Next week, when President Donald Trump arrives in Beijing to meet President Xi Jinping, the choreography will be in quintessential familiar style.
Yet their carefully crafted calisthenics, their ritual reaffirmations and the language of leadership will not hide the truth that this encounter is less about reconciliation and more for managing their irreconcilability, with some hope for global stability on the side.
The United States and China together generate over 42% of global GDP. This makes them anchors of global supply chains that stand disrupted by the geopolitics of protracted conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. These have unleashed volatility in global commodity markets threatening life and livelihoods around the world.
But the Trump-Xi summit is not going to aspire for any utopian end of their rivalry. At best, the two may acknowledge to each other that their rivalry has become structural and must now be managed from both the sides.
From détente to guardrails
Cold War analogies, however, are more likely to obscure than to illuminate the current state of US-China equations. Theirs is no hope for the sort of détente that transformed US-Soviet relations in the 1970s. For the US and China have little mutual trust, no ideological softening and no shared strategic horizon.
What is emerging instead is their search for guardrails — informal limits to escalation that can prevent crises from spiralling into conflict. Unlike formal US-Soviet arms control agreements of 1970s, these novel mechanisms are unlikely to be codified or publicly celebrated. They will exist only as tacit understandings.
This is because their reality is far more complex than what the prevailing narrative of detente or decoupling can imagine.
Since 2022, Washington has constructed an expansive China-focused export-control regime targeting advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence and other frontier technologies. Beijing has responded by leveraging its dominance in critical minerals such as gallium and germanium. Yet their economic interdependence remains substantial. Bilateral trade continues at scale, financial linkages are enduring and production networks remain, by design, deeply integrated.
Therefore what both sides have engineered is a form of stratified complex interdependence — high barriers around technologies that define future power, along with continued openness where mutual benefit outweighs strategic risk. Total decoupling is neither feasible nor desirable. What matters is how they have restructured their guardrails for this interdependence to survive.
Geo-economics as new geopolitics
Meanwhile, the center of gravity in US-China rivalry has also shifted decisively from the military to the economic domain. Export controls, sanctions and supply-chain networks now function as instruments of strategic coercion.
Economic tools are now deployed to achieve geopolitical objectives. With amalgamation of development and security pursuits, the distinction between markets and strategy has eroded. Trade policy is now inseparable from their national security doctrines.
For third countries, this transformation creates acute dilemmas. Other states have to carefully navigate between these two competing ecosystems and their constantly changing codes of conduct and strategic alignments. It is not an easy binary between Beijing and Washington, but a complex landscape of constrained autonomy, where bandwidth of strategic flexibility is increasingly difficult to accurately define.
So if the Beijing summit produces anything of lasting value, it will not be a grand bargain or a formal treaty. As was the case with the last Xi-Trump meeting, at Busan, this summit will produce a set of rather technical, opaque and yet more consequential understandings open to varying interpretation.
Recent incidents in the South China Sea and around Taiwan underscore the possibilities for inadvertent escalation. The absence of a codified crisis management mechanism amplifies such risks. In this context, even the most modest understanding — for communication channels, operational protocols or thresholds of escalation — can become a game changer.
Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US and the Soviet Union established mechanisms to prevent accidental wars. The US-China ties today require codification of a similar, even if less formalized, architecture of mutually recognized guardrails.
Trump-Xi chemistry matters
Personalised leadership style, however, introduces yet another layer of complications. Trump’s diplomatic approach is transactional, oriented toward immediate, visible outcomes. Xi’s is strategic and long-term, embedded within a broader vision of China’s rise. This disconnect will shape their outcomes at Beijing.
Trump will seek demonstrable gains — on trade balances, symbolic concessions or security assurances. As host, President Xi will calibrate responses to ensure that his concessions fit within China’s long-term trajectories.
Even their best results, therefore, will be tactical, reversible agreements — useful for short-term stabilization but insufficient for building durable frameworks. Such arrangements will also be contingent upon leadership dynamics rather than institutionalized cooperation.
The most consequential dimension of US-China rivalry also lies beyond their bilateral relationship. Across Asia, Africa and Latin America, states are being drawn into their competing visions of development, governance and connectivity.
Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative has established a significant presence across regions, embedding Chinese standards and financing structures. As the Trump administration struggles with conceptualiaing alternatives to Belt and Road, it has often resorted to the use of force as was recently seen in Venezuela and Iran.
For the rest of the world, therefore, the question is no longer which module is normatively preferable but which one can safely deliver tangible benefits. It is in this context that the outcome of US-China rivalry will be shaped not by summits but by their global credibility.
Selective coordination
Within structural rivalries, systemic shocks – paradoxically – can also create limited spaces for cooperation. Energy market instability, pandemic risks, terrorism and nuclear proliferation are issues regarding which both Washington and Beijing share overlapping priorities, even as they compete elsewhere.
The ongoing disruptions linked to the Middle East illustrate this dynamic. Even if for different reasons, both economies depend on stable energy markets and both are vulnerable to market volatility. Even in the absence of any broader strategic alignment, such shared vulnerabilities can create narrow corridors for transactional partnerships.
This pattern aligns with what scholars describe as competitive interdependence — marked by intensifying strategic rivalry alongside persistent economic and technological entanglements that neither side can fully unwind.
The cumulative effect of these dynamics is that their engagements have hiccups, containment is impractical and convergence has proven illusory. What remains is selective coordination for competitive coexistence.
In this framework, stability is not derived from trust or shared values, but from the recognition of mutual vulnerability and the costs of escalation. The US-China relationship exemplifies this simple logic: Rivalry persists, but it is bounded by necessity.
What to expect next
The Beijing summit, then, is not expected to resolve the central tensions in US-China rivalry. Taiwan will remain contested, technological competition will intensify and mutual suspicion will endure. What the summit may achieve will be modest and yet most consequential: It may buy time for both sides.
In an international system marked by uncertainties and fragmentations, time is a strategic resource. Managed rivalry, however imperfect, is certainly preferable to its unmanaged alternatives.
Trump and Xi do not see each other as reliable partners, nor are they likely to become so. They are, in a deeper sense, rivals by design — leaders of systems whose trajectories are fundamentally at odds, yet whose coexistence is their only choice. The understandings they develop in this summit will not end rivalry. At best, these will define its limits.
For now, that may be the most world can expect from Beijing summit.
Swaran Singh is a professor of international relations, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
