What happened when Trump met Xi?

The Trump-Xi meeting validated Beijing’s strategy of pushing back forcefully against U.S. actions. The Trump administration has tried to search for new pressure points with China, moving far beyond tariffs to export controls, port fees, visa restrictions, and sanctions. China has responded with its own expanded toolkit, hitting back with a range of measures that mirror many U.S. actions. In the process, China has discovered which levers seem to be the most effective in dealing with the United States, including soybean purchases and a TikTok deal. And twice now, China has found export controls on rare earths to be its ace of spades.

China’s primary goal is to halt the expansion of U.S. measures against it. No new tariffs or fees. No new export controls or sanctions. No new efforts to hobble its economy or slow down its technological development. Beijing had hoped that the Madrid meeting in September would mark a more lasting truce, but it grew frustrated with what it viewed as the bubbling up of new U.S. measures that violated the spirit of the talks. This came to a head with the expansion of the U.S. Entity List rules that would effectively subject thousands of additional companies connected to China to U.S. export controls. Beijing struck back through a massive expansion of its rare earths export controls that would have far-reaching consequences for global high-technology supply chains.

The recent meeting between Trump and Xi in South Korea marks another momentary de-escalation between the United States and China. But many of the actions both sides have taken are not permanently off the table. Moreover, China has now begun to develop a full-fledged export control regime, not just for rare earths but for a wide range of critical materials and technologies. So, while it may seem as if both sides have simply wound back the clock on their tit-for-tat retaliatory measures, the reality is that this process has helped spur the development of China’s defensive and offensive tech-industrial capabilities.

Any objective assessment of the success of Trump’s meeting with Xi should answer two fundamental analytic questions: 1) Did the meeting advance U.S. policy objectives? 2) Did the meeting position the United States well to advance its interests in the coming year? Despite all the Sturm und Drang that preceded this meeting and the fanfare that accompanied it, substantively, the meeting itself accomplished remarkably little on either count. The United States and China returned to the status quo ante, and U.S. leverage over China has dissipated as Beijing has demonstrated a consistent willingness to retaliate against the United States.

In this latest iteration, the most notable purported concessions the U.S. side extracted from the Chinese side were: 1) a suspension of China’s expansion of its export control regime on rare earth elements, 2) a resumption of Chinese cooperation on fentanyl, and 3) a resumption of Chinese purchases of U.S. soybeans. Yet if one rewinds to the start of the Trump administration in January, it is clear that we are not better off now than at the start of the year: on January 20, China was purchasing U.S. soybeans, cooperating on fentanyl (albeit fitfully and unsatisfactorily), and had no rare earths export control regime in place. Now, in exchange for these stop-gap measures, the United States has lowered tariffs on China and pulled back a U.S. Commerce Department rule on export controls to China. These two moves, respectively, only reduce the incentives for companies to diversify their supply chains away from China and set a pernicious precedent of trading away U.S. export controls, which had previously been non-negotiable.

Looking forward, it seems that the serious negotiations are likely to follow rather than precede the deal made between the two presidents—a dynamic that will play to Beijing’s advantage. That is in large part because this most recent deal seems to be as truncated and delicate as the truces that preceded it—leaving enough ambiguity that both sides can claim victory now and make mischief later. For example, the Trump administration is considering further trade actions beyond the letter of the agreement—but which Beijing will seize on as vitiating the agreement’s spirit, resulting in yet another spike in tensions and a scramble to scurry to a third country capital to defuse the problem. We may even see this rerun play one more time before the end of 2025. The net result is more commotion than motion.

Even if this truce does hold, Beijing has played its cards adeptly by agreeing to a one-year cessation of the expansion of its rare earth export control regime. In a year, the United States will be days away from the midterm elections, and Trump will be loath to see one of his signature deals unravel just before voters go to the polls—a dynamic that will only enhance Beijing’s leverage over Washington. In the meantime, Beijing will have time and space to build out the bureaucratic capacity needed to effectuate this export control regime when the moment comes. Meanwhile, Washington is unlikely to have done enough to remediate its vulnerability to China’s chokehold over rare earth elements. This unsatisfactory state of affairs encapsulates the administration’s China policy, which can be described as friction without competition: the administration is doing enough to aggravate bilateral tensions, but it is not doing enough to actually organize the U.S. government for competition with China.

Following the conclusion of the meeting between Trump and Xi in Busan, the White House declared that the two leaders had reached a “trade and economic deal” that marked a “massive victory” for American workers, farmers, and families. This characterization of the meeting was directionally consistent with Trump’s rating of his meeting with Xi as a 12 on a scale of zero to 10, with 10 being the best.

White House bluster notwithstanding, it is already apparent that Trump and Xi did not reach any breakthrough “deal.” They arrived at a shallow truce with limited deliverables in their ongoing trade war.

Washington and Beijing each published their own interpretations of the agreement reached by both leaders. Their interpretations broadly overlap but do not match. The biggest gap between the two sides was on the scope of China’s pause of its implementation of a rare earths licensing regime. The White House’s characterization of the meeting indicated that China had committed to “effectively eliminate China’s current and proposed export controls on rare earth elements and other critical minerals.” The Chinese presentation of outcomes is far less definitive or expansive on this point.

This imprecision and absence of shared understandings follow a pattern of on-again, off-again agreements during Trump’s second term. A similar pattern occurred following the three previous U.S.-China trade truces this year after negotiations in Geneva, London, and Madrid, all of which were short-lived. In short, announcing deals is easy. Negotiating real deals that represent shared buy-in, actual text, common understandings, and hard commitments is difficult.

Take a step back, though, and it makes sense why both sides are drawn to such agreements. The theater of these meetings offers a stage for Trump and Xi each to demonstrate statesmanship in hammering out deals with their top competitors. And at a deeper level, both leaders believe time is on their side.

China’s leaders likely believe that a U.S.-China trade truce will relieve pressure on their country to make structural changes to their economic model. This, in turn, will buy time for China to “accelerate high-level scientific and technological self-reliance,” Xi’s stated goal for insulating against external pressure on China’s growth model.

By a somewhat similar logic, Trump and his team have argued that they need several years to escape dependence on China for rare earths and magnets. Thus, it makes sense for them to buy time with China if they believe they can use that time to break U.S. dependence on Beijing for rare earths and emerge on the other side in a stronger position to demand greater future concessions.

While the theater of the on-again, off-again trade truces will garner media headlines, the more important story will be measuring which side is better using its time to strengthen its relative economic position. Ultimately, the answer to this question will have far more bearing on each country’s future than fast-fading headlines from underprepared meetings between both leaders.

The Trump-Xi deal pauses the escalating economic confrontation between the United States and China but sets the stage for a more managed—rather than market-based—trade relationship, and one that increasingly blurs the line between strategic and commercial objectives. The White House boasts that the deal will “effectively eliminate” China’s export controls on critical minerals and “open China’s markets to U.S. soybeans and other agricultural exports.” In reality, the agreement leaves Beijing and Washington firmly in control of key strategic levers in the bilateral economic relationship.

The commitments outlined in the deal primarily roll back the escalatory measures imposed since early March, when China retaliated against a White House executive order doubling tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The agreement also includes a pledge from China to curb the flow of fentanyl precursors reaching the United States, an issue tied to the justification for those tariffs. Yet the deal extends beyond IEEPA actions: both sides also pulled back on shipbuilding measures, with Washington suspending for one year the collection of vessel fees, and Beijing withdrawing its countermeasures.

More significantly, the deal ventures beyond commercial issues and into the realm of national and economic security. China agreed to facilitate U.S. access to critical minerals and rare earth elements—materials that are essential for many advanced technology manufacturing and defense—over which it controls global processing capacity and has increasingly restricted exports. In turn, the United States will suspend implementation of a new Bureau of Industry and Security rule that would have expanded the set of Chinese firms facing strict restrictions on access to advanced U.S. technologies. Beijing also agreed to unblock the flow of materials critical to legacy semiconductor production outside its borders—an action spurred by Dutch government actions rather than U.S. intervention. These steps may ease near-term tensions but also signal that national security measures have become negotiable in a commercial context.

At the very least, this de-escalation offers some short-term relief. China’s soybean purchase commitments may give U.S. farmers a reprieve, but it leaves them dependent on Beijing’s willingness to honor the deal. And there are few indications that the broader agreement this is meant to preview will deliver a more stable or market-driven trade relationship. If the Phase One Agreement—touted as a major achievement of the first Trump administration—becomes the model for what follows, U.S. businesses will find themselves in a system where politically calibrated purchases and negotiated security concessions replace market discipline and predictable policy.

The Trump-Xi meeting in South Korea has done little more than pause escalation in a trade conflict that exposes a deeper truth: the United States and China each command chokeholds over critical sectors of the global economy. Both sides agreed to extend their trade truce, pausing new export-control measures and rolling back some retaliatory tariffs. Yet these gestures represent less a breakthrough than a return to the status quo ante—a fragile ceasefire rather than genuine progress on structural challenges that have plagued the U.S.-China economic relationship.

The U.S. and Chinese readouts of the meeting reveal divergent interpretations of what was agreed to, underscoring how temporary this calm may be. The trade war has clarified that both economies are as exposed as they are powerful. The United States depends on China’s rare earth minerals; China still relies on U.S. semiconductor technologies. Each is racing to reduce these vulnerabilities, but the pursuit of disentanglement is far easier to declare than achieve. Even if both achieved self-sufficiency in these strategic arenas, other dependencies would remain. In a tightly woven global economy and with the complexity of modern goods, complete autarky is simply unrealistic.

For the rest of the world, this uneasy truce breeds uncertainty. Neither Washington nor Beijing seems particularly concerned about the ripple effects on others. While they have taken different rhetorical tracks, the reality is that both remain focused primarily on domestic industrial and political goals. Trump’s Asia tour was framed as a dealmaking bonanza, securing pledges from Asian allies to “revitalize the U.S. industrial base,” “further America’s energy dominance,” and to “promote American leadership in the technology revolution.”

Beijing, by contrast, has sought to occupy the rhetorical high ground, styling itself as a defender of openness and multilateralism. Xi’s speech at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum cast China as a champion of free trade and inclusive development, opposing “protectionism, unilateralism, and bullying.” Yet China’s newly issued Five-Year Plan tells a more self-centered story: one of reinforcing its manufacturing dominance and accelerating technological self-reliance.

These are two economic juggernauts preoccupied with their own advancement, while smaller economies scramble to avoid collateral damage. Over the past year, Washington and Beijing have behaved like boxers trading blows—each scoring points, neither moving forward. But this is not a fight that ends with one side on the mat, or even a finite race with a single finish line. The United States and China are bound to a shared arena they cannot exit, tied together by global supply chains, markets, and financial systems.

The real question now is what kind of environment the United States can shape to thrive amid such realities—one that advances its interests while offering allies and partners a sense of mutual benefit, and one that establishes a stable equilibrium with China. Trump’s comments that a trade deal with Beijing might require annual renegotiation hardly inspire the predictability businesses or allies crave. With about six months to go before Trump’s planned visit to Beijing in April, Washington faces its best chance to convert the fragile truce into a more constructive, comprehensive deal—an effort worth attempting even if success is far from certain.

Trump’s musings, just before meeting Xi, that the United States would resume nuclear testing if China and Russia did so, were confusing, to say the least.

First of all, Russia and China are not testing—that is, detonating—nuclear weapons as far as we know, and we know a lot. The United States has a very extensive system of sensors around the world designed to monitor such things. That’s why we knew about North Korean, Pakistani, and Indian tests of recent decades, even when some of the bombs were very small in nuclear yield. It is true that China has embarked on a major buildup in its nuclear forces and that Russian President Vladimir Putin has made nuclear threats during the Ukraine war. It is also true that Russia has tested new types of delivery vehicles that could carry nuclear weapons. These actions are concerning, but they are not the same as nuclear tests, meaning high-powered nuclear explosions. This century, only North Korea has carried out such explosions; no other country on Earth has done so (and the United States itself last tested in 1992).

There is no treaty banning nuclear weapons tests. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was negotiated in the 1990s, but it is not in effect or binding on any country. China and the United States never ratified it; Russia withdrew its ratification during the recent breakdown in relations with Washington. Thus, in theory, the United States could test without breaking international law or obligations.

Moreover, testing a nuclear weapon is not inherently dangerous. We have done it more than 1,000 times, between 1945 and 1992. And compared to some other actions one could take, like actually threatening nuclear weapons use, a test conducted safely and deeply underground would not be the end of the world.

But we should be trying to move geopolitics in the opposite direction, making nuclear weapons less rather than more usable and prominent in international relations. Most of the time, Trump himself seems to agree with this point. He should return to that view. Perhaps the positive atmospherics around the Trump-Xi summit after the fact will now allow him to do so.

The Trump-Xi meeting on the sidelines of APEC produced modest outcomes, with many important questions remaining unanswered. It will make for a temporary U.S.-China truce but will not provide for long-term stability in the U.S.-China relationship. First, the outcomes announced were on the low end of most analysts’ expectations. Chinese soybean purchases are roughly equivalent to past years (or what we would have expected if the Liberation Day tariffs had never been implemented); China’s crackdown on fentanyl exports has long been promised; and the TikTok sale was not complete despite months of work to land it. The TikTok sale will probably be completed soon, and the Chinese will almost certainly agree to buy more agricultural goods as part of a trade deal, but as a one-shot deal, this didn’t amount to much.

Instead, many of the most important questions in the U.S.-China relationship have gone unanswered. While the People’s Republic of China (PRC) agreed to pause the implementation of its October 9 rare earths measures for a year, this doesn’t guarantee that the Trump administration will actually be able to persuade Beijing to keep critical minerals flowing, now that China’s leadership has recognized it as a useful source of leverage. Likewise, we know that the U.S. side agreed to pause its use of the affiliates rule, but we do not know whether the Trump administration extended its promise of an indefinite pause on new technology export controls that it gave China in June. Trump also denied that NVIDIA would sell the Blackwill chip to China, but strongly intimated that NVIDIA may be pushing for new sales to the PRC in the coming weeks. On geopolitics, Trump declared that the issue of Taiwan did not come up in his meeting with Xi—a notable omission, if true, as Xi always raises Taiwan forcefully with his counterparts—the Chinese readout of the meeting did not mention Taiwan one way or the other. Regional allies continue to worry that Beijing will persuade Washington to compromise its position on Taiwan in the pursuit of a trade deal, and the likely Trump visit to Beijing will keep this concern alive and well. In sum, the thorniest issues in the U.S.-China relationship were either not addressed or were not acknowledged publicly. 

Beyond these vagaries, the Trump-Xi détente does not change the nature of U.S.-China competition. The trade deal that the two sides work toward will build upon the announcements in Busan, and while it will almost certainly include more large agricultural purchases, it probably won’t address long-standing concerns about problematic Chinese economic practices. Likewise, U.S. and Chinese bureaucracies remain poised to implement new export control measures should their leaders come away disappointed from continued bilateral engagements. Planned leader-level visits in 2026 mean that this truce will probably endure for some months, but this détente is still likely to be a fleeting one.

Late in his life, the French artist Henri Matisse was too frail to stand and paint. He instead began to create with collage, cutting simplified forms from painted paper and arranging them to use negative space—the background canvas—to create compositions. Trump seems to have borrowed this technique last week during his tour of Asia. The trade truce he reached with Xi stands out in part because it is framed by the background of the trip’s relatively muted treatment of regional security dynamics.

Trump’s tour of Asia, centered around his meeting with Xi in Korea and coinciding with the APEC summit, was widely expected to focus on economic issues. Yet there was nonetheless anticipation and indeed agitation that the trip would continue the administration’s public haranguing of its allies to make substantial increases to their defense budgets, that the Trump-Xi meeting might produce relaxation of U.S. restrictions on exports of advanced technology to China, and perhaps might even include discussion of the sensitive subject of Taiwan.

Trump was instead complimentary about Japan’s defense activities—despite its planned spending being well below the level Trump officials have indicated the administration wants—and affirmed U.S. commitment to the long-standing alliance. He agreed in principle to South Korea’s plans to commission a nuclear-powered submarine, which Seoul views as a necessary counter to North Korean capabilities, and that South Korean President Lee Jae Myung astutely presented as a means of reducing the burden on U.S. forces. That Trump did not, in any of his remarks, digress rhetorically into demands for more is a notable display of discipline from a notoriously undisciplined and appetitive president. More importantly, it paints a picture of a United States that is ready and willing to deal with regional actors based on bilateral economics and not on the extent of their alignment with U.S. security concerns about China.

The Trump-Xi meeting sits similarly atop this background. With Nvidia’s most advanced semiconductors and the status of Taiwan appearing to have been cut out of the conversation, the impression left is that the United States can work with China on the same basis as it can with other regional actors—trade talks can be about trade, and not about systemic rivalry or great power competition. It suggests, moreover, that Trump might be less interested in a comprehensive agreement than he is in making a series of issue-specific arrangements. Xi might be similarly inclined, given Trump’s history of making sweeping promises that later prove to have little staying power.

Amid much buildup, Trump finally had his first face-to-face meeting with Xi on the margins of the APEC summit in Korea on October 30. It is true that the meeting was hastily prepared, not very long, and focused on fairly narrow, non-strategic issues. It is also true that many of the so-called agreed-upon points will require further negotiation and testing. Some pundits were quick to declare China the “winner” of the event. But such assessments, while attracting clicks and making headlines, are not the real story.

The significance of the Busan meeting is that the two sides sent a clear signal that they will work to manage their relations and not let them spiral downward, as seen in the recent past. A calendar of continuing high-level meetings has been agreed to, and a series of lower-level official engagements will be held on issues such as military-to-military relations, trade and investment, and law enforcement cooperation. In an administration known for its unpredictability, this is the longest-term planning we have seen. While it is true that there are possibilities for derailment on both sides, Trump seems determined to keep his “fantastic relationship” with Xi and appears to be very involved in decisionmaking.

Perhaps Trump has sensed that this is in keeping with prevailing hopes not just in Asia and elsewhere, but also in the United States. A recent survey by the Chicago Council on World Affairs indicates that the tide of opinion on China in the United States may have shifted slightly. While only 40% of Americans supported engagement and cooperation with China last year, that number has ticked up to 53% recently, likely indicating that negative sentiment on China is not very deep and possibly that Trump’s own contradictory commentary on China and Xi has opened space for reflection. It is also possible that the trade war and China’s responses have laid bare the potential costs of confrontation.

Whatever his motivations, Trump will meet difficulties converting the current U.S.-China “truce” into a more comprehensive framework for bilateral relations. There are many fractious issues, and the natural default is to the underlying competitive dynamics between the two. Trump seems to understand the danger of that default, but forestalling that path will require a disciplined process that has not been a strong suit of the Trump administration, so far. In its absence, the repeated cycles of high-level engagement followed by recriminations and deterioration are likely to continue.