Two recent episodes involving China-U.S. relations underline an unexpected convergence in the relationship and the potential for these episodes to have a wider impact on the transitioning global order. 

First, Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met on the sidelines of the APEC meeting held in Busan on October 30, 2025, their first meeting since 2019. The agreements reached were not unexpected, largely unambitious, and mostly involved reversals and reinstatements of past policies, welded together by the expectation that there would be follow-on summit meetings between Trump and Xi in the spring and fall of 2026. 

Secondly, the U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) document was officially published in November 2025. It predominantly casts China as an economic competitor and accords it an implicit status as one of the “larger, richer, stronger” countries that is, and should be, shaping global order.

There is little or nothing in these agreements or the strategy document that suggests China is viewed as a serious revisionist threat either to global order or U.S. interests. Rather, it appears as a state that has earned its own sphere of influence, which the United States may or may not choose to accept. Moreover, the idea of a revisionist China recedes further when thought about in the presence of a Trump administration that is upending the main tenets of the post-1945 order. 

For those who have been exploring the question of whether China might actually be promoting an alternative global order, of necessity, now face a much harder task in coming to any conclusion.

Comparing the First and Second Trump Administrations

These perspectives on U.S. convergence with China are brought into sharper focus when examined through the comparative lens of the first and second Trump administrations. As is well known, Trump came into office in 2017, fixated on the trade in goods deficit with China, and began using tariffs as his weapon of choice to achieve greater balance in trade ties. He also appeared to view China as a supplicant. The assumption then was that China was more dependent on the U.S. market than the United States was on China – a form of asymmetrical interdependence that the U.S. government would be able to leverage.

Elsewhere in that first Trump administration, however, others had far larger concerns about China (notably, Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo). At this stage, they were in a position to influence the direction of policy because Trump was not wholly in charge of the China brief and was induced to stand by as the National Security Council coordinated policy from a “whole of society” threat perspective.

Meanwhile, Xi had come to power in late 2012-2013 determined to pursue an industrial strategy that would enhance China’s capacity to produce........

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