The Real Worry About Trump’s Deals With China
President Donald Trump emerged from his highly anticipated meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping today with most of what he wanted from a deal with Beijing. Yet the agreement does little more than extricate Trump from crises of his own making. The pattern in Trump’s dealings with China raises a long-term concern: that he will one day wind up sacrificing American interests in the pursuit of deals of questionable strategic importance.
Today’s agreement, struck on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea, averts another escalation of tensions between the world’s two great powers. China agreed to postpone expanding export controls on rare-earth metals for one year. Those controls, announced earlier this month, threatened to choke off the flow of rare earths into industries vital to American security, including semiconductors and weapons systems. In return, the Trump administration will pause a new rule it announced in September, which imposed U.S. export controls on certain subsidiaries of companies sanctioned by Washington. Trump also won’t impose the additional 100 percent tariff on Chinese imports he’d announced in retaliation for Beijing’s rare-earth controls.
According to Trump, China also met two of his other key demands: It agreed to resume purchases of U.S. soybeans, which it halted in the spring, and pledged to crack down further on the illegal fentanyl trade. In return, Trump will cut in half, to 10 percent, the tariffs he imposed on China earlier this year to pressure Xi to take firmer action on fentanyl.
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In the end, Xi didn’t give up very much. He largely withdrew measures he’d taken in response to Trump’s policies. Most of these were meant to put pressure on the American president by exploiting his political vulnerabilities. China’s ban on U.S. soybeans hit American farmers hard and created a political hassle for Trump, but China is the world’s largest importer of soybeans, and buying a few from American farmers is hardly a major concession. Xi’s new rare-earth controls might not have lasted much longer anyway, because they alienated not only the United States but many of China’s trading partners. And how much stock to put into Xi’s promise to clean up the illegal fentanyl trade is hard to know, given his long-standing reluctance to act. In return, Xi got Trump to remove more tariffs and hold off on export controls that could have been harmful to Chinese businesses.
Behind the theater of imposed and rescinded threats and controls, however, was a prospect of real substance to both countries—one that seems not to have come up in this meeting. The day before the meeting, Trump said he would discuss selling China Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips, which are currently restricted by export controls. The mere possibility of such sales raised an alarm in Washington, where these restrictions are widely seen as crucial to U.S. security. Allowing China to get powerful chips that its own companies do not have the ability to produce would further not only Beijing’s quest for dominance in AI but also its efforts to upgrade its military capabilities. In response to Trump’s comment, the House Select Committee on China warned on social media that selling AI chips to China “would be akin to giving Iran weapons grade uranium.”
That Trump’s offhand remark would so quickly generate such a reaction is an indication of how little the U.S. foreign-policy establishment trusts Trump to defend American interests. China experts have feared that Trump, in his desire for deals with Xi, would trade issues of minimal strategic value, such as soybean purchases, for concessions that endanger core American interests. A relaxation of U.S.-technology controls would be an enormous win for Xi.
Beijing has pressed Washington to lift the chip controls since the Biden administration first introduced them in 2022. Success would benefit China’s economic progress and redound to Xi’s political credit. According to Bonnie Glaser, the managing director of the German Marshall Fund’s Indo-Pacific program, what Chinese leaders most want from Trump is an end to the constant expansion of restrictions placed on their country. They care about this, she told me, “less because they are concerned about falling behind technologically than just a matter of politics and dignity.”
That Trump would contemplate lifting those AI-chip restrictions demonstrates the extent to which he has broken with the general consensus in Washington about China. Both Democrats and Republicans, including members of Trump’s own team, have held for some time that China is the primary threat facing the United States. Trump’s decisions and comments in recent months suggest that he does not fully agree with that assessment. He has appeared to be interested mainly in cutting deals and expanding business opportunities with China. In a speech to business leaders in South Korea on Wednesday, Trump predicted that the outcome of his meeting with Xi would be beneficial to both sides. “That’s better than fighting and going through all sorts of problems,” he said.
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China’s leaders may welcome the opportunity to sideline that old consensus on great-power competition. Dennis Wilder, an expert on U.S.-China relations at Georgetown University who served as a top aide on Asian affairs to President George W. Bush, told me that Trump “has personally gone in what the Chinese would think is the right direction”—toward a friendlier approach to China—and “what they want to do is keep him on that trajectory.”
That could explain Xi’s willingness to make deals with Trump. But Trump’s apparent wavering on crucial issues could also encourage Xi to get more aggressive in pushing China’s interests. Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser on China at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me that one possibility is that China’s leaders “really believe that Trump is doing a great deal of harm to the United States, and that they ought to take advantage of this opportunity that won’t come along very often to really make the U.S. suffer and lock in their advantages.”
This week’s get-together in South Korea may have served to remind Xi of just how much he gains from a Trump presidency. Trump departed the country shortly after his meeting with Xi, skipping out on the main summit of Asia-Pacific leaders. That left the field open for Xi to schmooze with his counterparts in a region where he seeks to expand Chinese influence. Trump may have left feeling that he won the day, but he can still lose the future.
