Robert A. Manning
By most accounts, the outcome of the 90-minute meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in October was little more than a one-year truce in the trade war, rolling tariffs back to Jan. 19 levels, though final details are still being sorted out; a rare Xi-initiated phone call to Trump on Nov. 24 underscored his desire to implement the deal (while also raising the Taiwan issue). But what if the Washington cognoscenti and much of the press have it wrong? What if the meeting signaled the beginning of a new phase in U.S.-China relations?
Why? One metric I use to gauge U.S.-China relations is the five stages of grief—traditionally framed as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. After passing through the first two, Washington is hitting the third. These have unfolded in direct proportion to China’s emergence on the modern world stage, as its GDP grew from $310 billion in 1985 to $18.8 trillion in 2024 and it moved up the ladder of civilian and military technology to challenge U.S. global primacy.
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