John Culver is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Chinese military, a subject he began studying as a CIA analyst in 1985. From 2015 to 2018, he served as national intelligence officer for East Asia. Since retiring from the CIA in 2020, he has been a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. In advance of the summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, I spoke with Culver about China’s military capabilities and what lessons the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is drawing from the U.S. conflict with Iran. The conversation has been edited and condensed.