U.S.-China summits can change the world. President Richard Nixon’s 1972 trip to Beijing gave the United States an advantage over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. President Jiang Zemin’s 1997 tour of the United States eased China’s entry into the global economy and accelerated its national rise. The summit that begins Thursday in Beijing between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping is taking place at another important juncture in the two countries’ relationship.
When Mr. Trump first won the presidency a decade ago, he correctly labeled China a threat to American interests and criticized past U.S. presidents for their naïveté. In both his terms in office, however, Mr. Trump has weakened the United States relative to China. The damage has been especially bad in his second term.
His failed tariffs have been the central example, setting off a humbling chain of events. The tariffs proved ineffective at intimidating China even before the Supreme Court ruled some of them illegal. In response, China restricted U.S. access to valuable rare earth metals — and learned just how much leverage it has. To regain access to the minerals, Mr. Trump agreed to allow China to buy advanced American semiconductors that power artificial intelligence.
He has also diluted instruments of American power that have long been crucial to constraining foreign adversaries. He has alienated partners that can help counter China, including Japan, Australia, India, the European Union and Canada. He has cut funding for scientific research, diminishing American prowess in A.I., green energy and other realms.
Mr. Trump arrives in Beijing without the aura of strength that he cherishes. His war in Iran has hurt the American economy, and he reportedly plans to lobby Mr. Xi to buy more American goods, in agriculture and other sectors. In exchange, Mr. Xi wants weaker American support for Taiwan and even more access to American semiconductors. Either of these exchanges would be a bad deal for the United States.
Mr. Trump and his aides should recognize that Mr. Xi has his own problems, starting with wary Asian neighbors, a real-estate downturn, a disappointing job market and a demographic collapse. The safest outcome from the summit would be narrow agreements on shared interests, such as limits on A.I. to prevent the development of bioweapons. The two countries should also try to stabilize their relationship and ensure that bilateral military communications continue. A limited agreement along these lines would buy time for the United States to undo some of Mr. Trump’s damage and start rebuilding for the long competition ahead.
China policy is a rare area in which Mr. Trump shifted the consensus in both the Republican and Democratic parties. In his 2016 campaign, he argued that China had exploited the United States and that American leaders needed to get tougher. After taking office, he imposed targeted tariffs on semiconductors, steel, electronics, industrial machinery and other products. The Biden administration largely maintained or expanded those tariffs, and it strengthened alliances in Asia to restrain China’s aggression. For a time, Mr. Trump seemed to have started a bipartisan era of realpolitik toward a country that seeks to diminish American power.
As is so often the case, though, Mr. Trump showed little strategic discipline, and he prioritized his own personal and political interests over the nation’s. Before his first term had ended, he had begun to abandon his apparent concern over China. In his second term, he has become even more accommodating.
His administration’s National Security Strategy no longer uses the phrase “great power competition” to describe the relationship with China, as Ryan Hass of the Brookings Institution noted. Mr. Trump instead seems tempted to allow China to dominate Asia, while the United States focuses on Latin America and the Middle East. “It was as if the president decided that the United States was now content to run aside China rather than slow it down or run faster,” Evan Medeiros wrote for the Chicago Council of Global Affairs.
The second-term tariffs typified his failures. They applied to virtually the entire world, including American allies, and Mr. Trump imposed them haphazardly and illegally. “The United States is losing ground in Asia,” the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, recently concluded. In the past few months, the war in Iran has continued the trend. Some countries skeptical of China, like Vietnam and the Philippines, have nonetheless turned to Beijing for help in getting access to energy. And America’s inability to defeat Iran’s much smaller military has raised questions about whether it could help defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion.
The biggest risk of this week’s summit is that Mr. Trump will trade short-term American gains, such as the exporting of more soybeans and other agricultural goods, for long-term Chinese advantages. Mr. Xi, as part of his effort to reunify Taiwan with mainland China, may ask the United States to explicitly oppose Taiwanese independence or delay weapons sales to the island. Either move would be a mistake. Already, Mr. Trump has signaled a worrisome lack of interest in Taiwan’s future as a democratic ally and economic partner.
Semiconductors are a related area of concern. Taiwan manufactures many of the semiconductors that American companies use. China, for its part, remains significantly behind the United States in the race to develop the most advanced A.I. The Biden administration deserves some credit for the gap because it refused to allow American companies to sell the most advanced line of semiconductors to China. Mr. Trump has been weaker on the issue.
Mr. Xi very much wants the restrictions removed, and Mr. Trump has begun to loosen them. China now has permission to purchase Nvidia’s high-end H200 chips, but it is still blocked from buying the company’s top-line chips, known as Blackwell. If Mr. Trump ever lifts that restriction, he will be handing Mr. Xi a huge victory.
The competition between the United States and China matters to the entire world. China wants to dominate Asia and expand its global influence. It wants to discredit democracy and downgrade the importance of human rights and political equality. It wants a world where ethnic and religious oppression is accepted. China is the most important ally of several brutal dictatorships, including Russia, North Korea and Iran. Anybody who believes in pluralism, freedom and other liberal values should be rooting against a world where Mr. Xi and the Chinese Communist Party have more sway.
The best hope for the United States to win this competition is to reject Mr. Trump’s shambolic, self-serving approach to governing and diplomacy. In the long term, the United States should employ a version of the strategy that prevailed in the long 20th-century struggles against fascism and communism. It involves alliances to rebuild international systems of trade and security for today’s world. Doing that will take time. In Beijing this week, Mr. Trump should not make the task harder by handing China more victories.
Source photograph by William Sherman/Getty Images.
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