Trump and Xi Can’t Stop the U.S.-China Spiral

Foreign Affairs | Orville Schell

U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping remain unable to halt the deteriorating geopolitical spiral between their nations through personalist diplomacy and high-level summitry. This persistent bilateral friction defies deep-seated expectations among observers that skilled executive leadership can decisively resolve intractable international deadlocks. Historical precedents drive these high expectations.

During the twentieth century, landmark diplomatic achievements—such as the 1945 unconditional surrenders of Germany and Japan, the 1949 creation of NATO, and the 1962 resolution of the Cuban missile crisis—accustomed Americans to decisive diplomatic breakthroughs. Furthermore, the landmark arms-control agreements negotiated by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s reinforced the belief that personalist diplomacy could wind down intense systemic rivalries. Ultimately, the structural forces driving the current Sino-American confrontation limit the efficacy of summitry, rendering personal relationships between leaders insufficient to bridge deep ideological and strategic divides.

Comment

The belief that personalist diplomacy can arrest the current Sino-American descent misinterprets the structural conditions that enabled the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Unlike the late Cold War era, where Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev negotiated from a shared recognition of mutual vulnerability, the contemporary Washington-Beijing dynamic lacks a comparable baseline of strategic stability. The ideological divergence between the Chinese Communist Party and the United States has deepened beyond the reach of bilateral summitry. Consequently, personal rapport between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping cannot substitute for the highly structured verification mechanisms that once validated Soviet-American accords.

This diplomatic deficit is particularly acute because modern Sino-American competition is driven by structural technological friction rather than easily quantifiable military deployments. While the Reykjavik Summit in 1986 focused on counting nuclear warheads, today's friction points centre on dual-use technologies like advanced semiconductors and artificial intelligence. These semiconductor supply-chain dependencies cannot be managed through top-down executive handshakes between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping without dismantling the broader economic integration of the global technology sector.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If the structural friction between Washington and Beijing is driven primarily by dual-use technologies rather than quantifiable military hardware, how can negotiators adapt the verification principles of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty to govern non-physical capabilities?

The trajectory indicates that traditional verification frameworks from the 1987 treaty are largely incompatible with software-defined and dual-use capabilities. Instead, any modern adaptation would likely require shifting focus from physical inspections to end-use monitoring and shared supply-chain auditing protocols. My assessment is that such intrusive measures are highly unlikely to be accepted by either the United States or China under current levels of mutual suspicion.

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