Following Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing in May 2026, Xi Jinping paid a visit to Washington, his first since 2015, between September 23 and 25. With the two leaders scheduled to meet two more times this year alone, at the APEC summit in November and the G20 summit in December, we approached several analysts to share their insights on the importance of this meeting, including its major deliverables and implications for the future development of not only US-China relations but also relations with the European Union, Japan, and Taiwan.
Björn Jerdén, Director at the Swedish National China Centre
A clear US strategy towards China has yet to emerge under the current Trump administration. China’s priorities, however, are easier to discern. Before the summit, I suggested that Xi was heading to Washington with four important objectives. How far did he come towards achieving them?
The first goal was to prevent the trade war from flaring up again. According to US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the two sides agreed to extend the trade truce until 10 January 2027, postponing the November deadline that could have triggered renewed tariff escalation. Both also emphasized continued negotiations, and Xi said the latest economic consultations had produced a “new joint arrangement.” The United States and China have since published details of proposed tariff reductions covering US$30 billion of non-sensitive goods in each direction. According to China, over 90% of the listed products would receive most-favored-nation tariff treatment. Xi thus appears to have achieved his minimum objective of avoiding a return to the tariff war. Beijing would probably have preferred a longer truce, however, and any further extension will require additional negotiations in the coming months.
Xi’s second goal was to ease US technology restrictions. The two sides agreed to establish an AI dialogue and a channel for communicating about AI incidents, but they announced no easing of export controls. This represents progress in cooperation but offers no clear improvement in access to US technology.
China’s third, longstanding objective is to consolidate a relationship in which the United States recognizes it as a great power of equal stature. The exceptional ceremony of the state visit and Trump’s lavish praise suggest that Xi can plausibly claim some success on this symbolic level. However, for Beijing, recognition as an equal also entails deference to China’s core interests, including restraint in criticizing its human rights record. No public confirmation shows that Trump raised such concerns during the summit, but there are also no indications that Xi secured substantive concessions on other issues Beijing regards as fundamental.
Finally, Xi sought to weaken US support for Taiwan. After the May meeting, Trump said he was holding back a roughly US$14 billion arms package, describing it as a negotiating chip. Xi urged Washington to oppose Taiwanese independence, seeking a shift from its established position of not supporting it. However, no new concession has been publicly confirmed. Xi may view the delay of the arms package as evidence of Chinese leverage, but little public evidence suggests the summit brought him closer to his objective.
In sum, Xi secured some of what he wanted, but the warm reception yielded few substantive US concessions. The summit showed how much Trump’s tone toward China has softened, and how far the United States is still from giving Beijing what it wants.
Shannon Tiezzi, Editor-in-Chief at the Diplomat
As expected, there weren’t a whole lot of deliverables from the Trump-Xi summit. The biggest practical impact was finally making good on one of the agreements from the May summit: the Board of Trade to provide tariff relief for US$30 billion worth of goods. (The Board of Investment from May, however, still has nothing to show for its existence.)
The other big commitment was an agreement to extend the “trade truce” through the next wave of summits: APEC in China in November and the G20 in the US in December. From Trump’s perspective, this is particularly important as it will help keep the economy stable through the midterm elections in November.
After the truce expires in January 2027, it will be very interesting to see what happens. There is growing discontent on the US side that China isn’t fully implementing its promises to restart the flow of rare earths to US firms. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hinted at this even when announcing the truce extension, saying that China needs to make more progress on its deliverables. The short length of the extension was notable.
Washington is also under pressure to further tighten restrictions on China’s access to US AI models and chips, which is at odds with Trump’s instinct to sell whatever he can to whomever he can. Trump even reportedly asked Xi if he wanted to buy US arms, an unthinkable offer, given that China is the US military’s nearest peer competitor.
This gets to the heart of the issue with the Trump-Xi summits. Whatever bonhomie is put on display while one leader hosts the other, it looks out of touch with the realities of the relationship. Trump met Xi at the airport, literally rolling out the red carpet for him, while thousands of protesters demonstrated in Washington, to call attention to China’s human rights abuses. Trump talked about Xi as a “good friend” while China continues to provide dual-use goods to Russia for its war in Ukraine. China is also supporting Iran, which is directly in conflict with the United States, by giving Tehran intelligence and dual-use goods.
The story of the Trump administration as a whole has been the growing gap between this US government’s interests and US national interests. And the Trump-Xi summits fit directly within that larger trajectory. While it’s decidedly in the US national interest to prevent conflict with China and keep trade ties open, Trump’s embrace of China’s preferred framing of the relationship, and apparent willingness to sideline or ignore real security concerns in pursuit of economic gains, create problems for the United States.
Atsuko Higashino, Head of the Degree Program in International Public Policy at the University of Tsukuba
The September 2026 Trump-Xi summit in Washington should be understood as the third stage in the evolution of US-China relations over the past year. The Busan summit in October 2025 was primarily about stopping escalation after months of tariff retaliation and Chinese restrictions on critical minerals. The Beijing summit in May 2026 moved further, creating a framework for managing competition under what Beijing called a “constructive China-US relationship of strategic stability.” Washington now represents a third stage: the normalization of managed competition. By the end of Xi’s visit, Beijing said the two leaders had agreed to build such a relationship “on the basis of respect, fairness and reciprocity,” even as their fundamental disputes remained unresolved.
For Japan, this brings both short-term reassurance and long-term uncertainty. Before the summit, an immediate concern was that Trump might make significant concessions over Taiwan in return for an economic deal with Beijing. Xi was expected to press Washington to restrict arms sales to Taiwan and to adopt a stronger formulation opposing, rather than merely not supporting, Taiwan independence. No such major change in US policy was publicly announced. Tokyo can therefore take some immediate reassurance that no overt trade-off between economic accommodation with China and core regional security interests has materialized.
The more important question is what happens next. Japan should watch four indicators: whether delayed US arms sales to Taiwan actually proceed; whether restrictions on advanced semiconductor exports to China remain intact; whether access to Chinese rare earths and critical minerals becomes linked to US concessions elsewhere; and whether US-Japan defense cooperation, including in the East China Sea and around the Senkaku Islands, continues to deepen in practice. These will tell Tokyo far more than the cordial atmosphere surrounding the summit.
Trump’s reference to the United States and China as “allies” during the Second World War also deserves attention. Historically, the United States did fight alongside China (represented by Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China) against Japan. The problem is not the historical fact itself. Rather, the remark showed how readily highly sensitive historical language can be employed in the symbolism of stabilizing US-China relations, even as Beijing continues to invoke wartime history and “militarism” in its criticism of contemporary Japan.
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi responded cautiously, stressing instead that Japan and the United States had achieved post-war reconciliation and were now allies bound by very strong ties. The episode therefore points less to a downgrading of the alliance than to a subtler problem: Washington may simultaneously strengthen its formal alliance with Japan while pursuing highly personalized and transactional summit diplomacy with China. That will make alliance management increasingly complicated for Tokyo. Japan therefore needs neither alarmism nor complacency. It should strengthen institutionalized consultation with Washington, particularly before major US-China negotiations, while reinforcing its own defense capabilities, economic-security resilience and diplomatic options.
Europe, especially Central and Eastern Europe, faces a closely related dilemma: dependence on a credible US security commitment against Russia coexists with economic vulnerabilities linked to China. Japan and Europe therefore share an interest in ensuring that US-China “strategic stability” does not become a substitute for consultation with allies. Cooperation on critical-mineral diversification, supply-chain resilience and economic-security standards can help ensure that a more stable US-China relationship strengthens, rather than reduces, their strategic agency.
Andrew Yeh, Senior Director at the China Strategic Risks Institute (CSRI)
No doubt many officials in Taipei would have breathed a sigh of relief at the end of Xi’s meetings with President Trump in Washington last week. Unlike the last meeting between the two leaders in May, Taiwan was neither top of the agenda nor subject to unexpected and damaging off-script musings from Trump in the immediate aftermath. However, any relief must be tempered by the reality that, on Taiwan, Xi already has what he wants from Trump: his continued refusal to sign off on a major US$14 billion arms package to Taiwan. In Trump’s own words, the package has been held “in abeyance” since the May summit and is a great “bargaining chip” in his negotiations with China. Yes, it is true that Xi urged the US to “resolutely oppose Taiwan independence” at last week’s summit, as he tried with the Biden Administration before him. So far, nothing suggests that Trump agreed to this suggestion, with previous US policy stating it “does not support” Taiwanese independence but not going so far as to “reject” or “oppose” it, as Beijing wishes. While these subtle distinctions matter, they matter far less than the pragmatic reality of what the suspension of the arms package has achieved for Beijing.
The $14 billion package is critical for three reasons. Firstly, defense buildup. The package included weapons that would play an important part in Taiwan’s roll-out of “asymmetric” defense capabilities, including anti-ship, anti-missile and anti-drone systems. These are all purchased with one goal in mind: deterring a Chinese invasion. The US offers the leading equipment in this regard and is normally the only country willing to openly sell such high-capability weapons to Taiwan in such large volumes. Secondly, Taiwan’s domestic politics. President Lai has set out an agenda twinning rapid defense procurement with clear alignment with the US and other democratic countries. The suspension of the weapons sales undermines both and bolsters opposition critics of his approach, right before Taiwan’s local elections next month. Thirdly, regional impact. Chinese information operations in Taiwan and other countries in the Indo-Pacific often seek to sow doubt about the US commitment to the region. Trump’s willingness to trade off traditional security ties as a “bargaining chip” will be of great concern to Japan, the Philippines and other regional treaty allies increasingly under pressure from Beijing.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio passed off the delay as due to considerations of the US’ own needs, rather than a snub to Taipei. There may be a grain of truth in this, with the continuing war against Iran significantly depleting US stockpiles. Nonetheless, US sales to Taiwan have often had delivery timelines delayed by several years or more, and there is always scope to allow the US to prioritize its own defensive needs over servicing foreign sales. The primary motivations for the delay are political and, given the otherwise China-skeptical views of his party, appear to lie with Trump alone. So long as the weapons sales continue to be held in abeyance, Beijing will be quite content with how its Taiwan strategy is playing out.
Dominika Remžová, Research Fellow at CEIAS
As Xi met Trump in the US, trade, technology and Taiwan seemed to have been high on both leaders’ agendas. While not much has changed in the US position on Taiwan, with the arms package continuing to be delayed and the summit yielding few (if any) concrete deliverables, the Busan trade truce has been extended until January 2027. The short nature of this extension is, however, indicative of China’s leverage, with inflationary pressures in the US placing a concrete structural barrier on the extent to which the Trump administration could raise tariffs further, if the Busan truce had not been extended.
A more interesting development concerns the establishment of a joint channel for flagging AI incidents. The Xi-Trump meeting, seen as encompassing the current geopolitical moment marked by an intensifying AI race and attempts to manage this through head-of-state diplomacy, has been likened to the Cold War-era nuclear arms race and the Reagan-Gorbachev 1985 summit in Geneva. Several analysts have interpreted the 1985 meeting through the lens of the security dilemma, with the two leaders seemingly recognizing the extent to which one state’s security measures may produce a sense of insecurity for the other, potentially leading to a dangerous cycle of securitization driven by fear and misunderstanding. The difference, however, is in the leaders involved. Not only were Reagan and Gorbachev more pragmatic in their political leanings, but political power has since shifted markedly toward a select few in the private sector, especially in the US.
Indeed, the divergence over the pace of AI frontier development is increasingly occurring at the level of firms rather than states, with Trump’s and Xi’s positions marked by convergence: an unwillingness to engage, at least to any significant extent, in the regulatory debate. While both administrations have shown some understanding of the dangers posed by an uncontrolled AI race, neither is willing to pull the brakes first. On the one hand, it is questionable to what extent any regulatory or export control regime could slow down the race, considering how AI capabilities diffuse across borders. On the other hand, there are rising concerns about any further bifurcation of AI infrastructure into a US-aligned proprietary camp and a China-aligned open-weight camp.
The greatest concern, however, relates to the differences between the respective political-economic models. While power and wealth in the US increasingly lie in the hands of a select few tech oligarchs, the Chinese government exercises significantly greater control over its frontier technology sector, thereby acting as a greater impediment to the unintended consequences of the AI race that may shift power even further from humans to machines. This, in turn, raises questions about the justification for the incident-reporting channel in the first place. Moreover, the world’s greatest regulatory power, the European Union, whose Cloud and AI Development Act has the greatest potential to establish some form of regulatory regime, is not even part of the debate.
