Slouching Toward Beijing: The Trump-Xi Summit and the Trajectory of U.S.-China Strategic Competition

President Trump is not a China hawk. In his first term, this fact was partially obscured by the accomplishments of administration officials who used the political opening he created to break the paradigm of U.S. policy toward China and place the United States on a more explicitly competitive footing. But in his second term, with those officials largely absent and the President more assertively wielding the levers of party control and presidential power, the United States has taken a decidedly softer stance toward China.

The second Trump Administration has ignored the law on TikTok, lowered tariffs after China weaponized rare earths, weakened export controls, and approved advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip sales to China.  The president has broken campaign pledges to curtail visas for Chinese students and ban Chinese purchases of U.S. farmland. To be sure, some competitive elements endure. The Pentagon, for example, continues to emphasize deterrence against China along the First Island Chain in the Indo-Pacific. However, even at the Pentagon there are signs of a shift, from its Obama-style embrace of military-to-military communications with China to its rhetorical attacks on strawman policies that would be “unnecessarily confrontational” by seeking to “dominate,” “strangle,” or “humiliate” China.[i]  

President Trump’s summit meeting with General Secretary Xi in Beijing this May must be understood in this context. The summit was mostly ceremonial, with its few substantive results clouded by conflicting readouts from the two governments. The summit did not increase the risk of near-term conflict, harm the regional military balance, or cause lasting damage to U.S. alliances. Nonetheless, it stayed the course of U.S. policy on China on a heading of truce or détente.

With President Trump and General Secretary Xi set to meet three more times this year, the United States risks a return to the “China calendar,” the pernicious tendency of prior administrations to self-censor and delay competitive actions to avoid disrupting diplomatic engagements with Beijing. President Trump’s eagerness for bilateral pageantry and headline-grabbing “deals” makes each upcoming meeting a point of leverage for China to constrain the United States on Taiwan arms sales, export controls, and more.

The Trump Administration’s accommodationist course risks squandering the opportunity to marshal U.S. structural advantages against China, which are real but not immutable. And it would cede precious time to Beijing to achieve asymmetric interdependence—securing supply chains, decoupling from the United States while weaponizing U.S. dependencies, diversifying export markets, cornering the global market for key inputs, and aggressively pursuing a dominant position in vanguard technology sectors.

The United States should be focused on achieving a win—not a truce—in the competition with China. With encouragement from U.S. allies and Republicans in Congress, perhaps President Trump will take inspiration from his first term to find a more winning formula.

“Constructive Relationship of Strategic Stability”

In a narrow sense, President Trump and General Secretary Xi arrived in Beijing with a similar goal: to buy time to increase their advantage over the long term.

General Secretary Xi sought to perpetuate the economic truce established at Busan in October 2025 while pressing for security concessions—on Taiwan above all. His interest in perpetuating the status quo suggests confidence stemming from China’s progress in key technological sectors, success in turning back U.S. tariffs and export controls through its weaponization of rare earths, and disunity in the West that has undermined collective action against China. General Secretary Xi’s confidence that he has the upper hand in negotiations with President Trump does not mean all is well in China. Indeed, China’s domestic challenges continue to mount: civil unrest, elite paranoia, military corruption, capital flight, youth unemployment, a looming debt crisis, involuted manufacturing firms, and more. All the more reason for General Secretary Xi to create a positive diplomatic atmosphere that eases U.S. pressure and provides Beijing time and space to address these issues.

President Trump had more immediate and tactical goals: the pageantry of his personal relationship with a strong leader, visible economic deals he could present at home, and freedom from a new confrontation while managing Iran, elevated consumer prices, and pending midterm elections. As reporting from Politico captured in April, administration officials led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have been “walking on eggshells,” anxious to preserve the truce while building resilience to Chinese economic pressure and revitalizing the U.S. defense industrial base.[ii]

Neither side got all it wanted. By any substantive measure, not much happened in Beijing. On investment, rare earths, export controls, tariffs, artificial intelligence, and Iran, the summit produced atmospherics rather than breakthroughs. The two sides agreed to establish a Board of Trade and Board of Investment, but their institutional scope remains undefined. Promised agricultural purchases echoed the hollow commitments of the Phase 1 deal from 2020. A purchase of 200 Boeing aircraft was below expectations and not reflected in the Chinese readout.

The most notable outcome was the Trump Administration’s acquiescence to the Chinese formulation of a “constructive relationship of strategic stability.”[iii] This is an evolution of Xi’s “new model of great power relations” that he has been advocating for more than a decade, but which U.S. administrations had previously rejected. This updated version emphasizes “cooperation as the mainstay,” “moderate competition,” “manageable differences,” and “promises of peace.”[iv] China intends this formulation to establish a new baseline of bilateral relations that frames any future U.S. steps to address China’s military buildup and industrial overcapacity—under this administration or the next—as confrontational, escalatory, and aggressive. Thus, it is surprising the Trump Administration agreed to it, especially when it appears to have received little if anything in return for the concession.

The summit was also a political setback for Taiwan. Most consequentially, President Trump ignored President Reagan’s Six Assurances by explicitly consulting China about arms sales to Taiwan. President Trump’s belief that arms sales are a “very good negotiating chip” is exactly backwards. Putting the issue on the table provides China more opportunities to extract concessions and leaves Taiwan more vulnerable. President Trump also made comments in post-summit interviews parroting General Secretary Xi’s characterization of Taiwan’s president as seeking independence. He also repeated false attacks on Taiwan for “stealing” the U.S. chip industry. Repeating his mistake in the Russia-Ukraine war, President Trump positioned the United States as a neutral arbiter in the Taiwan Strait rather than a party with clear interests and the resolve to defend them. It was encouraging that Trump reportedly defended Japan’s Prime Minister Takaichi against Xi’s charges that Tokyo’s rearmament is destabilizing. But his failure to defend Taiwan with equivalent firmness—and his subsequent criticism of Taipei—suggests the asymmetry was not accidental.

The Way Ahead

Left to its own devices, the Trump Administration will continue its drift toward accommodation. Hoping for self-correction is not a strategy. Congress should act on several fronts.

Congress must push the administration to approve and deliver—without further delay—the authorized Taiwan arms package and make clear through legislation that arms sales to Taiwan are a matter of statute, not diplomacy. It should pass the PORCUPINE Act to streamline arms sales to Taiwan. It should codify the Six Assurances into law. Whatever form the so-called Boards of Trade and Investment might take, Congress should oppose and prevent expanded Chinese access to the American economy. And it should block further sales of advanced AI chips to China.

Congress should also encourage the president to defend U.S. allies under direct pressure from China. In particular, China is likely to escalate pressure on Japan in the hopes of undermining Prime Minister Takaichi and slowing Japan’s defense modernization. Congress should urge President Trump to actively and publicly defend Japan. Speaker Johnson should invite Prime Minister Takaichi to address a Joint Session of Congress this fall.

Finally, Congress should press the president to shift from a unilateral trade agenda focused on commercial access toward a multilateral approach that seeks to build a coalition of like-minded countries to counter China’s industrial overcapacity. From Europe to the Global South, there is not only a growing awareness of the dire economic and security consequences of China’s economic model, but an increasing willingness to act. The time is ripe to put the greatest asymmetric advantage of the United States—its alliances—to good use.

Conclusion

For the time being, the Beijing summit has advanced a framework that would make deterrence harder to sustain and competition harder to win over the long term. It is not too late to reverse course. The United States has structural advantages over China. What it needs now is the political will and strategic discipline to marshal these advantages in concert with its allies. This is the surest path to peace through strength in the Indo-Pacific.