The gladiators of geopolitics have squared off.
Now, both are claiming victory.
It started with a handshake.
Chinese dictator Xi Jinping and United States President Donald Trump strode across the red carpet in front of Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, confident in their own skins.
Chairman Xi was his usual, upright self. He likes to move slowly and deliberately, his upper body as stiff as the smile on his face.
President Trump was the showman, his larger-than-life body language honed by decades of scene-stealing real estate deals and reality television grandstanding.
But only Trump felt the need to add a reaffirming pat on the wrist when the two leaders engaged in a handshake.
“When Trump arrives, he walks over to Xi, who, even though he’s the host, makes hardly any effort to move towards Trump or to express any enthusiasm for the imminent meeting,” Oxford University psychologist Peter Collett told US media after the event.
“This gives the impression that Trump is doing all the work, both literally and figuratively.”
The subsequent day-and-a-half of negotiations was largely conducted behind closed doors.
President Trump had money foremost on his mind.
He’d brought a bevy of his friendliest billionaires, leaving the usual entourage of diplomatic, cultural and strategic advisers behind in Washington DC.
Chairman Xi was pondering the same thing he does every night: Taiwan.
Only their formal banquet and curated media tours offered any further insight into their clash of wills.
Then the talks ended. The fanfare faded. The parades dispersed.
And President Trump and his entourage boarded his plane home.
The 47th President of the United States immediately declared mission accomplished: He’d secured “fantastic trade deals”. “We’ve settled a lot of different problems that other people wouldn’t have been able to solve,” he proudly exclaimed to his media followers.
Exactly what deals and which problems are yet to be detailed.
That’s despite both teams issuing formal readouts on the summit’s achievements.
The 5th Paramount Leader (and Great Navigator) of the Chinese Communist Party issued his proclamation from the comfort of his new Forbidden City (the Zhongnanhai compound of Beijing).
The summit had established “a new bilateral relationship, which is a relationship of constructive strategic stability,” he said, to “provide strategic guidance for the next three years and beyond”.
But the summaries show surprisingly little overlap.
“These are two very different interpretations of the same meeting,” explains China analyst Manoj Kewalramani.
“It’s actually quite remarkable that the US readout does not talk about military-to-military dialogue and escalation management, whereas Beijing references both of these issues.”
Alternate Realities
“The two sides chose to focus on somewhat different sets of issues in their respective readouts and diverged particularly sharply on the question of Taiwan,” a Foreign Policy assessment of the summit reads.
Which is odd.
Xi, after all, had told Trump that “the Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-US relations”.
He reinforced this great power red line. He insisted his ambition to own Taiwan and the island democracy’s desire for independence was “as irreconcilable as fire and water”.
Xi even threatened Trump to use “extra caution” on the matter.
President Trump’s readout, on the other hand, doesn’t mention the Taiwan crisis at all.
And Trump refused to answer media questions on the matter aboard Air Force One on the way home.
Instead, his PR team addressed a subject the Chinese appeared to care little about.
“The two sides discussed ways to enhance economic co-operation between our two countries, including expanding market access for American businesses into China and increasing Chinese investment into our industries,” the White House readout states.
Trump needed an economic goal or six.
Time is money for his entourage of billionaires (including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Apple CEO Tim Cook) after all.
His tariff wars haven’t been going so well.
And the much-lauded trade deal he insisted he’d reached with Xi during his first term of office never actually eventuated.
This time around, Xi appeared gracious, but offered no specifics: “Yesterday, our economic and trade teams produced generally balanced and positive outcomes. This is good news for the people of the two countries and the world.”
Then there’s the matter of Iran.
Trump wanted Xi’s commitment to help save the world from Iran’s chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz.
It’s not clear whether or not he got it.
“President Xi made clear China’s opposition to the militarisation of the Strait and any effort to charge a toll for its use,” the White House states. “Both countries agreed that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.”
Xi left it to his Ministry of Foreign Affairs to convey his thoughts on the matter.
“There is no point in continuing this conflict, which should not have happened in the first place,” a spokesman said during the summit. “To find an early way to resolve the situation is in the interest of not only the US and Iran, but also regional countries and the rest of the world.
“Now that the door of dialogue has been opened, it should not be shut again.”
The Questions of Our Times
“Can China and the United States overcome the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm of major-country relations?” Chairman Xi’s readout asks.
“Can we meet global challenges together and provide greater stability for the world? Can we build a bright future together for our bilateral relations, in the interest of the wellbeing of the two peoples and the future of humanity? These are the questions vital to history, to the world, and to the people.”
That these questions were asked after the summit had concluded is intriguing.
“They are the questions of our times that the leaders of major countries need to answer together. I stand ready to work together with President Trump to set the course and steer the giant ship of China-U. S. relations,” Xi concludes.
Between the lines is a different message: If you stick to your turf, we’ll stick to ours.
“The peoples of China and the United States are both great peoples,” Chairman Xi told the banquet gathering in the Great Hall Thursday night.
“Achieving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again can go hand-in-hand. We can help each other succeed and advance the wellbeing of the whole world.”
To Xi, it was all about redefining a “constructive China-U. S. relationship of strategic stability”.
One that finally concedes Beijing’s position as a competing superpower.
“[This] may be the single most consequential line of the summit,” argues Singapore-based international relations analyst Yaqi Li.
“[Xi’s] early readout did more than report a meeting. It supplied the first authoritative vocabulary through which the summit would be understood. The side that names the relationship is trying to set the terms on which it is read.”
President Trump had announced his Beijing tour touting: “THE G2 WILL BE CONVENING SHORTLY!”
But China rejected the idea of a Group of Two “major power co-governance”.
“The sequence matters,” argues Li. “Trump attempted to define the relationship first; Beijing declined. Two months later, in Beijing, China provided its own rhetorical formula.”
Chairman Xi wants “sound stability with moderate competition”.
“Now Beijing offers the more operational language for managed rivalry, while the Trump side looks comparatively empty-handed on the basic question of what the relationship is,” Li concludes.
Lost in Translation
“Trump came to Beijing seeking ‘the art of the deal,’ and was largely unprepared to engage Beijing’s strategic proposal on its own terms,” assesses Li.
“Beijing had its policy and propaganda apparatus running at full speed, flooding the zone with concepts and interpretative cues.”
That left President Trump out on a limb.
And his billionaires were unable to help him.
“The publicly visible US delegation lacked an obvious senior China hand – the kind of official whose role is to read and decode Chinese political language,” Li states.
It may have profound implications for the future.
Especially when it comes to the proposed “strategic stability”.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the media entourage after the summit that “strategic stability” was “one of the things the Chinese emphasise – and we agree.”
Li argues this shows Rubio, and by implication Trump, read “a constructive China-US relationship of strategic stability” as a platitude – a throwaway line – of the type often applied to crisis management.
Instead, it defines Xi’s vision of great power conflict.
“Washington hears ‘strategic stability’ and reaches for a checklist. Beijing says it and draws on something closer to a philosophy of tempo. One side reads an engineering blueprint; the other, statecraft as paced struggle,” he adds.
Chairman Xi was defining the diplomatic battlefield.
He was setting the terms of conflict.
“That is the architecture behind the phrase. Stable co-operation where useful. Disciplined competition where necessary. Red lines where non-negotiable. Policy tools to make all three operational,” Li explains.
Chairman Xi had attempted to highlight the high stakes he was setting.
He had repeatedly named the elephant in the room: The Thucydides trap.
It’s the ancient Athenian idea that tensions will inevitably escalate between a rising power and a declining power and end in conflict.
Chairman Xi’s eyes were fixed on his goal: Taiwan, and the “rejuvenation” of the Chinese empire.
President Trump appeared interested only in trade deals.
“It’s worth watching how all of this plays out,” concludes Kewalramani.
“I would wager that sooner rather than later, there will be friction in how both sides interpret the practical connotations of the framework of constructive strategic stability.
“For instance, who defines what are the “proper limits” of competition in a particular scenario?”
