The U.S.-China Superpower Stalemate

For two days in Beijing last week, U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping leaned into the familiar theater of great-power diplomacy. Trump said it was an “honor” to be Xi’s friend and predicted the U.S.-China relationship would be “better than ever before.” Xi, more subtly, used ceremony and symbolism to appeal to Trump’s sense of history and deal-making.

All that spectacle yielded a modest yet marketable outcome. Deliverables centered on soybean and agricultural purchases benefitting U.S. farmers, Boeing jets for Chinese airlines, and new boards of trade and investment to keep commercial channels open. These steps helped both leaders project calm, but they did not settle the underlying contest. That was the summit’s logic — motion without movement, stalemate masquerading as stagecraft.

Today’s superpower showdown will endure because the U.S.-China contest now hinges on leverage: who has it, who can sustain it, and which side can force the other to absorb more risk. Trump wants deals without supply-chain disruption. Xi seeks tariff stability without surrendering face. Neither is seeking rupture; however, both are fighting over reliance: Washington needs to reduce its dependence on China, while Beijing needs to preserve the power that dependence provides.

The summit matters because it gives today’s rivalry a diplomatic rhythm. Trump and Xi appear intent on testing vulnerabilities, applying pressure, and then returning to leader-level engagement before the relationship fractures. But each pause also primes the next round of pressure. In that sense, last week’s meeting was not an escape from escalation; it was a way to manage its tempo.

For all the talk of detente, last fall’s Trump-Xi meeting in Busan, South Korea, produced a tactical trade truce, and little more. Washington cut fentanyl-linked tariffs on Chinese imports from 20 percent to 10 percent, while keeping the broader tariff wall largely intact. It also paused for one year a draft Commerce Department rule that would have expanded export-control restrictions to majority-owned affiliates of blacklisted Chinese firms. Beijing suspended rare-earth controls announced before Busan, eased retaliatory tariffs on U.S. farm goods, and resumed soybean purchases. Both sides also paused new port fees on each other’s vessels for one year.

That truce did not stop pressure from moving elsewhere. After Busan, Washington continued tightening technology controls, sanctioned Chinese entities tied to Iranian oil, and approved a historic $11 billion Taiwan arms package over China’s objections. Beijing pushed back by tightening restrictions on industrial supply chains and issuing a first-of-its-kind blocking order telling Chinese refiners not to recognize or comply with U.S. sanctions. Taken together, these moves sharpened the rivalry without breaking truce, namely because neither side wanted the commercial floor to collapse.

If the post-Busan period demonstrated that trade turbulence could be managed, the Beijing summit reaffirmed that strategic pressure points are another matter. Xi warned Trump that if Taiwan were “handled poorly,” the United States and China could “collide or even clash.” Senior U.S. officials then reiterated that Washington’s policy toward the island remained unchanged. Iran followed the same pattern. Trump sought China’s help bringing the U.S.-Iran war to a close; Beijing endorsed reopening the Strait of Hormuz and preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, while showing no sign it would pressure Tehran.

In certain respects, this dynamic has made the relationship more predictable. Washington and Beijing no longer expect accommodation from the other side. The rivalry has become more legible. U.S. officials now treat China’s nonmarket system as a structural condition to manage, not a problem that trade talks can fix. Beijing, meanwhile, has internalized that U.S. tariffs, export controls, and alliance coordination are enduring features of China’s external environment. That clarity makes the relationship easier to read, but it also hardens the rivalry by making accommodation look less likely, and confrontation more routine.

A more coercive logic follows. Disruption, real or threatened, is no longer being treated as a policy failure, but as a policy tool. Both countries are expanding their arsenals to shape the other’s choices, impose costs, and preserve optionality. Each new restriction, licensing regime, sanctions threat, or blocking order feeds a cycle of coercion and countermeasures. This is mutually assured disruption in action: repeated economic friction treated as manageable until it is not. The risk is that both sides mistake repetition for control, believing they can maintain the cycle without losing command of it.

Against that backdrop, time was arguably the summit’s most important deliverable. Xi’s statements made clear why. He described a global “transformation not seen in a century” as “accelerating,” with the world reaching a “new crossroads.” In Chinese strategic discourse, these phrases signal Beijing’s belief that U.S. advantages are weakening, the global order is becoming more fluid, and China can gain ground if it can manage near-term volatility. The tension is that Xi sees history speeding up while China needs time to get its house in order. Stability, for Beijing, is not the opposite of competition. It is the condition China needs to compete more effectively.

That is why Xi is looking for breathing room more than a breakthrough. China’s economy is under pressure, its technology sector still faces U.S. chokepoints, and its supply-chain leverage is powerful but not invulnerable. Beijing needs enough predictability in the bilateral relationship to keep U.S. de-risking from gaining momentum, keep foreign firms tethered to China, and build around American technology controls.

Washington also needs time, but for the opposite reason. China can use stability to wait, adapt, and preserve leverage. The United States has to use stability to build. Reducing reliance on China cannot be done through one-off investment announcements or scattered reshoring projects. It requires a sustained effort to re-shore industrial capacity, secure critical minerals, and align allies around technology controls that actually hold. That work is expensive, slow, and exposed to political cycles that rarely reward long-term resilience.

That makes the period after Beijing more important than the summit itself. Beijing will measure success by whether the pause slows U.S. momentum and keeps foreign firms exposed to China’s market and supply chains. For Washington, the test is whether a quieter trade lane accelerates the hard work of resilience or lulls it into treating a pause as progress. If the summit lowers the temperature while leaving U.S. vulnerabilities intact, Beijing will have gained the more valuable concession without making one of its own.

In the end, the Xi-Trump summit appeared modest because it was modest. But modest does not mean meaningless. It was a measure of the new equilibrium taking shape between Washington and Beijing: a relationship that can produce transactions without trust, restraint without reconciliation, and stability without settlement. The stalemate did not end in Beijing. It became easier to see.

Craig Singleton is the senior director of the China Program and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). For more analysis from Craig, and the China Program, please subscribe HERE. Follow FDD on X @FDD, and follow Craig @CraigMSingleton. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.