Why the Trump-Xi summit will be underwhelming
Donald Trump’s visit this week to China, the first by a U.S. president since Trump himself visited eight and a half years 8½ earlier, is unlikely to produce a breakthrough given the deep-seated rivalry between Washington and Beijing.Bilateral relations have been acrimonious since the first Trump administration named China “a revisionist power” that sought to “shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests” in its 2017 National Security Strategy. Since then, the U.S. and China have fought bruising trade and technology wars. The two countries have also been on opposite sides of the kinetic conflicts that have broken out in Europe and the Middle East since 2022.The underlying tension in the relationship derives from structural great-power competition. Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, the most formidable Communist Party chief since Mao Zedong, China seeks to displace American technological leadership and dominance of advanced manufacturing. At the same time, Beijing is pursuing hegemony in the Indo-Pacific, aiming to ultimately diminish the U.S. military’s ability to operate in the region.
