US President Donald Trump flew to Beijing last week and held his second summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping on 14-15 May. The two men had previously met at Busan in South Korea in October last year, and the two summits reflected a joint effort by the two great powers to manage their relations in an agreed framework of strategic stability.
Both leaders have realised that despite the differences between their two countries on a host of questions – economic, commercial, high tech, AI, Taiwan, and the war against Iran – they still have to manage these differences wisely and in a way that will not lead to open conflict.
In other words, they have committed to a long-view approach to the future of their bilateral relations instead of getting mired in a prolonged confrontation or in crisis mode. The tariffs and trade war that became the hallmark of their economic and commercial relations last year proved both futile and counterproductive.
The American-Chinese summit was not expected to solve the economic and commercial problems between their two countries, and nor will it lead to common ground in their competing geo-strategic approaches and policies towards Taiwan, Iran, North Korea, or the war in Ukraine. The overall objective was to stabilise Chinese-American relations at least for the next two years as a prelude to further accommodation across the board, not only between today’s leaders in Washington and Beijing but also for the decades until 2049 and maybe beyond.
In 2049 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will celebrate the centennial of the Chinese Revolution of 1949.
At the Beijing summit red lines were drawn. President Xi made it clear that the question of Taiwan could make or break bilateral relations with the United States if not handled “properly” and could even lead to “confrontation”. Used in this context, “confrontation” was probably a diplomatic reference to war.
A post on X by Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning said that Xi told Trump that the “Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-US relations.” He added that “if handled properly, the bilateral relationship will enjoy overall stability.” Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts, “putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy”.
On his way home on 15 May, Trump told the US network Fox News, commenting on the question of Taiwan, that “when you look at the odds, China is a very, very powerful, big country. That’s a very small island. Think of it, it’s 59 miles away [from the coast of China]. We are 9,500 miles away. That’s a little bit of a difficult problem.”
He made it clear in his comments on Taiwan that the United States will not support any Taiwanese quest for “independence”. No previous American president has ever articulated the American position towards Taiwan in these unprecedented terms. They preferred “strategic ambiguity” when it came to what actions the United States would take if China attacked Taiwan.
Trump made this “strategic ambiguity” less ambiguous. The question now is whether his administration will come to the rescue if China launches military operations to seize Taiwan by force. His remarks could send the wrong signal to the Chinese government that in the two remaining years of Trump’s term in the Oval Office the United States might not come to the defence of Taiwan.
There is a widespread opinion among American military experts that China could go to war in 2027 to take Taiwan and bring it back to the “motherland”.
It should be noted in passing that Xi spoke to Trump by phone in February to warn against American arms sales to Taiwan, asking him to handle the issue with “extreme caution”. One week before the American-Chinese summit in Beijing, a group of American senators wrote to Trump on 8 May urging him to formally notify Congress of an arms deal worth $14 billion with Taiwan, noting that Taiwan’s legislature has approved $25 billion in special funding to pay for missiles and other weapons from the United States.
The other most significant position on the part of Xi came in his opening remarks at the summit. He expressed the hope that the United States and China could avoid conflict and asked “whether the two countries can transcend the ‘Thucydides trap’ and forge a new model for relations between major powers.” He concluded by stressing that “cooperation benefits both sides while confrontation harms both. The two countries should be partners rather than rivals.”
Thucydides was an ancient Greek historian who wrote a book on the 30-year Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta in the 5th century BCE. The latter, the dominant power in ancient Greece, had observed the emergence of Athens and its growing influence with great concern lest Athens succeed in neutralising Spartan power and dominance.
Graham Allison of Harvard University in the US published a book called “Destined for War” a decade ago in which he came up with the concept of the “Thucydides trap”. In the book he studied 16 cases over the last 500 years where dominant powers feared the rise of adversaries. He found that out of the 16 cases 12 had gone to war as a result. He wrote that in the case of the United States and China this should not be the case.
I believe that Trump and Xi have succeeded in achieving a certain strategic stability in American-Chinese relations that will be strengthened, most probably, in their next summit in Washington later this year. In Beijing last week, Trump invited the Chinese president to pay a state visit to the United States.
Writing for the UK Financial Times on 16 May, Jessica Cher Weiss of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in the US said that the American and Chinese leaders should face the “hard truth” that there are no military solutions to the differences between their two respective countries, only “sustained and creative diplomacy”.
I could not agree more.
The writer is former assistant foreign minister.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 21 May, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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