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An Alternative View of What’s Next After the Trump-Xi Summit

Hawkish rhetoric from the national security establishment isn’t grappling with the complex challenges posed by China’s rise.

As Donald Trump arrived in Beijing last week for the first visit to China by a US president in almost a decade, it felt hard to remember the spiraling escalation of US-China economic warfare that could have easily ended in a permanent break between the world’s two most powerful countries.

After all, it took place last year. So many other crises have kicked off in that intervening 13 months that the world’s most consequential international relationship now seems like an island of stability in a sea of chaos.

But in judging the paltry outcomes of Trump’s summit with President Xi Jinping—some nice words and China’s promise to buy American soybeans and airplanes—it’s worth recalling that US-China conflict almost pushed the world into an out-of-control economic crisis last year. And because economic tension has provided cover to a US national security establishment pursuing confrontation with China, mutual economic aggression could have developed fairly rapidly into something more violent. Perhaps, then, it was enough that Trump and Xi agreed to pursue “constructive strategic stability” without offering much idea of what that would mean in practice.

Yet the summit also demonstrated how unhealthy the relationship remains. The United States seems to be stuck between two diametrically opposed approaches to China that somehow both manage to exacerbate the pressures driving us toward conflict: unsound peace or unfettered confrontation.

The first approach was crassly illustrated by Trump’s entourage of billionaires. Among the oligarchs who accompanied Trump on Air Force One were Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and a dozen of the other richest financiers and tech barons in the country. Trump’s “very first request,” he posted on the way to China, would be asking Xi “to ‘open up’ China so that these brilliant people can work their magic.”

It was precisely the entangled economic interests of elites in the two countries that, despite persistent tensions, kept the peace for decades before the US-China relationship collapsed starting in 2018. Yet this peace was built on fundamentally unhealthy foundations. The economic growth that enriched well-connected businesses and corrupt politicians in both countries also systematically decimated the power of labor—again in both countries. The outcome was devastating inequality and intense everyday insecurity achieved through the free-market form of globalization that bound the US and China together. Ultimately, symbiotic expansion of market society led to destabilizing populist politics in both countries.

In the United States, populism took on an anti-China cast: The dislocations of the globalization era were associated with China because of its outsize........

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