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Trump-Xi summit reveals a rivalry too deep to decouple, too tense to cooperate

Both the US and China recognise the lure and liabilities of deep economic interdependence, even as geopolitical realities push them toward structural rivalry.

The upcoming summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing is unlikely to deliver a grand bargain between the world’s two most consequential powers. Expectations of a transformational reset in US-China relations remain limited. Yet that is precisely what makes the summit significant.

Its importance lies less in what it aims to achieve than in what it seeks to prevent: an uncontrolled escalation between two increasingly adversarial powers that now shape the structure, anxieties, and uncertainties of the international system.

The world today is suspended between orders. The post-Cold War assumptions of globalisation, institutional convergence, and stable American primacy are eroding, while a new equilibrium has yet to crystallise. The international system is increasingly defined by a state of polycrisis where trade wars, technological disruptions, military signalling, supply chain realignments, and vulnerabilities around maritime chokepoints are collectively rewiring the grammar of global politics.

In this environment, as Washington and Beijing size each other up and search for leverage across multiple domains, the Trump-Xi summit is less about grand posturing and more about strategic recalibration. Both sides recognise the lure and liabilities of deep economic interdependence, even as geopolitical realities push them toward structural rivalry. Equally, both understand that the consequences of their cooperation or confrontation will reverberate far beyond the bilateral relationship and shape the trajectory of the international system itself.

The US and China are neither locked in a Cold War-style détente nor bound by the kind of deterrence architecture that once underpinned US-Soviet relations through formal arms control agreements. Despite Trump’s occasional references to a possible “G2,” no stable great-power duopoly has crystallised. What exists instead is a form of transactional stability: a deeply competitive relationship that is managed, but sustained only by a thin and fragile layer of........

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