Was There A Trump-Xi Summit? How Could You Tell?

Not much happened. It could have been worse.

Photo by Yang Yang on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has been a bit preoccupied this week with the important day job responsibilities of herding cats leading the faculty of the Fletcher School for Commencement Week. So it has been difficult to keep on top of current events.

I was dimly aware, however, that the President of the United States was going to visit the paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing for a two-day summit. I also vaguely recall that it has already been postponed once due to, you know, the strategic clusterfuck that is Operation Epic Fury.

In the run-up to the summit, the New York Times’ Ana Swanson noted that Trump’s strategic ambitions on China had been downsized from both his first term and his 2024 campaign pronouncements:

When President Trump campaigned in 2024, he promised a trade agenda that would hit China harder than any other economic partner, expanding on actions he had taken in his first term.

Mr. Trump talked about imposing a tariff of 60 percent or more on the country, and proposed stripping China of the preferential trade relations given to it when it joined the World Trade Organization. The rest of the world would be subject to tariffs too, but they would be much lower, at 10 or 20 percent.

More than a year into Mr. Trump’s second term, the picture looks dramatically different….

Rather than pushing China for broader structural changes to its economy, as Mr. Trump’s aides did in his first term, the focus now is largely on maintaining stable relations between the countries, while restoring or increasing U.S. sales of products like airplanes, ethanol, soybeans, beef and sorghum.

The remarkable shrinking of Mr. Trump’s Chinese ambitions is the result of the events of the last year, when China responded to Mr. Trump’s tariffs by cutting off the supply of rare earth minerals and magnets needed by American companies making everything from cars and weaponry to power tools.

Facing the prospect of shuttered U.S. factories and widespread economic damage, the Trump administration appears to have given up the idea of a more ambitious deal with China — widely acknowledged as America’s most problematic trading partner — even as it presses less troublesome partners more aggressively than ever before.

Sounds like a low-but-well-defined bar: a soybean deal here, an aircraft deal there, and that would be that. Writing in the National Interest, Graham Allison sounded upbeat about this kind of outcome:

I am offering 4 to 1 odds that the summit will be, and will be declared by both leaders to be, a great success. My confidence in offering this bet is based on several judgments: each wants this to be a success; each is prepared to give the other what he needs to declare the summit successful; each has informed the other that he’s prepared to deliver; and the summit managers working for each team have laid the groundwork to ensure success.

Peering deeper into my cloudy crystal ball, I’ll hazard a further bet that this will be remembered as the “business” summit in which economics is elevated to a position of equality with geopolitics and “business statecraft” comes to play a larger role in diplomacy….

Last year, President Trump and his team made the mistake of choosing a course of action when imposing extreme tariffs without thinking carefully about how China would respond. As he has told colleagues, it is not a mistake he plans to repeat. Now when considering actions he pauses to ask: “What could China do in response?” As he says: “It’s a big chess game at a very high level. It’s very high-level chess, the highest, and I’m dealing with very smart players.”….

Seeing US-China relations through a business lens means analyzing relations between the two countries as one would assess relations between companies that are simultaneously fierce rivals and friendly partners. They are forced by circumstances to find ways to simultaneously compete and cooperate.

So now that the summit is over, how did the business summit go?

Well… if the Guardian’s Amy Hawkins is correct, not a whole lot got done:

Trump said on Friday he and Xi Jinping, China’s leader, “settled a lot of different problems that other people wouldn’t have been able to solve”. But he didn’t provide much detail on what those solutions were.

“My guess is that despite all the ceremony and summit theatrics, that at the end of the day, this summit will not be that significant,” said Amanda Hsiao, the China director at the Eurasia Group, an advisory and consultancy business. “The core of the relationship hasn’t changed.”

The Chinese readout of Xi and Trump’s final bilateral on Friday gave little concrete information on what had been achieved by the meetings, which have been called the “stalemate summit”.

But what about business deals? Did we see some business deals? The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin is, shall we say, skeptical:

President Trump departed Beijing a few hours ago, hailing “fantastic trade deals” struck during his two-day summit.

Still, many analysts and investors appear underwhelmed by a lack of details or breakthroughs on key issues like tariffs, Iran and tech restrictions. The summit seems to have fallen short of already diminished expectations.

For the 17 business leaders who accompanied Trump on the trip, the deal flow also appeared thinner than what was announced on his last presidential trip to China, in 2017.

The negative market reaction to the end of the summit bolsters Sorkin’s conclusions. And Swanson’s post-summit report pointed out the slight gap between Trump administration enthusiasm and Chinese chill about the summit deliverables:

President Trump departed Beijing on Friday, touting trade deals to sell American-made airplanes, farm goods and other products, the signature outcome of his two-day summit with Xi Jinping, China’s top leader.

Mr. Trump and his advisers said China had agreed to buy 200 Boeing airplanes, with the possibility to sell more, and more than $10 billion worth of agricultural products, as well as energy and medical devices. But few details were released, and Chinese officials said little publicly about the commitments….

Chinese officials struck a more cautious tone. Asked whether China had agreed to buy more Boeing airplanes or American agricultural products, Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, would not confirm any details. He said Beijing was willing to work with the United States “to implement the important consensus reached by the two heads of state.”

A Boeing official referred a request for comment to the White House.

Stephen Olson, a former American trade negotiator, said that “no major breakthroughs were expected and none were achieved, but both countries got what they needed from this summit: a bit of additional stability.”

The terrifying thing is that while “a bit of additional stability” might sound like the lowest bar possible, it is not the worst outcome from a president who clearly has the capacity to make much dumber decisions. With the possibility of a great power war over Taiwan, Jessica Chen Weiss points out in the Financial Times that a cold peace is a pleasant surprise:

The more surprising outcome was that Xi and Trump seem to have a genuine interest in stabilising US-China relations. If hawks on both sides of the Pacific can stomach it, stalemate could become the durable détente both countries need. There is now a window of opportunity for this….

The goal right now may just be a “cold peace”. Rather than trying to engineer a breakthrough, this is a moment to prevent deterioration. Keeping enough channels open so that a better relationship becomes possible, despite any bluster over Taiwan, is a modest mission, but it may be the only viable one.

So to sum up:

1. Yes, Trump and Xi had a summit;

2. No, not much happened at the summit;

3. In 2026, we should be grateful for an event involving Trump in which not much happens.