As Trump and Xi prepare to meet in Washington, mixed signals from the US administration and unresolved strategic differences expose the fragility of efforts to stabilise relations between the two powers.
Xi Jinping’s September 2026 visit to Washington – his first since 2015 – will be a major benchmark in the evolution of his relationship with Donald Trump. The May 2026 Beijing summit saw the two leaders extend the ‘trade truce’ forged in South Korea in October 2025 and agree to pursue ‘constructive strategic stability’ in the US–China relationship. But in the intervening four months, Washington has sent mixed signals about its commitment to maintaining momentum towards this goal.
The consensus since May 2026 has been that Trump is leaning towards a more accommodating approach to China, after several years of escalating tensions and emphasis on strategic competition. The most notable signs came immediately after the Beijing summit, when Trump made several statements that appeared sympathetic towards Xi’s framing of the Taiwan issue and postponed a US weapons sale to Taiwan.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth also struck a softer tone towards China in his May 2026 speech to the annual Shangri-La Dialogue compared with the previous year, while Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby’s August 2026 Manila speech did not mention China at all. FBI Director Kash Patel announced enhanced US–China law enforcement cooperation during his July 2026 visit to Beijing.
Yet little progress has been evident over the northern summer on the key issues addressed at the May summit. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Foreign Minister Wang Yi in July 2026 on the sidelines of an ASEAN conference in Manila, but Washington’s readout of the meeting hinted at little more than ‘the importance of keeping channels of communication open’. And the bilateral Board of Trade and Board of Investment, announced at the May summit, have not yet become operational.
Perhaps most damaging of all is that Trump has occasionally reverted to castigating China. He lobbed accusations towards Beijing in July 2026 of clandestine interference in the 2020 US presidential election and threatened to sanction China, among other countries, for sustaining its economic relationship with Iran in August.
Given these mixed messages, the summit in Washington is unlikely to yield any major breakthroughs. It will inevitably be characterised by both sides as a diplomatic success and the two leaders will likely extend the trade truce. But the structure and substance of ‘constructive strategic stability’ – which essentially refers to working out the terms of peaceful coexistence – will probably remain elusive.
This will be due in part to the persistent gap between the two sides’ assessments of their relative strategic leverage, which constrains both parties from making major concessions without a guarantee of reciprocity. While Trump and Xi appear determined to improve the relationship, both almost certainly believe that they have the upper hand and can withstand pressure from the other.
But the biggest obstacle to ‘constructive strategic stability’ in US–China relations is the instability posed by Trump himself. The past year may have seen Trump implicitly recognise the limits on US leverage over Beijing, alongside rising US public support for a less confrontational approach to China. Yet it is not at all clear that this will translate into pragmatic US policy on China and a stabilisation of the bilateral relationship.
Trump’s approach to China lacks coherence, consistency, and consensus within his administration on what strategy and policies to follow. In contrast, Xi’s approach to the United States is coherent and consistent, and reflects a unified strategy in Beijing.
Washington’s China policy is being held hostage by Trump’s impulsive decision-making, apparent incapacity for strategic thinking and desire to maintain what he claims to be a ‘very good’ relationship with Xi. Those with genuine expertise on China and grand strategy within Trump’s administration – including China hawks who are probably frustrated with Trump’s more accommodative approach – have yet to forge a policy consensus.
That the National Security Council process is inoperative only adds to the difficulty of consensus-building, leaving foreign policy mostly subject to Trump’s unscripted personal pronouncements. And even if Trump were to nominally endorse a China strategy – as he did with the December 2025 National Security Strategy and the January 2026 National Defense Strategy – there is no guarantee that he would recall its contents, let alone reliably and consistently uphold it.
Due to this internal bureaucratic dysfunction and the longstanding presumption that Washington should be able to set the terms of the US–China relationship, the Trump administration is still far from reckoning with what ‘constructive strategic stability’ with China might require. Though Xi himself seems genuinely committed to pursuing this goal, he has little reason to anticipate that Washington will be a dependable partner in that pursuit in the foreseeable future.
Republished from East Asia Forum
Paul Heer
Dr. Paul Heer is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. A veteran of 30 years as an analyst of East Asian affairs at the Central Intelligence Agency, he served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015. He has held fellowships at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Massachusetts Institute for Technology’s Center for International Studies, and the Center for the National Interest. He also served as Adjunct Professor at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He is the author of Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018).