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As world leaders prepare for the second high-stakes meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in just four months, set to open on U.S. soil on September 24, 2026, the core agenda will look strikingly familiar to their last sitting in May: the three persistent, high-stakes issues that define U.S.-China relations – trade, Taiwan, and technology. What has shifted dramatically since their last encounter is the urgent new pressure placed on technology talks, driven by the sudden, fast-evolving breakthroughs and risks in artificial intelligence that have upended global markets and security calculations. What remains uncertain, however, is whether the two powers can reach any groundbreaking, transformative breakthrough on AI or any of the other core challenges on the table.

### Trade: Modest Adjustments Expected for a Year-Old Pact
Of the three core issues, trade is framed as the most time-sensitive and the most likely to yield a incremental resolution. Nearly 12 months prior, during a meeting in Busan, South Korea, the two leaders negotiated a landmark detente: the U.S. agreed to roll back some of its strict export controls on advanced technology and cut the steep three-digit tariffs that had been in place on billions of dollars of Chinese goods. In exchange, China committed to ending export restrictions on critical minerals and rare earths that are vital to U.S. manufacturing and tech supply chains.

That 2025 Busan agreement is now approaching its expiration date, and both sides have signaled they favor extending the status quo. While minor side adjustments to the terms are likely, most analysts expect the new pact to largely mirror the original framework.

In previous talks, both governments have floated the idea of establishing a permanent new bilateral body, a U.S.-China Board of Trade, tasked with reviewing low-sensitivity shared business interests. But concrete details about the institution’s mandate, authority, and operating structure remain unclear, and while an official announcement is expected during the summit, global business leaders are waiting to see how robust and long-lasting the new body will actually be. An even less developed proposal, a separate Board of Investment, remains in early planning stages with no public roadmap.

Beijing has proposed bringing a delegation of top Chinese chief executives to the summit to match the U.S. contingent, which included senior leaders from major American tech firms such as Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Tesla’s Elon Musk, who accompanied Trump on his earlier trip to Beijing. The final makeup of the Chinese business delegation, however, will likely be shaped by which economic sectors Beijing sees as having the greatest potential for near-term cooperative growth.

### Taiwan: A Long-Standing Standoff With No Near-Term Breakthrough
The thorny, decades-long dispute over Taiwan stands in sharp contrast to trade as the most intractable issue on the agenda, and few analysts expect any substantive shift in the status quo coming out of this meeting. Unlike his predecessor, Trump has declined to make explicit security commitments to defend the self-governing island in the event of a Chinese invasion, instead reaffirming Washington’s long-standing policy of strategic ambiguity.

Currently, U.S. foreign policy attention is heavily diverted by ongoing conflict in Iran, leaving the East Asian region lower on the immediate policy agenda. For its part, Beijing continues to prioritize non-military approaches to advancing its claim of sovereignty over Taiwan, rather than pursuing an immediate military incursion.

The next major turning point for cross-strait relations is not expected to come from this summit, but rather from Taiwan’s scheduled presidential election in January 2028. The outcome could shift dramatically if the more Beijing-friendly Kuomintang opposition wins the presidency, or if an isolationist candidate wins the U.S. presidential election later that same year. Early contenders from both major U.S. political parties have already floated a more restrained approach to overseas engagement, and a shift in U.S. policy would dramatically alter cross-strait calculations. For the moment, Beijing continues to expand the People’s Liberation Army’s naval capabilities to preserve the option of military action, but its current strategy focuses on leveraging shifting internal political dynamics within Taiwan, combining economic incentives and coercive pressure to narrow Taipei’s international space, while waiting for potential signs of waning U.S. interest in the Western Pacific.

Secondary international issues, while likely to be raised, are not expected to take center stage or drive major policy shifts. Beijing will almost certainly voice its opposition to the U.S.-led conflict in Iran, while Washington will remind Beijing of new U.S. legislation that allows sanctions on nations that purchase large volumes of Russian oil – a category that includes China, the world’s largest buyer of Russian crude. But neither side expects these discussions to lead to tangible changes in existing policy.

### Technology: AI’s Rapid Rise Creates Urgent Unmet Demand for Regulation
It is in technology, and specifically artificial intelligence, that the two sides are scrambling to bring diplomatic negotiation in line with the fast-changing reality of the global AI boom. The May 2026 summit surprised many observers when AI regulation emerged as an unexpected topic of discussion, something that had not been on the bilateral agenda during Trump’s first year back in office. Even so, both sides agreed that preliminary principle-based talks on guardrails for AI development were not just possible, but necessary, given the rapid growth of the sector and its inherent unpredictability. Most recently, on September 20, the two governments floated the idea of a dedicated bilateral AI “hotline” to alert each other of unanticipated AI-related national security risks.

In the months between the May and September summits, growing public anxiety over unregulated AI has hardened attitudes in the U.S., creating a more urgent push for guardrails. In China, public sentiment toward AI is far less openly hostile, with widespread recognition of AI’s transformative benefits for sectors like healthcare that have softened public attitudes. Even so, private and policy concerns persist: there are lingering questions over whether China’s sluggish, struggling economy will actually see sustained, broad-based benefits from the AI boom, and while AI has created new consumer opportunities, it has so far generated relatively few new jobs for a Chinese workforce already grappling with large-scale structural unemployment.

Both sides have compelling individual reasons to pursue talks on AI regulation. For both governments, the shared risk of unregulated AI development by rogue private firms triggering widespread social disruption is a core concern, while the U.S. also faces immediate voter pressure over the resource demands of AI data centers.

For Beijing, there are unique domestic political drivers for seeking regulatory controls. The Chinese Communist Party leadership views unregulated, out-of-control systems as an existential threat to political stability, a concern deeply shaped by President Xi Jinping’s own formative experience: as a young man, Xi was exiled to rural China after his father was purged ahead of the Cultural Revolution, a period of political anarchy that left a lasting imprint on his leadership style and commitment to tight centralized control. Any AI development that could undermine the Party’s unchallenged hold on power is seen as unacceptable, so regulatory frameworks that mitigate this risk are unlikely to be rejected out of hand.

Even with this shared recognition of mutual concern – albeit rooted in very different national priorities – major short-term progress remains unlikely. U.S.-China strategic competition in AI is intense, and neither government nor private sector leaders in either country are willing to make concessions that would grant a strategic advantage to the other. Trust between Washington and Beijing on AI issues remains very low. The most likely public outcome will be an agreement to continue talks, rather than a substantive regulatory deal, even if quiet backchannel negotiations continue out of public view.

### The Value of Sustained Dialogue Amid Persistent Divisions
At its core, the 2026 September Trump-Xi summit matters less for any imminent major policy shift on either side, and more for what it represents: a continued commitment to maintaining open dialogue between the leaders of the world’s two largest economies and military powers. The two leaders are already scheduled to meet two more times before the end of the year at the G20 and APEC summits, putting four high-level leadership meetings in just over six months – a frequency of engagement that analysts frame as a positive signal, where a breakdown in meetings would be a far more worrying outcome for global stability.

Even so, the deep, fundamental incompatibilities in the two sides’ core priorities on the three Ts remain the undercurrent beneath all polite, occasionally cordial diplomatic exchanges. While dialogue reduces the risk of catastrophic miscalculation, it has yet to bridge the divides that have defined U.S.-China rivalry for decades.

Against a backdrop of rising military tensions, intensifying technological rivalry, and shrinking room for accidental escalation, the US-China relationship currently stands at one of its most dangerous turning points in modern history. As US policymakers continue to debate how to respond to China’s growing global influence, leading analyst David Santoro, President and CEO of the Pacific Forum, argues that American strategy must adjust its ambitions to match on-the-ground material realities. While Washington has long pursued enduring global primacy, technological dominance, and full economic sovereignty, Santoro contends that the only sustainable path forward for the bilateral relationship is deliberate, structured managed coexistence.

To frame the ongoing policy debate correctly, Santoro first rejects two extreme, unworkable approaches that have gained traction in Washington. The first, pushing for the subversion of the Chinese Communist Party, is labeled both reckless and foolhardy. Attempting to force the collapse of a nuclear-armed major economy that governs 1.4 billion people carries catastrophic risks: even if successful, the move could trigger uncontrolled military escalation, destabilize critical global strategic assets, spark a total collapse of the global economy, and cause unprecedented humanitarian disaster. The second extreme, ceding control of the Indo-Pacific region to Chinese hegemony, is equally disastrous. Unchecked Chinese dominance in the region would choke off critical global maritime trade routes, weaken core US security alliances and partnerships, and upend the long-standing global balance of power.

The real policy divide in Washington falls between two competing competing visions. On one side are primacists, who argue that the US must enforce full dominance and escalation superiority over China while leading a broad containment strategy. On the other side are realists, who recognize that the era of unchallenged US global primacy has ended, and advocate for building a stable equilibrium with China rooted in military deterrence, targeted economic de-risking, and managed coexistence.

The primacist vision, while ideologically appealing to many, collides directly with hard material constraints that cannot be ignored. Militarily, primacists push for escalation dominance, using overwhelming offensive power to preserve the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, arguing that managed competition prioritizes short-term de-escalation at the cost of long-term victory, and that “there is no substitute for victory.” In technology and trade, primacists frame US-China competition as a zero-sum struggle, calling for aggressive state subsidies, increased federal research and development investment, and strict export controls to preserve US leadership in high-stakes sectors including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and semiconductors. They also push for broad industrial rebalancing, efforts to reverse China’s mercantilist trade practices, reshoring of critical supply chains for goods like critical minerals and pharmaceuticals, full decoupling of major economic sectors, and frame the rivalry as a moral “democracy versus autocracy” crusade aimed at mobilizing US alliances to isolate China and pressure for internal political change.

But this grand ambition runs up against unchangeable realities. Uncontested US military supremacy along China’s coastal perimeter is now out of reach. China’s layered anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) networks mean the US can no longer project unimpeded military power directly to the Chinese mainland, and any attempt to do so risks triggering a preventive war rather than deterring one. China’s expanding nuclear triad has also eliminated the traditional US strategic immunity that once kept the American homeland largely beyond nuclear threat. As expert Brad Roberts notes, the US will share mutual nuclear vulnerability with China regardless of whether it accepts this reality politically, even as it adapts its nuclear arsenal to counter both Russia and China. Material constraints make achieving nuclear dominance over these two peer adversaries simply impossible.

On the economic and technological fronts, broad blockades on Chinese progress are equally ineffective. China’s deep pool of tech talent and massive capital reserves guarantee that Beijing can innovate around even the strictest Western export controls. Even former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, a prominent advocate for aggressive innovation competition with China, has acknowledged that both the US and China will develop next-generation AI capabilities: “We cannot prevent it. We cannot hold it to ourselves for a few years of advantage. We are in a race that will shape the world’s future.” Total economic decoupling is also prohibitively costly, given the deep integration of global supply chains, and aggressive use of trade weapons risks retaliation, including Chinese export restrictions on critical inputs such as rare earth elements that are vital to US manufacturing and tech sectors. Most importantly, key US regional allies and Global South partners refuse to choose between Washington and Beijing, preferring to maintain commercial ties with China alongside security partnerships with the US. China’s deepening strategic alignment with Russia, Iran, and North Korea also creates a counter-bloc that undermines Western efforts to achieve full isolation.

Acknowledging these material limits does not mean American retreat or capitulation, Santoro emphasizes. It simply requires adopting a pragmatic strategy rooted in hard-nosed realism. While some realists (often called offshore balancers) advocate for withdrawing US military forces from the First Island Chain to the Second Island Chain and dissolving mutual defense alliances to reduce the risk of war, a forward-leaning realist camp argues that voluntary retreat would create a dangerous power vacuum that invites the very Chinese aggression deterrence aims to prevent. Instead, these realists argue that the US should maintain a favorable balance of power along the First Island Chain, deter aggression through military denial, manage rivalry through transactional statecraft, and seek equilibrium within the theater rather than retreating to safety behind the horizon. This approach rests on four core pillars:

### Pillar 1: Rebuild domestic solvency, tech leadership, and targeted collective resilience
Sustained global American power begins with strong economic and physical foundations at home. The US should prioritize targeted public investment, next-generation AI infrastructure, green energy supply chains, and expanded domestic manufacturing capacity. Streamlining immigration pathways for top global tech talent and modernizing industrial infrastructure will also create the engines needed to sustain long-term competition. Rather than pushing for full economic decoupling that alienates US allies, Santoro argues domestic revitalization should be paired with collective resilience among partners: Washington should collaborate with allies to build joint critical mineral processing networks, shared strategic reserves, and targeted anti-coercion trade mechanisms. This framework protects both the US and its partners from Chinese economic leverage and export blockades, while preserving open trade channels for non-sensitive goods.

### Pillar 2: Deploy a posture of military denial and allied responsibility-sharing
The US should shift away from vulnerable, concentrated forward military platforms toward a distributed, resilient denial network. Priority should be given to massed autonomous strike systems, long-range mobile anti-ship weaponry, hardened command-and-control nodes, and undersea warfare assets. These capabilities can deter a Chinese amphibious invasion of Taiwan or maritime coercion without relying on escalatory strikes against the Chinese mainland. As strategist Elbridge Colby argues, this approach is the only realistic option to prevent Chinese regional hegemony, since restoring full military dominance over China is unfeasible given China’s size and growing industrial and military capacity. This strategy also requires robust burden-sharing from allies: while reaffirming its extended deterrence commitments, the US should insist that front-line allies take on a larger share of conventional defense. This includes integrating Japan’s new stand-off counterstrike capabilities into joint operational planning, supporting Australia’s expansion of long-range strike capabilities under the AUKUS partnership, and co-developing defense industrial production capacity with regional partners to make the First Island Chain self-sustaining for long-term deterrence.

### Pillar 3: Establish strategic and operational guardrails
As the US strengthens deterrence, it must also acknowledge mutual nuclear vulnerability with China to stabilize the strategic balance and eliminate incentives for worst-case force expansion. Building on this baseline, Washington should pursue targeted risk reduction measures across both strategic and operational domains. Drawing on the precedent of the 1988 US-Soviet Ballistic Missile Launch Agreement, the US should coordinate with allies to push Beijing to adopt formal pre-launch notification agreements for ballistic missiles and space-launch vehicles; recent Pacific Forum research suggests China may be open to such an agreement. Beyond missile-related guardrails, the two powers should secure bilateral commitments to maintain permanent human control over nuclear assets, institutionalize 24/7 military-to-military crisis communication channels, standardize maritime and aerial encounter protocols in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, and negotiate binding rules of the road for military AI, space-based targeting systems, and offensive cyber operations. These confidence-building measures are critical prerequisites for future nuclear arms control talks, which remain out of reach today due to the current asymmetry between US and Chinese nuclear force structures.

### Pillar 4: Institutionalize platforms for transactional diplomacy and reciprocal statecraft
Beyond military risk reduction, preventing routine friction from escalating into open conflict requires resilient diplomatic channels that can withstand periods of political volatility. The US and China should establish joint working task forces to resolve trade disputes, update definitions for targeted export controls, and coordinate action on shared non-zero-sum challenges including global macroeconomic stability, climate change mitigation, global public health threats, and the suppression of illicit illicit precursor chemical networks for illegal drugs. Engagement should move beyond empty dialogue to reciprocal statecraft: Washington can offer calibrated market access or relaxed regulatory restrictions in exchange for verifiable Chinese actions, such as stricter controls on fentanyl precursor exports or commitments to fair debt restructuring standards for developing nations. Anchoring these exchanges in multilateral frameworks will also ensure that agreements reflect regional consensus, making it harder for either power to walk away from commitments during periods of heightened political tension.

In conclusion, Santoro argues that prudent statecraft requires aligning strategy with material realities rather than ideological ambitions. Shifting from a pursuit of primacy to a realist framework does not require American retreat or capitulation. Instead, it demands a deliberate balance-of-power strategy: anchoring national power in domestic revitalization, enforcing stability through forward military denial and allied burden-sharing, building critical strategic and operational guardrails to reduce risk, and pairing strong deterrence with sustained crisis diplomacy.

Fifty-five years after Henry Kissinger’s covert 1971 trip to Beijing laid the groundwork for Sino-American rapprochement, a high-stakes meeting between the United States and China is set to unfold in a dramatically altered global landscape.

In July 1971, then-U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger used a reported case of gastrointestinal illness during an official trip to Pakistan as cover to slip away on a classified flight to Beijing. Hidden from view behind Cold War divisions, Kissinger’s secret negotiations with Premier Zhou Enlai cleared the path for President Richard Nixon’s iconic 1972 visit to China, the trip widely remembered as the “week that changed the world.” That historic opening turned Cold War ideological adversaries into uneasy strategic partners aligned against a shared Soviet rival, a gamble that redefined global order for decades.

Half a century later, the geopolitical stage has flipped: on September 24, 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump will host Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House, a meeting that follows an earlier bilateral summit in Beijing that May, where the two leaders first agreed to work toward “constructive strategic stability.” Unlike Kissinger’s hidden mission, this summit will play out entirely in the public eye, under the intense scrutiny of global media, with no backchannel secrecy and no shared overarching enemy to unify the two sides. Yet the core question facing both leaders echoes the same uncertainty that shadowed Kissinger’s 1971 flight: can two great power rivals forge a lasting, stable peace without ever setting aside their deep mutual differences?

### The Rise of Weaponized Interdependence
For much of the first Trump administration, public discussion of U.S.-China relations centered almost entirely on tit-for-tat tariff disputes. Today, that framing no longer captures the transformed nature of their rivalry, which has evolved into a contest over control of critical global supply chain chokepoints.

Nowhere is this new dynamic more visible than in the global rare earths market. China holds a near-total dominance over rare earth refining and processing capacity, so complete that even rare earth ore mined in California is currently shipped to China for value-added processing. This gives Beijing significant strategic leverage: China can weaponize its market position to hold critical U.S. industrial sectors – from aerospace and semiconductors to high-performance temperature-resistant coatings – hostage to its geopolitical priorities. Recent Chinese export restrictions have laid bare deep vulnerabilities in U.S. industrial supply chains, illustrating how a little-noted link in global production can suddenly become a major geopolitical flashpoint.

This dynamic cuts both ways, however. Washington maintains its own formidable set of economic and strategic tools: sweeping tariffs, export controls on cutting-edge semiconductors, regulatory investment restrictions, global financial leverage, and exclusive access to the most advanced artificial intelligence chips. For its part, Beijing’s arsenal draws on unmatched manufacturing scale, control of sprawling global supply chains, dominance of rare earths and critical minerals processing, and access to one of the world’s largest consumer markets.

Decades ago, political scientists Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye coined the term “complex interdependence” to describe how mutual economic reliance between states generates both constraints and coercive leverage for all parties. What is unfolding between Washington and Beijing today is a far more fraught iteration of this dynamic: their interdependence has become increasingly securitized, turning the deep economic ties that once bound them into a weaponized landscape of mutual coercion.

### Diverging Strategic Philosophies and Underlying Fault Lines
Beyond the new geoeconomics of rivalry, the two sides approach negotiations with fundamentally differing strategic instincts. Trump’s approach to diplomacy is deeply transactional, prioritizing immediate, measurable concessions that can be framed as clear victories for domestic political consumption before global attention shifts elsewhere. By contrast, Xi’s diplomatic style follows a longer time horizon, favoring incremental progress, deliberate sequencing, and calculated ambiguity, prioritizing the gradual expansion of strategic space over short-term wins while avoiding any commitments that could limit future flexibility.

Washington’s core priorities for the summit include securing more predictable rare earth supplies and commitments from Beijing to curb practices deemed harmful to U.S. economic and strategic interests. Beijing, in turn, is seeking relief from U.S. tariffs and technology restrictions, as well as a stable long-term framework for bilateral engagement. The bilateral Board of Trade established during the May 2026 Beijing summit has already made one modest start, agreeing to cut tariffs on non-sensitive commodity exports worth up to $30 billion annually, laying limited institutional groundwork for an otherwise highly volatile relationship.

Beneath these surface economic negotiations lies a far more intractable security dilemma. The Taiwan Strait remains the single most dangerous fault line in bilateral relations; during the May Beijing meeting, Xi explicitly warned Trump that mismanaging the Taiwan issue could push relations into “a very dangerous place.”

Artificial intelligence adds a further layer of growing complexity. The two powers are locked in a fierce race to dominate AI development, yet neither can manage the risks of unregulated AI alone. Every measure one side takes to boost its own security – from export controls to technology restrictions to military deployments and supply chain diversification – is automatically interpreted by the other as an attempt at strategic containment. It remains uncertain whether the U.S.-China AI dialogue mechanism, agreed ahead of the summit to monitor high-risk unregulated AI developments, will actually be activated and meaningfully used amid intensifying competition.

While these tensions do not make armed conflict inevitable, escalating friction across multiple fronts leaves the relationship vulnerable to unforeseen external shocks. And crucially, this summit’s outcomes will reach far beyond the bilateral relationship: the entire world has a direct stake in how the two leaders manage their rivalry.

### Global Expectations of Managed Coexistence
Recent conflicts in Ukraine and Iran have laid bare the inherent limits of great power influence, while a growing bloc of middle powers have steadily expanded their own geopolitical bargaining power. From India and ASEAN to Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Gulf states, and much of the Global South, most nations rely on China for manufacturing, on the U.S. for technology and finance, on Gulf producers for energy, and on one another for trade and connectivity. Few have any interest in being forced to choose an outright side between Washington and Beijing.

India’s focus on strategic autonomy and multi-alignment perfectly captures this global stance, as does ASEAN’s longstanding resistance to binary great power alignments. European governments seek economic resilience without fully severing ties to Beijing, while Gulf states have openly demonstrated that alignment with Washington does not require abandoning closer economic and strategic ties with China.

The most consequential question facing the 2026 summit is not which side holds greater coercive leverage, but whether their rivalry can leave enough strategic space for all other nations to operate independently. A U.S.-China bilateral condominium that divides global influence would alarm much of the world, just as a full-blown open confrontation between the two powers would carry unacceptable global risks. The only widely acceptable outcome is carefully managed rivalry: a framework that lets the two great powers adjust their equilibrium while allowing other nations to retain full strategic agency. This end goal is not friendship, trust, or even full reconciliation – it is simply stable, mutually accepted coexistence.

### Building Guardrails for Sustainable Rivalry
The success of the summit should not be measured by flashy photo ops or symbolic announcements, but by whether Trump and Xi can agree on a set of modest but durable guardrails to prevent uncontrolled escalation.

First, the two sides need to deliver greater economic predictability. Global businesses cannot afford to restructure sprawling supply chains every time Washington or Beijing rolls out a new trade or export control measure. Second, they need to reinforce open lines of strategic communication. While military-to-military contacts and crisis hotlines do not build trust on their own, they are proven tools to prevent accidental clashes from spiraling into full-blown crises.

Third, the two sides should pursue targeted selective cooperation. Issues including climate change, global public health, financial stability, and AI safety all demand urgent collaborative action that can advance even before the two sides resolve their deeper geopolitical differences. Fourth, they need to agree on boundaries for competition: great power rivalry is inevitable, but unconstrained competition carries catastrophic risks for all.

Finally, both sides must confront a difficult psychological reality: neither power is going away any time soon. The U.S. will remain a formidable technological, financial, and military superpower, while China will remain a major industrial, commercial, and geopolitical heavyweight. Any sustainable bilateral relationship must start from this unshakable reality.

In 1971, Kissinger’s secret trip proved that yesterday’s adversary could become tomorrow’s partner. In 2026, Trump and Xi face the opposite, equally urgent challenge: proving that today’s rival does not have to become tomorrow’s enemy. Where Nixon and Mao needed a strategic opening to suit Cold War demands, Trump and Xi need a strategic ceiling: a clear agreement to limit the escalation of their rivalry before it slips into catastrophe.

This summit will not decide which power will dominate the 21st century. But it can deliver a far more consequential outcome: it can determine whether the two great powers can compete peacefully, without forcing the rest of the world to pay the price for their rivalry.

*This analysis is by Swaran Singh, former professor of diplomacy and disarmament at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.*