WASHINGTON- President Trump faces the most important international meeting of his second term on Thursday: face-to-face negotiations with Xi Jinping, who has turned China into a formidable economic and military challenge to the United States.
The two presidents face a broad agenda during their meeting in Seoul, starting with the escalation of the trade war between the two countries over tariffs and high-tech exports. The list also includes U.S. demands that China crack down on fentanyl, China's help to Russia in its war with Ukraine, the future of Taiwan and China's growing nuclear arsenal.
Trump has already promised, as usual, that the meeting will be a great success.
“It's going to be fantastic for both countries and it's going to be fantastic for the whole world,” he said last week.
But it is not yet clear whether the concrete results of the summit will live up to that high standard.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that the two sides agreed to a “framework” under which China would delay implementing strict controls on rare earth elements, minerals crucial to the production of high-tech products from smartphones and electric vehicles to military aircraft and missiles. He said China also agreed to resume purchasing soybeans from American farmers and crack down on fentanyl components.
In exchange, Bessent said, the United States will back off its harsh tariffs on Chinese products.
Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to Beijing under then-President Biden, said such a deal would amount to “an uneasy trade truce rather than a comprehensive trade deal.”
“That may be the best we can hope for,” he said in an interview Monday. Still, he added, “it will be a positive step to stabilize global markets and allow trade between the United States and China to continue for the time being.”
But U.S. and Chinese officials have remained tight-lipped about what, if anything, has been agreed upon regarding Xi's other big trade demand: looser U.S. restrictions on high-tech exports to China, especially advanced semiconductor chips used for artificial intelligence.
Burns said the two superpowers' technological competition is “the most delicate… in terms of where this relationship is going to go, which country is going to emerge more powerful.”
Giving China easy access to advanced semiconductors “would only help [the Chinese army] in its competition with the US military for power in the Indo-Pacific,” he warned.
Other former officials and China hawks outside the administration have said, even more clearly, that they are concerned that Trump is too willing to trade long-term technology assets for short-term trade deals.
In August, Trump eased export controls to allow Nvidia, the world leader in artificial intelligence chips, to sell more semiconductors to China, in an unusual deal under which the US company would pay 15% of its revenue from sales to the US Treasury.
Matthew Pottinger, Trump's top China adviser during his first term, protested in a recent podcast interview that the deal risked trading a strategic technological advantage “for $20 billion and Nvidia's bottom line.”
Behind the controversy over technology, some China watchers warn, there is a basic mismatch between the two presidents: Trump focuses almost exclusively on trade and trade deals, while Xi focuses on displacing the United States as Asia's largest economic and military power.
“I don't think the administration has a China strategy,” said Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the German Marshall Fund in the United States. “You have a trade strategy, not a China strategy.”
“The administration doesn't seem to be focused on competition with China,” said Jonathan Czin, a former CIA analyst now at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “It focuses on making deals… It's tactics without strategy.”
“We have fallen into a kind of commercial and technological myopia,” he added. “We are not talking about issues like China's coercion [of smaller countries] in the South China Sea. … China doesn’t want to have that broader, broader conversation.”
It's not clear that Trump and Xi have the time or inclination to talk in detail about anything other than trade.
And even on the hottest economic issues, this week's ceasefire is unlikely to produce permanent peace.
“As with all these deals, the devil will be in the details,” said Burns, the former ambassador. “The two countries will remain fierce trade rivals. Future friction and new trade duels are expected well into 2026.”
“Buckle up,” Czin said. “There are likely to be more sudden moves by Beijing in the future.”
In the long term, Trump's legacy in US-China relations will depend not only on trade agreements but on the broader competition for economic and military power in the Pacific Rim. No matter how this week's meetings go, those challenges still lie ahead.
