Trump and Chinese Circumstance

“"He loves good granite" is what President Trump said he learned during his summit with Xi Jinping.

 

If so, Mr. Xi didn't see much to love during his visit to Washington. There was plenty of fluff but little hard agreement. The two superpowers will talk about the future of what they've agreed to call "superintelligence." Messrs. Trump and Xi intend to meet twice more this year, during international gatherings scheduled for November and December. The trade truce has been extended until Jan. 10, with some mutual adjustments and concessions. There was a viewing of the portrait of Joe Biden's autopen signature. Two giant pandas have landed in Atlanta.

 

Wisely, neither Mr. Trump nor his Chinese counterpart seemed to expect anything more substantive from the summit. That shouldn't surprise anyone. The U.S. and China have the most complex international relationship in world history, and the conditions for long-term stability don't currently exist.

 

The centripetal forces that draw the two countries together and the centrifugal ones that drive them apart are both strong and in flux. Trade, finance and people-to-people ties binding the countries are much stronger than anything between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. China's deep integration into the international economy makes it simultaneously a more important partner and a more dangerous rival than the Soviets ever managed to be.

 

The military and technological rivalry between the two countries is far more complicated than the competition between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. over nuclear weapons and delivery systems. The nuclear competition is still there, but add artificial intelligence, cyber, drones and bioweapons to nuclear weapons and missiles and we are in a qualitatively different and more difficult place.

 

China's ideological system and approach are more sophisticated than Soviet communism and pose fundamentally different, and in many ways more difficult, challenges.

 

The future of the competition is impossible to predict. Will one country gain such significant tech advantages from breakthroughs in superintelligence or quantum computing that it can overturn the economic and military balance of power -- and if so, which one? Will the imposing but rickety Chinese economic system implode under the cumulative weight of the poor consequences of state planning? Will political polarization combine with half-baked populist policy to leave the U.S. so weak and divided that it cannot bring the full weight of its resources and power to its competition with China? Will the Iran war break, cement or reshape American power in the Persian Gulf? Will the North Atlantic Treaty Organization fragment as a result of Ukraine events? Nobody knows, so managing the U.S.-China relationship must take place under the shadow of important uncertainties.

 

Mr. Trump is much more comfortable navigating this kind of terrain than conventional policymakers are. Uncertainty is his native milieu and improvisation his greatest skill. For Mr. Xi, who comes out of the engineering culture of modern technocratic China, the turmoil in world affairs is less comfortable, but a revisionist power like China can also benefit from rapid international change.

 

With both sides sensibly resolved to avoid chasing imaginary grand bargains, the two leaders could focus on their common interests. This is where the fluff came in. Messrs. Trump and Xi both benefit from stressing the power difference between themselves and the leaders of the world's lesser powers. The more pomp and circumstance at the summit, the more both leaders look larger than life, and the more their own peoples and the world at large see the two of them as giants among dwarfs.

 

Not all the dwarfs were happy. Noting that Mr. Xi skipped the United Nations General Assembly but found time to meet Mr. Trump, many observers in Europe and beyond worry that Messrs. Xi and Trump are forming some kind of durable "G-2" world order. That isn't where we are. Mr. Trump is a disrupter, not an order-builder, and Mr. Xi's ambitions wouldn't be satisfied by any grand compromise the Trump administration would be prepared to offer.

 

The U.S. and China are far and away the world's two most powerful countries, but the nature of their ultimate relationship is still up for grabs. In the meantime, they manage the relationship as best they can, while each side looks for advantages. This is the granite-hard reality of world politics today. The September summit reflected that reality and projected it onto the global stage.” [1]

 

1. Trump and Chinese Circumstance. Walter Russell Mead.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 29 Sep 2026: A15.