Rush Doshi
Mr. Doshi was the deputy senior director for China and Taiwan affairs at the National Security Council under President Joe Biden.
There are moments in great-power politics when the tectonic plates seem to shift perceptibly beneath us. The recent summit between President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China was one of those inflection points.
The two leaders agreed during a meeting on Oct. 30 to pause the trade war that Mr. Trump launched this year. But the real story to emerge from the event was not the inconclusive truce they reached in the South Korean city of Busan but the unmistakable demonstration that China could now face America as a true peer.
China absorbed the full weight of American economic pressure and retaliated successfully with greater pressure of its own, weaponizing its dominance of global supply chains on which America relies, particularly rare earth minerals and magnets. After decades of deindustrialization, a poorly prepared United States would not — or could not — respond.
If historians someday try to identify exactly when China became America’s geopolitical equal, they might point to the outcome of Mr. Trump’s ill-considered trade war.
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