Trump's Beijing trip shows his bid to corner China has hit a stalemate

If there was one thing that United States (US) President Donald Trump was supposed to do in office, it was to push back against the People’s Republic of China. Throughout his political career, and even earlier, he repeatedly stated that the terms of trade between the US and China were unfair. The big lesson of his visit to China last week, however, is this: Mr Trump’s signature project has failed. He has simply given up.

 

Chinese President Xi Jinping said as much when he described the current state of US-China relations as “constructive strategic stability”. What this means is that, first, at the moment nobody is trying to blow things up, but actually to improve relations; and, second, that no disruptive shifts are expected and thus China’s rise will continue unimpeded.

 

This is probably not what Mr Trump would have expected when he took office just over a year ago. But one of the most obvious lessons of his attempt to levy tariffs on the entire world was that countries like Cambodia or Vietnam might have no way of fighting back, those like the European Union might be unwilling to do so — but China was both capable of economically harming the US and was perfectly willing to try. And thus we wound up with the paradoxical situation that a trade policy that had originally been devised and justified in response to Chinese control of supply chains and manufacturing overcapacity was deployed against everyone else but barely against China itself. Mr Trump is not famed for his sagacity, but he was able to infer fairly soon that tariffs did not have the power to force Beijing into making concessions to him, and that its control over critical minerals and vital products built from them — such as magnets — consisted of a sufficient deterrence. A stalemate emerged quite soon, one that Mr Trump has no idea how to break.

 

The headlines that emerged from the trip — aside from all the trivial atmospherics, which were the usual product of Mr Trump’s bone-deep reverence for authoritarians — reflected this new reality. They focused mainly on Taiwan’s status. This is a conversation that Beijing wants to have, not the one Washington would prefer. Mr Trump was silent about the issues that have exercised him for so long — from China’s blatant mercantilism to its disruptive overcapacity in vital industries from steel to chemicals.

 

On the other hand, China hawks in Washington and worried policymakers across the Indo-Pacific will recognise that it could have been worse. There were genuine concerns that Mr Trump’s long-anticipated visit would result in the informal coalescence of a new G-2, and that his obvious disinterest in the security of the region and focus on the Western Hemisphere would cause him to essentially accept China’s right to a sphere of influence in its neighbourhood, which included long-time US allies and partners. He did indeed emerge from that meeting saying he was deeply unenthusiastic about American forces having “to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war” that might emerge from a declaration of independence by Taiwan; but he did not depart further from the policy of strategic ambiguity about US defence of the island, which has been the norm in recent years. Mr Xi had reportedly pressed him on the subject in their closed-door meetings, as well as about arms sales to Taiwan, especially a $14 billion deal that Mr Trump said he would decide on in a “fairly short period”. The Chinese President said, according to his state media, that “the Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-U.S. relations”.

 

On the other hand, nor has Beijing got everything it wants. Mr Trump’s effusive praise for his counterpart provided ample fodder for the propaganda machine, but the long train of billionaires and chief executive officers that travelled with the President on Air Force One did not result in any major corporate deals. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang was among them, for example, but the vexed question of what high-end chips China would receive access to was not solved on the trip. On the other hand, Mr Huang did eat a photogenic bowl of noodles in zhajiang sauce at a street food market while wearing his trademark leather jacket. This made for great content and was sufficient to distract China’s hyper-patriotic internet away from the fact that the crucial tech-access concessions the country wanted didn’t materialise.

 

Part of the problem for Mr Trump is that he has focused on too many things simultaneously. If he wants to break his stalemate with China, the fact that he has been forced into another one on the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t help. He claimed that Mr Xi assured him that Iran would not receive Chinese weaponry, but Beijing’s own readout of the meeting broke no new ground on the subject.

 

One year in, the President is coming to terms with the fact that he cannot, in fact, reshape the world to his whims. Even reshaping America might be too hard a task. We should not be surprised if he winds up settling for reshaping just the White House. Certainly, that fits what seems to be the main lesson he took away from the state visit. On his social network, Truth Social, he posted a photograph of himself alongside Mr Xi outside the Great Hall of the People and said: “China has a Ballroom, and so should the USA!” He promised the controversial new White House wing would open “around September 2028”. At that point, he would be a few weeks from being a lame-duck President. The courts have tried to stop his pet construction project from going ahead. Still, it’s far more likely that, by then, the White House has a new ballroom than that he will have broken his stalemate with Mr Xi.