costs and benefits? What are the trade-offs involved? What are the alternatives? What could be done to ensure ultimately that the U.S. meets its national interests? That’s what our role has always been. That’s what our role is now.

Jordan Schneider: What do you think are the unique challenges of this job relative to others you’ve had in your career?

Mike Froman: That’s a great question. I worked in the public sector. I’ve worked in the private sector. This is the first time I’m running a nonprofit organization, a think tank. The challenge is to maintain its position as a nonpartisan, independent source of research and analysis in what is a very partisan environment. Every day we think, how do we make sure, whether it’s our membership or the people who participate in our meetings and are put on stage or the engagement we have with the administration, how do we make sure that we are fulfilling our obligation as a nonpartisan institution going forward? That is a new and different level of challenge now probably than in the past, just because of the broader nature of the political environment.

Jordan Schneider: Do you spend much time with AI? Have you been using it to research or write at all?

Mike Froman: Not really.

Jordan Schneider: Maybe this is my pitch to you, Mike. The tools are enabling young talent to learn much faster and be much more prolific than they ever were in the past. My critique of the model that I grew up with — you have senior fellows and then you have RAs who hang out for two or three years and then go on their merry way, and most of their job is directly supporting or just serving as a research assistant to someone senior — what the research tools which now exist allow folks who are really sharp and motivated to do is just get up these knowledge hills much more quickly.

Obviously there are things that ChatGPT can’t teach you. A lot of this think tank game is one of relationships, be that with folks in Washington or in the media or what have you, or the subtleties of how to shape an idea so that it will resonate with different audiences. On the more contentful learning stuff, you can run a lot further as a 23-year-old than you could even 10 years ago. I would encourage — challenge, maybe — you and the organization to imagine raising the bar for what the top tier of young talent can aspire to do.

Mike Froman: To that point, Jordan, we started about a year ago opening the door for our RAs to publish on CFR.org in conjunction with their fellows or on their own as well, recognizing, as you say, first of all, we have a terrific group of people with or without AI tools and quite expert in their own way for their stage in their career. We wanted to give them an opportunity to develop their portfolios as well.

Jordan Schneider: Cool. Two thumbs up for that.

It’s clear that demand exceeds supply for policy analysis roles. I see this when I put job descriptions out. I’m sure you guys see it as well. There are people willing to not make a lot of money to do this work because they think it’s really interesting and really important. It seems like we, as a country, are leaving some money on the table from an idea generation perspective. The fact that we don’t just have 10 times as many people trying to understand what makes the Chinese rare earths ecosystem tick… where are we on the production curve of idea generation for think tanks?

Mike Froman: It’s probably always been more applicants than roles for these kinds of jobs. It’s probably particularly acute right now just because changes in the government mean that a lot of people who expected to go into the government or into the intelligence community are probably not seeing the same pathways that they saw before. Same thing for a lot of NGOs or nonprofits, particularly in the development field. People who are planning on going into that area are probably seeing the jobs disappear.

On the positive side, virtually every company is figuring out that they need geopolitical advice. They need to understand the impact of the changing geopolitical environment on their business. Many of them are setting up offices to bring in people with foreign policy interests and ideas into their ecosystem. That’s another avenue that didn’t fully exist five or 10 years ago and now is a much more vibrant part of the market for ideas. It’s think tanks, obviously, being one piece of it. Universities also. But then the private sector is now another place where people can go and develop careers if they have an interest in this area. Can I ask you a question Jordan? Who among the CFR fellows is your favorite.

Jordan Schneider: Oh man, I don’t know if I can choose…

It’s interesting, right, this whole think tank model, because on the one hand, you are these independent atoms, kind of like professors who can do their own thing. But I imagine also as a president, you want to see synergies develop in-house, as opposed to if one’s sitting here and the other is at Brookings.

Given that you have all these stallions who are going to want to run in their different directions, how do you think about to what extent you’re going to want to get them playing together and rowing in the same direction versus going off and optimizing their time how they want?

Mike Froman: What I hear from you, Jordan, is that we have so much great talent that you can’t possibly choose who is the best one. I appreciate that endorsement of CFR.

To answer your question, because it is timely and it is one of the things that I brought to the Council as a bit of an innovation — we’re doing a lot more collaboration among the fellows. runs our China Strategy Initiative and he pulls in a wide range of fellows from CFR, but also from other think tanks and universities into his project to answer questions — What is China thinking? What is China doing? How do we compete and how do we engage? Those are the four pillars of his initiative. It involves dozens of folks across the Council, including our cadre of China fellows.

We’ve done the same, for example, on economics. Our Real Econ initiative, which is Reimagining American Economic Leadership, now has about a dozen or so fellows who touch trade and economics in one form or another and are working together on a whole series of projects. That’s a little bit new for the Council — these clusters of fellows coming together, working on collective projects, as well as working on their own books and their other projects. As you said, it adds that synergy. It’s not about having them all pull in the same direction intellectually because we welcome the diversity of their perspectives, but adding them together and seeing what we can produce on China, on economics, on technology, on energy and climate in ways that are additional is very important.

Jordan Schneider: One person you didn’t name is Tanner Greer, in the Rush Doshi extended universe. The other failure mode, which you have thankfully avoided, is this deification of PhDs as the only way to have relevant credentials or insight that would allow you to play under the bright lights of a CFR fellowship. Tanner has had a classic China arc of living in the PRC, speaking, teaching grade school, being a tutor, and just having a blog on the side. He’s one of the most well-read and thoughtful people. He also provides a little bit of ideological diversity to the building, which is important in these trying times. I’m really excited to see what he does with those extra tools and leverage that you guys can bring to him.

Mike Froman: Thank you for raising him. He’s a great new asset for us. Of course, he’s running our Open Source Observatory, which is this effort to do mass translations of Chinese public documents and make them available to scholars and policymakers so you can read in their own words what they are actually saying, which oftentimes proves to be actually quite relevant to the policy direction they’re taking their country.

With schools nationwide easing into the holidays, hackers may see the lull in activity as a window of opportunity to strike an already-vulnerable sector.

在法国民主劳工联合会（CFDT）、法国总工会（CGT）和团结工会（SUD）发起的集体罢工号召下，卢浮宫周一被迫关闭，数千名游客被拒之门外。据法新社报道，周一上午，卢浮宫标志性的玻璃金字塔前聚集了大批罢工员工，他们手持“卢浮宫罢工”标语封堵主入口，并齐声高呼：“谁拥有卢浮宫？是我们！”

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（德国之声中文网）国家医保局称，到2026年，中国将力争在全国范围内，对纳入政策范围的所有生育相关医疗费用实现全额报销，包括产前检查费用。该机构在周六发布的一份报告中表示，此举将“提升产前检查医疗费用保障水平，力争明年全国基本实现政策范围内分娩个人‘无自付’”。

但根据中国官媒报道，生育保险“覆盖范围”不包括参保人自主选择更高服务标准的医疗机构进行分娩，或使用不在生育保险目录内的药品耗材等。

报道还称，吉林、江苏、山东等7个省份目前已实现政策范围内住院分娩医疗费用“全额保障”。

人口连续三年负增长

这一举措正值中国面临人口持续下滑的挑战。

中国人口在2022年出现数十年来首次下降，2024年中国总人口数连续第三年减少，出生率（6.77‰）低于死亡率（7.76‰），自然增长率降至-0.99‰。

人口学家预计，由于出生率下降，这一趋势还将继续。与此同时，劳动力规模缩小与老龄人口不断增长，可能会给本就负债沉重的地方政府带来更大压力。

从独生子女到三孩政策的制度演变

中国出生率连续几十年下降与1980年至2015年实施的独生子女政策以及快速城市化进程密切相关。

1982年中国人大第五次会议将计划生育定为基本国策。

2011年底实施双独二孩政策，即夫妻双方均为独生子女被允许生育第二个子女。

2013年底通过单独二孩政策，即一方是独生子女的夫妇可生育两个孩子。

2015年10月全面实施二孩政策。

2021年6月三孩政策实施。

生孩压力大 多重激励措施并行

虽然全面实施三孩政策以来已有4年，然而高昂的育儿和教育成本、就业的不确定性以及经济增长放缓，仍让许多中国年轻人对结婚生子望而却步。

中国在今年3月表示，将“积极”出台政策应对快速增长的老龄人口和年轻群体的需求，包括发放育儿补贴、推动学前教育免费化等措施。

此前，相关部门也曾通过延长产假、提供财政和税收优惠，一次性生育奖励、育儿补贴、购房补贴等方式，鼓励夫妇生育。

今年7月，中国宣布自2025年起向3岁以下婴幼儿发放现金补贴，且该补贴免征个人所得税。

虽然政府不断修改并出台政策以鼓励生育，但据中国国家发改委今年二月发表的文章预测，中国人口总量在“基准场景下”仍将呈持续下降趋势，2025年将下降至14.06亿人，2035年下降至13.57亿人，2050年下降至12.12亿人

。

（综合报道）

DW中文有Instagram！欢迎搜寻dw.chinese，看更多深入浅出的图文与影音报道。

© 2025年德国之声版权声明：本文所有内容受到著作权法保护，如无德国之声特别授权，不得擅自使用。任何不当行为都将导致追偿，并受到刑事追究。

今年 9 月，保时捷宣布正式关闭燃油版 718 Boxster 和 Cayman 在全球范围内的订单通道，在完成所有积压订单后，这款经典的中置跑车将彻底告别内燃机时代，由纯电车型接棒。

消息一出，全球车迷无不扼腕叹息。许多人认为，一个根植于内燃机的，讲求纯粹驾驶乐趣的时代，即将落下帷幕。

然而，谁也没想到，保时捷很快就「打了自己的脸」。

最新消息显示，保时捷正计划对其下一代 718 Boxster 和 Cayman 的纯电专属平台进行重大改造以使其使其重新兼容内燃机。

英国汽车媒体《Autocar》援引保时捷魏斯阿赫（Weissach）工程中心高层人士的话称，保时捷正在对专为 2026 年推出的电动 718 打造的 PPE Sport 平台进行「逆向工程」，目标是是在该平台上重新塞进一台中置汽油发动机。

如果一切顺利，基于这一改造平台的第五代燃油版 718，将与即将上市的纯电版形成「双线并行」的产品矩阵，并预计 2030 年左右推出，用以填补当前高性能燃油车型停产后、纯电版本尚未完全站稳市场之间的空白。

更通俗易懂的来说就是，保时捷 718 正在进行「电改油」。

PPE Sport 平台本身为纯电架构，其在设计伊始就未曾考虑过内燃机的存在。它没有中央传动轴通道，也没有预留油箱、油路或排气系统的空间。要让一台汽油机在纯电架构上运转，几乎需要重建整个后半车身。

而且，对于纯电平台来说，电池包本身是车身结构的一部分，其为整个车身提供了极低的重心但增加了车身刚度，一旦移除电池，整个车身强度将大幅削弱。

为此，工程师提出了一套十分复杂的方案——开发一个全新的结构化地板模块，通过现有平台的硬点螺栓固定，以恢复车身刚性；同时重新设计后部防火墙和副车架，用于支撑发动机和变速箱。

至于新燃油 718 将搭载哪款发动机，目前仍在评估中。

但据即将卸任的 CEO 奥利弗·布鲁姆（Oliver Blume）近期披露的新规划，最有可能的选项仍是那台自 2020 年起用于 718 GTS 4.0 和 GT4 RS 的 4.0 升自然吸气水平对置六缸发动机。在 GT4 RS 上，该引擎可输出高达 493 马力。

把一台中置汽油发动机塞回一个从诞生之初就完全为纯电服务的平台，听上去就十分不靠谱，但这或许是保时捷不得不做的工程妥协。

可能会有人疑惑，718 不本来就有燃油版本嘛，直接接着造不就得了，为什么要在纯电平台上魔改出一个不伦不类的版本呢？

没法这样做直接的原因，是联合国欧洲经济委员会发布并强制实施的第 155 号网络安全法规（UN R155）。法规要求汽车制造商和相关供应商在设计和生产车辆时实施严格的网络安全措施，以保护车辆免受网络攻击和数据泄露的威胁。是全球第一个汽车信息安全强制法规。

现款 718（代号 982）的电子电气架构，早在十几年前就已定型，而要让老平台满足新规，远不止是一次软件升级那么简单，而是一场涉及控制单元、通信网络乃至整车电子架构的「大手术」。有行业分析指出，其改造成本几乎相当于开发一款全新车型预算的一半。

除了网络安全原因外，欧盟在 2023 年通过的排放法规，也在推动保时捷走向纯电。

2023 年，欧盟正式通过了一揽子气候立法中的关键条款，明确规定「自 2035 年起，所有在欧盟新注册的乘用车和轻型商用车必须实现 100% 二氧化碳减排。」

由于当时技术条件下，只有纯电动车（BEV）和氢燃料电池车（FCEV）能实现「尾气零排放」，这项法规被广泛解读为 「2035 年起全面禁止销售新的燃油车」，包括汽油、柴油，甚至传统混合动力（HEV）和插电混动（PHEV），只要它们仍依赖化石燃料并产生尾气排放。

该政策初衷是加速交通领域脱碳，推动欧洲汽车工业向电动化转型。

上述二者叠加，让保时捷不得不决定放弃对现款 718 的升级，将全部资源押注于纯电转型。

然而最近两年，欧洲电力基础设施严重滞后、消费者接受度低于预期以及本土汽车产业严重受挫等多项现实问题浮出水面，使欧盟的原定路线难以为继。

面对产业界的不断游说，欧盟委员会在本月对 2035 禁令进行了修订，将「100% CO₂减排」重新解释为 「全生命周期碳中和」，而非仅限「尾气零排放」。

这意味着只要车辆使用经认证的碳中和燃料（如 e-fuel 或先进生物燃料），即使搭载内燃机，也可在 2035 年后合法注册销售。

这一政策转向，直接为保时捷、法拉利等品牌的燃油车打开了「续命窗口」。

「电动版 Boxster 和 Cayman 有沦为小众产品的风险，」一位保时捷高级工程师坦言，「但新法规改变了算术题的答案。」

只是反复的与政策技术转向，已让保时捷付出了接近70 亿欧元的代价。

而且现在再重新开发一套符合网络安全的规范的燃油平台同样不现实，因此保时捷只能被迫赶鸭子上架，开始魔改纯电平台。

但很难想象，当一个平台从第一天起就没打算给内燃机留位置时，最终魔改出来的 718 ，还能保留保时捷一直引以为傲的配重和操控特性嘛？

希望我们最终不会得到一台比老款 718 更重、比 911 更不纯粹、又远不如纯电版本「彻底」的抽象产品。

借用欧洲网友的话来说就是——

现在我们得到的，恐怕是一款在过去几个月里被严重削减研发预算的电动车，再加上一款仓促拼凑出来的纯燃油版车型，开起来估计软塌塌像布丁一样。这真的是车迷们想要的吗？与其花将近十万美元买这种用胶带和蓝丁胶勉强粘在一起的荒唐玩意儿，还不如直接去买辆二手的，开起来更爽、声浪更好听，何乐而不为？

#欢迎关注爱范儿官方微信公众号：爱范儿（微信号：ifanr），更多精彩内容第一时间为您奉上。

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（德国之声中文网）在与记者进行WhatsApp聊天中，泽连斯基表示，接受美国、欧洲和其他国家提供类似北约第五条的安全保障，而不是直接加入北约，是乌克兰为推动和平进程和获得安全所能做出的妥协。

他说，“从一开始，乌克兰就希望加入北约，因为北约能够提供真正的安全保障，然而，美国和欧洲的一些伙伴并不支持这条道路。”

泽连斯基的这番表述标志着乌克兰方面的一个重大转折。乌克兰一直倡导加入北约以抵御俄罗斯的攻击，并将这一目标纳入了该国宪法。

据美国安全专家称，乌克兰放弃加入北约的提议不太可能对和平谈判的进程产生重大影响。卡托研究所（Cato）国防与外交政策研究主任洛根（Justin Logan）表示，“这改变不了任何事情。乌克兰试图表现得更理智些。”

美国佛罗里达大学战略研究教授米赫塔（Andrew Michta）也认为，乌克兰加入北约早已不是现实范畴，目前，乌克兰加入北约的事宜并未在考虑的事项当中。

泽连斯基是在与美国代表就结束俄乌战争举行的会谈之前发表上述声明的。这次在柏林举行的会谈定于周一继续进行。泽连斯基的顾问利特温（Dmytro Lytwyn）通过WhatsApp宣布，泽连斯基届时将发表声明。美国特使史威特科夫(Steve Witkoff)在X上宣布，俄乌会晤取得了“很大进展”。

（美联社）

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