Sometimes, what doesn’t happen at major summits is almost as important as what does. The Trump-Xi summit was long on well-choreographed pageantry and symbolism, short on measurable results. Bringing a phalanx of top CEOs, U.S. President Donald Trump sought to parlay his bonhomie with Chinese President Xi Jinping into deals but got both more and less than what he bargained for.
Trump touted deals, some still vague, and claimed that he had gotten support on Iran. The meeting has been dismissed by many Asia hands and much of the media as “pomp and circumstance, signifying nothing.” China hawks fearful of concessions on Taiwan and tech were relieved by their apparent absence.
Sometimes, what doesn’t happen at major summits is almost as important as what does. The Trump-Xi summit was long on well-choreographed pageantry and symbolism, short on measurable results. Bringing a phalanx of top CEOs, U.S. President Donald Trump sought to parlay his bonhomie with Chinese President Xi Jinping into deals but got both more and less than what he bargained for.
Trump touted deals, some still vague, and claimed that he had gotten support on Iran. The meeting has been dismissed by many Asia hands and much of the media as “pomp and circumstance, signifying nothing.” China hawks fearful of concessions on Taiwan and tech were relieved by their apparent absence.
But this was more than just a holding operation; it may signal a significant shift in the way U.S. leaders approach China. Over time, the summit may be seen as part of a larger historical evolution, set to be played out by up to four follow-on meetings this year. Xi called it a new framework of “constructive strategic stability for three years and beyond.”
The timeline would lock in predictability and stability through Trump’s second term, a time-buying exercise with the hope of shaping a new trajectory at least to the medium term. Xi seems to recognize that Trump has unique problems and is trying to lock in a relationship advantageous to China that could persist beyond just this administration. For Trump, bogged down in Middle East entanglements, economic travails, and facing possible lame-duck-dom after the November elections, buying time may have some appeal.
I have argued in these pages that the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) are a useful metric for U.S.-China ties. From the 1990s through the 2008-09 financial crisis, the United States was in denial, assuming China was liberalizing, becoming like us. Then, starting in the later Obama years, the “China shock,” job losses as China became the world’s factory and narrowed the power gap with the United States, it entered the anger stage—China became toxic, and it still is for much of the Washington commentariat and many in the Trump administration as well.
Why do I think Trump China policy has now entered the bargaining stage? Trump 2.0 has featured a demonstrable downsizing of his ambitions toward China. Gone is talk of changing China’s neo-mercantilist policies. Beijing was the only nation to push back against Trump’s 145 percent “Liberation Day” tariffs—effectively a trade embargo—and restricted exports of rare-earth minerals, essential for everything from autos and semiconductors to advanced weapons, many of which China holds a near-monopoly.
One thing Trump respects is strength. Beijing demonstrated to Trump that he didn’t hold all the cards and underscored the reality of the United States’ and China’s capacity for mutually assured economic disruption, producing the trade truce in the Busan summit last October. With the announcement of a board of trade, a board of investment, and a new dialogue on AI, a process of defining the terms of managed competition appears to be underway. This reflects a mutual strategic decoupling—derisking key competitive sectors like tech, while setting terms for trade and investment in still-to-be-defined “non-sensitive” sectors.
That shift is visible beyond just economics. The language on China in the National Security Strategy focuses on deterrence, dropping the characterization of China as a “strategic competitor,” the designation used in the first Trump administration and continued under former U.S. President Joe Biden. The National Defense Strategy, reportedly toned down by Trump himself, also eschews strategic competitor or adversary terms, saying the U.S. goal of avoiding regional domination “does not require regime change or some other existential struggle.” Trump’s posture does not seem a far cry from the views Xi expressed at the summit, of “competition within proper limits,” or “manageable differences,” or, for that matter, his new formulation of “constructive strategic stability.”
But Chinese officials love inventing these slogans, which mostly end up in the trash can of history. Xi tried, unsuccessfully, to foist a similar concept—“new type of great-power relations”—onto then-U.S. President Barack Obama in 2014. U.S. domestic politics could well scupper the shift, as could Trump’s own mercurial personality; he remains, for now, a lonesome dove amid a bipartisan flock of China hawks in D.C.
Stability may not survive geopolitical pressure points. Xi starkly warned that if the Taiwan issue was “handled poorly” it could lead to conflict—apparently aimed at preempting a pending $14 billion U.S. arms sale to Taipei that Trump has been ambiguous about in comments after the summit.
Whether the United States accepts this formulation or not, managing deep-seated, fundamental U.S.-China differences renders any equilibrium fragile. From incompatible and unavoidably contending goals of Asia-Pacific and global security order, Taiwan, economic competition, rivalry for supremacy of AI and other new technologies, the risk of conflict is not trivial. Trump’s more accommodating posture toward China may make him more predictable, but stability will be more problematic.
In any case, the new comity seems a time-buying exercise by both Washington and Beijing as they mutually continue disentangling interdependency and rewiring supply chains 40 years in the making. Beijing has been steadily decoupling, trying to achieve autonomous supply chains and insulate its economy from the United States.
Last year, Chinese exports are up globally but were down 20 percent in dollar terms with the United States in September alone. Foreign direct investment is down similarly. Beijing has stepped up efforts to reduce the role of the dollar, pushing use of the renminbi for oil payments as a growing share of its trade in goods and services is done in the yuan—more than 30 percent—facilitating developing nations to convert foreign debt to yuan and pushing “panda bonds.”
The Trump administration has aggressively pursued a similar course, pushing an industrial policy reshoring tech manufacturing and rewiring supply chains. Its Pax Silica initiative is mobilizing a coalition of like-minded states to build an alternative supply chain for rare-earth minerals and separately,the U.S. has committed $12 billion to build a stockpile. The White House AI Action Plan seeks to forge an independent AI stack for U.S. export.
Derisking, tariffs, and sanctions have accelerated the reordering of trade since Trump 1.0 launched its trade war with China. U.S. bilateral trade with China has shrunk by about one-third, from $635 billion in 2017 to $415 billion in 2025. The soon-to-be-established board of trade, which Beijing said is to negotiate reciprocal tariff reductions, appears an effort to manage the scope, pace, and limits of separation.
This will be tested as the Trump administration has launched Section 301 trade investigations into Chinese overcapacity; for its part, China has increasingly put in place mirror-image trade restrictions, most recently imposing penalties for foreign firms leaving its supply chain. Bargaining may reduce the risk of conflict, but the vision of a world where the two great powers grow ever more intertangled is largely moribund.
The measure of the summit will be whether it truly marks a new phase or is just a pause between rounds of brinkmanship. Will the board of trade find a reciprocal balance, or will Trump launch a new round of tariffs? Whether the talk of expanding and regularizing diplomatic exchanges, people-to-people contacts, and military talks is realized are key metrics.
The thick web of mutual vulnerabilities, 45 years of accumulated interdependence, still takes time to unwind. All those advanced weapons systems depleted in Trump’s war on Iran will require a lot of gallium and rare-earth magnets to replenish stockpiles.
It took existential near-catastrophes, notably the Cuban missile crisis, before the United States and Soviet Union reached a stable balance and an uneasy coexistence. The best case is if this summit and successive ones this year reach what Jessica Chen Weiss calls a “cold peace”—a taut, fragile, and painful relationship that nevertheless allows for a real coexistence.
