The past year of U.S.-Chinese relations has been extraordinary and head-spinning. In the spring of 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump imposed a de facto trade embargo on China, a measure swiftly reciprocated by Beijing. Months later, he was touting a “G-2” partnership between the two countries. In recent weeks, Trump has both invited Chinese warships to the Strait of Hormuz and threatened to strike China-bound oil tankers passing through it.

But the world’s most important bilateral relationship has also changed in more consequential and persistent ways. China has quietly established authority over whether and how the United States will implement national security measures such as export controls. Stylistic changes in how the United States conducts diplomacy with China have allowed Beijing to gain the upper hand in pushing for high-stakes policy concessions. And Washington has separated its diplomacy with Beijing from efforts to compete for influence globally, resulting in a deprioritization of critical strategic issues and enabling China to weaponize the appearance of U.S.-China rapprochement. These subtle changes in U.S.-Chinese relations may constrain decision-making in Washington for years to come.

When Trump meets with Xi in Beijing this week, the two leaders are unlikely to achieve major policy breakthroughs. But they will reinforce a new set of implicit rules and assumptions for managing relations that ultimately favor China, which may embolden Beijing to test American resolve on Taiwan, the protection of cutting-edge technology, and other vital interests. This, in turn, will complicate Washington’s ability to preserve the bilateral stability it has gone to great lengths to secure.

China emerged from the 2025 trade war in a position of relative strength. As tensions escalated in early 2025, strategists in Beijing argued that disruptions would hurt China but that they would hurt the United States more. As predicted, after Beijing blocked exports of key rare earths and critical minerals, threatening the viability of U.S. manufacturing, the Trump administration quickly sought an off-ramp from the trade war it had launched. Chinese officials saw their assumptions vindicated. Their confidence soared. An earlier wariness of Trump’s unpredictability gave way to near certainty that Beijing could manipulate his administration with ease. Chinese officials concluded that they could negotiate with the United States on equal footing and that, if anything, China held the stronger hand.

In the aftermath of the trade war, both sides refocused on the ostensibly technical task of unwinding the most damaging retaliatory measures they had imposed. The United States shelved structural concerns regarding China’s non-market policies and resulting trade imbalances that the tariffs were originally meant to address. But the final arrangements, endorsed by Trump and Xi in October 2025 at their summit in Busan, South Korea, still revealed significant changes to the character of U.S.-Chinese relations. China paused its most sweeping controls on rare earths and critical minerals. In exchange, Washington ceded to Beijing an effective veto over whether and how the United States would protect itself from certain national security threats.

As part of this deal, the United States withdrew a new regulation that would have applied export controls to the subsidiaries of entities that had already been sanctioned, closing a loophole that was used to circumvent the ban on advanced semiconductor sales to China. In one fell swoop, Beijing had asserted authority over the degree to which the United States would enforce all of its existing national security measures that drew on export controls, whether they targeted China or not. Additionally, the United States agreed to forgo new export controls that specifically targeted Chinese entities.

China emerged from the 2025 trade war in a position of relative strength.

Such a trade would have been unthinkable a year earlier. The first Trump administration and the Biden administration had used export controls to address a wide range of challenges, including the Chinese military’s weaponization of U.S. technology, Beijing’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, and human rights abuses in Xinjiang. These measures prevented China from easily drawing on U.S. capabilities to undermine American interests and values. The second Trump administration quietly set this tool........

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