WASHINGTON — President Trump faces the most important international meeting of his second term on Thursday: face-to-face talks with Xi Jinpingwhich has turned China into a formidable economic and military rival to the United States.
The two presidents face a broad agenda as they meet in Seoul, starting with an escalating trade war between the two countries over tariffs and high-tech exports. The list also includes US demands on China's crackdown on fentanyl, China's assistance to Russia in the war with Ukraine, the future of Taiwan and China's growing nuclear arsenal.
Trump has already promised, characteristically, that the meeting will be a great success.
“It will be fantastic for both countries and it will be fantastic for the world,” he said last week.
But it is not yet clear whether the specific results of the summit will meet this high standard.
Finance Minister Scott Bessent said on Sunday that both sides agreed on the “framework” according to which China will delay imposing strict controls on rare earth elementsminerals critical 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 response, Bessent said, the United States would abandon its harsh tariffs on Chinese goods.
Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to Beijing under then-President Biden, said such a deal would amount to “an uneasy trade truce rather than a comprehensive trade deal.”
“This is probably the best we can expect,” he said in an interview Monday. However, he added, “this will be a positive step to stabilize global markets and allow trade between the US and China to continue for a while.”
But U.S. and Chinese officials have remained silent on what, if any, agreement has been reached on Xi Jinping's other major trade demand: easing U.S. restrictions on high-tech exports to China, especially advanced semiconductor chips used for artificial intelligence.
Burns said the technology rivalry between the two superpowers is “the most sensitive… in terms of where this relationship will go, which country will become more powerful.”
Giving China easy access to advanced semiconductors “will only help [the Chinese army] in competition with the US military for power in the Indo-Pacific region,” he warned.
Other former officials and China hawks outside the administration were even more blunt in saying they were concerned Trump might be too willing to trade long-term technology assets for short-term trade deals.
In August, Trump loosened export controls to allow Nvidia, the world leader in artificial intelligence chips, to sell more semiconductors to China in an unusual deal that American company will pay 15% of its income 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 risks trading a strategic technology advantage “for $20 billion and Nvidia's profits.”
At the heart of the disagreement over technology, some China watchers warn, is a fundamental mismatch between the two presidents: Trump is almost entirely focused on trade and business deals, while Xi is focused on supplanting the United States as the largest economic and military power in Asia.
“I don’t think the administration has a China strategy,” said Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “It has a trade strategy, not a China strategy.”
“The administration does not seem to be focused on competing with China,” said Jonathan Jing, a former CIA analyst now at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “She's focused on making deals… It's tactics without strategy.”
“We have fallen into a kind of trade and technological myopia,” he added. “We're not talking about issues like China's coercion [of smaller countries] in the South China Sea. … China doesn’t want to have a bigger, broader conversation.”
It is unclear whether Trump and Xi Jinping will have the time or inclination to discuss anything other than trade in detail.
And even on immediate economic issues, this week's ceasefire is unlikely to lead to permanent peace.
“As with all such agreements, the devil is in the details,” said Burns, the former ambassador. “These countries will remain fierce trade rivals. Expect friction and further trade fights well into 2026.”
“Buckle up,” Jing said. “We are likely to see even more sudden moves from Beijing ahead.”
In the long term, Trump's legacy in US-China relations will be based not only on trade deals, but also on broader competition for economic and military power in the Asia-Pacific region. Regardless of how this week's meetings go, those challenges still lie ahead.
