The United States’ epic twentieth-century successes in diplomacy set dangerously high expectations. Germany and Japan surrendered unconditionally in 1945; U.S. President Harry Truman created NATO in 1949; President John F. Kennedy resolved the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 through secret diplomatic exchanges with the Soviet premier; and in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan, with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, negotiated landmark arms-control agreements to wind down the Cold War. Such victories accustomed many Americans to imagining that their skilled leaders could break seemingly intractable political deadlocks in decisive ways.

This hope runs especially deep in China watchers. Their sense of how diplomacy between the United States and China can unfold at its best was shaped by that game-changing moment in 1972 when U.S. President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, redrew the world’s geopolitical map in the course of a weeklong visit with Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai, transforming the Cold War from a largely bipolar contest into a triangular one. Then, in 1979, U.S. President Jimmy Carter threw the door open to China in a theatrical way by welcoming the country’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, to the White House and restoring formal diplomatic relations with Beijing.

Today, as U.S.-Chinese relations spiral into an ever more adversarial state, the longing for another breakthrough delivered by “great men” is especially acute. U.S. President Donald Trump has egged on that desire by boastfully insisting that he alone can cut the kinds of deals the United States needs through force of personality. Even seasoned foreign policy hands who consider themselves realistic have been prone to entertaining unrealistic visions of success. When a Beijing summit between Trump and Xi was announced for the spring of 2026, the meeting was sanguinely billed in Foreign Affairs as “a geopolitical heavyweight matchup” that could “change the course of U.S.-China competition.”

Sadly, no such breakthrough came to pass. The May summit in Beijing, which I attended as a member of the press corps for this magazine, may have helped sustain a cryptic peace—a “constructive strategic stability,” as Xi euphemistically termed it. But it did not change the fundamentally adversarial nature of the relationship between the two countries. They remain locked in a dynamic of strategic ambiguity marked by endless bouts of punitive “chokehold” diplomacy, with each exploiting its control over critical supply chains to pressure the other.

Now, another Trump-Xi summit is scheduled to begin in Washington on September 23, and yearnings for a conclusive breakthrough are resurfacing. They should be tempered. The same limitations that crimped the May summit will constrain the upcoming one. The problem is not simply that the United States and China have different ideologies and political systems. It is also that neither of their leaders is suited to the kind of bargaining their current rivalry demands. Xi equates compromise with weakness and has a hard time understanding the give-a-little-to-get-a-little logic that is the heart and soul of diplomacy. And Trump is so contradictory and impetuous that his pandering, “tech bro” side is in such an uncomfortable state of tension with his belligerent side that effective diplomacy becomes almost impossible.

In the past, the United States and China achieved breakthroughs when conditions were just right and leaders with great diplomatic acuity were in charge. The circumstances today are less favorable. Despite Trump’s simulacrum of camaraderie, he and Xi simply do not have the symmetries to build the kind of genuine fraternity and trust needed to resolve deep structural problems. As long as these two men lead their respective countries, the likelihood is that their summits will barely be able to manage the rivalry at best. At worst, they may exacerbate it by letting push come to shove.

Historically, successful U.S.-Chinese summits have relied heavily on leaders’ ability to break through the barriers of distrust. But the kind of superficial flattery and bonhomie in........

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