Trump and Xi have found a way to compete — but America must remember what it is fighting for.
Trump and Xi have found a way to compete — but America must remember what it is fighting for.
T he world watched last week’s Trump-Xi summit with the familiar expectation that the leaders of the world’s two most powerful countries might finally unveil a “grand deal.” The same expectation surrounded their Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Busan, South Korea, last November and President Trump’s state visit to China in May. Each time, observers were disappointed: no historic reconciliation, no decisive confrontation, no grand bargain. This week’s summit, with its extraordinary pomp and ceremony, was therefore widely dismissed as a made-for-TV event with few deliverables. I think this misses what actually happened: The grand deal is already taking shape. It is simply not the kind people have been looking for.
There is a line in an old Chinese poem: One searches for her a thousand times in the crowd, only suddenly to turn around and find her standing where the lights are dim. We have been searching for a grand deal in communiqués, tariff schedules, and dramatic concessions. But the real deal is emerging through the increasingly frequent interactions between Trump and Xi themselves: a tacit understanding about the nature of their competition and, above all, that neither side currently wants to overturn the table.
After seven years of trade conflict, the Busan summit crystallized an uncomfortable reality. Each country possesses tools capable of inflicting serious economic damage on the other. Neither can easily force the other to capitulate, and both would pay dearly for unrestricted economic warfare. The resulting trade truce bought something more important than tariff relief: time.
What has followed has been extraordinary diplomatic choreography. Trump visited China in May; four months later, Xi came to Washington. Both received unusually elaborate treatment. More meetings are planned. Behind the pageantry is recognition of a strategic fact: G-2 has become a reality. But it is a realist G-2.
Realism begins not with what we wish the other country to be but with what it is: an opponent with the power, interests, ambitions, and capacity to hurt us. Trump and Xi are, in different ways, masters of transactional politics. Neither expects the other to convert. The emerging framework rests on mutual recognition of power and calculations of national interest.
That does not make the framework stable. The Chinese saying is blunt: “One mountain cannot accommodate two tigers.” International-relations scholars call the corresponding danger the Thucydides Trap: When a rising power challenges an established one, structural pressures can push them toward war. But Xi has repeatedly insisted that the Thucydides Trap can be overcome.
Perhaps. But Xi cannot know that. Trump cannot know it. Nobody can. That uncertainty explains the emphasis on “strategic stability.” What Trump and Xi appear to be constructing is neither friendship nor surrender. Competition continues. Conflicts continue. Each side still seeks advantage. But both have concluded that now is not the time to flip the table. If a showdown can be avoided, avoid it. If it cannot be avoided, postpone it. Meanwhile, accumulate strength. That, I believe, is the Trump-Xi grand deal. It is not a treaty. It is an understanding about how to compete.
Xi gave it its most audacious formulation during this visit: The “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and making America great again can “go hand in hand” and even reinforce each other. Let’s call Xi’s objective MCGA — Make China Great Again.
Can MAGA and MCGA really reinforce each other? Taken literally, the proposition strains credibility. America wants to restore manufacturing, maintain technological primacy, strengthen its military, and preserve global influence. China wants technological self-sufficiency, industrial dominance, military modernization, greater global influence, and national “rejuvenation.” Their ambitions collide precisely where each matters most.
MAGA-plus-MCGA is therefore less geopolitical reality than useful strategic fiction. Both leaders nevertheless have reasons to behave as though it might be true.
Trump places American reindustrialization at the center of MAGA. The new U.S.–China Boards of Trade and Investment could allow selected Chinese capital and technology to contribute to American manufacturing.
Taiwan presents the harder test. For Xi, “reunification” is inseparable from national rejuvenation. Beijing says Xi urged Washington to adopt the “correct position of opposing ‘Taiwan independence.’” Trump has not publicly accepted that formulation. America traditionally says it does not support Taiwan independence, not that it opposes it. Yet the White House summit account conspicuously omitted Taiwan, while a roughly $14 billion Taiwan arms package has remained unsigned for months.
More strikingly, the White House shared that the “United States and China were allies in World War II and fought side by side to win the war” against Japan. This version of history is errant. America’s formal Chinese ally was the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek, not the People’s Republic, which did not exist until 1949. That wartime ROC survives today on Taiwan.
Why emphasize such deliberately broad historical language now? One possible interpretation, perhaps the only logical one, is that strategic ambiguity is becoming even more ambiguous — about who are friends and who are adversaries, extending beyond whether America would defend Taiwan toward how Washington places Taiwan, and perhaps Japan, within its larger accommodation with Beijing. This does not prove that the U.S.’s Taiwan policy has changed. But this new friend-or-foe ambiguity has strategic consequences, which help explain the unease in Taipei and Tokyo.
There is another foundation beneath the new G-2. Trump and Xi increasingly acknowledge and praise each other’s civilizations. Trump invoked Confucius during his China visit; at the National Archives, he contrasted America’s 250 years with China’s thousands. Xi, in turn, praised America’s distinctive founding spirit.
Admirable diplomacy. But something is missing. The leaders can celebrate each other’s civilizations while avoiding the enormous difference between their political systems. And here an apparently unrelated event during Xi’s visit becomes important.
The White House had barred CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds. The organizations sued. Other major media organizations stood with them. Then U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, appointed by Trump himself, ordered their access restored. The administration complied.
Consider how strange this must appear from Beijing. A president appoints a judge. The judge later rules against the president. The president is angry. The ruling nevertheless takes effect.
That is constitutional government. But in Xi’s China, the media must “bear the Party’s surname.” In America, the media does not bear Trump’s surname, the Republican Party’s surname, or the Democratic Party’s surname. Presidents can attack journalists; journalists can attack presidents; courts can restrain presidents; and presidents remain presidents.
This is not peripheral to the competition with China. It is part of what America is competing with. Talking about competition. Nowhere is that more consequential than in artificial intelligence.
Trump and Xi deserve credit for establishing a dialogue on “super intelligence” and a bilateral communication channel for AI incidents. Advanced AI can enable cyberattacks, manipulate information, affect weapons and critical infrastructure, and increasingly act with degrees of autonomy its creators may not fully anticipate. Its benefits will not respect national borders. Neither will its dangers.
Yet Washington and Beijing remain obsessed with one question: Who will win? The harder question is: What does winning mean?
Suppose America develops the world’s most powerful AI and dominates compute and robotics but concludes along the way that defeating China requires adopting China’s methods of surveillance, information control, centralized data collection, and political management. Would that constitute an American victory? If America must become more like China to defeat China, China has achieved something remarkable without firing a shot.
This is why freedom should not be the sentimental appendix to American strategy. It is part of the strategy. And it points to the weakness of the Trump-Xi grand deal: It is highly personalized. Particularly on the American side, it is difficult to imagine this arrangement emerging so rapidly and dramatically under another president.
But Trump and Xi will eventually leave the stage. What survives them?
Realism is indispensable. America should recognize Chinese power, negotiate where interests overlap, deter where they conflict, and avoid turning every disagreement into an ideological crusade. But realism works until it does not. Leaders change. Interests change. Relative power changes. Miscalculations happen. America therefore needs something beneath realism, not instead of it, but underneath it.
American democracy itself is unquestionably troubled. The information revolution has amplified polarization, rewarded outrage, fragmented the public sphere, and weakened institutional trust. AI may intensify these problems. No serious defender of democracy should pretend otherwise.
But the answer to malfunctioning democracy is not less constitutionalism. It is better constitutionalism. This is where a third acronym belongs beside MAGA and MCGA: MADGA — Make American Democracy Great Again.
I do not mean another crusade to remake China in America’s image. MADGA means something more conservative: repairing and preserving the constitutional inheritance that made American power possible, independent courts, a free press, political competition, peaceful transfers of power, federalism, private enterprise, protection for dissent, and the capacity to discover mistakes and correct them.
Authoritarian systems can move faster because they suppress friction. Democracies often appear disorderly because they institutionalize it. But friction is not necessarily weakness. In engineering, friction prevents machines from spinning out of control. In politics, constitutional friction can prevent a powerful country from making an enormous mistake that nobody is permitted to identify.
That becomes more important in the age of AI. A superintelligent authoritarian state may become extraordinarily efficient. It may also become extraordinarily efficient at being wrong.
America’s advantage should therefore not consist merely of better chips, larger data centers, stronger armies, or more capable AI. It should include a system in which enormous power remains subject to law, competing institutions, independent scrutiny, and citizens who retain the right to say no.
That is not idealism. It is national strategy. MAGA and MCGA may coexist for a time. The realist G-2 Trump and Xi are constructing may even help prevent two nuclear superpowers from stumbling into catastrophe. But America should enter it knowing what it seeks to preserve.
Something happened during Xi’s visit that was much smaller than a G-2 summit and, in another sense, much larger. A president tried to exclude journalists he despised. Other journalists stood with them. They went to court. A judge appointed by that president ruled against him. And the journalists walked back through the White House gates. Xi may regard that as evidence of American disorder. Americans should recognize it as evidence of American strength.
Trump and Xi may be right that MAGA and MCGA need not lead to war. But America should add one condition to its grand bargain, a condition imposed not on China, but on itself: In competing with China, America must remain America. MAGA needs to be committed to the democratic ideals that are at the core of what the country is all about.