The myth of US-China stability

The most dangerous misunderstanding between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping ahead of their summit is that both use the same word, “stability,” to achieve dramatically different futures.

Advancing stability, a senior US official involved in the planning for the summit told me, is the loftiest American goal for the meeting, irrespective of any specific deliverables. The official defined stability as a low but durable floor beneath the world’s most consequential bilateral relationship.

For the Trump team, stability means preventing a descent into unwanted confrontation while buying time to build US leverage—industrial, military, technological, and geopolitical. “A detente has some merit if America spends the interlude diversifying its rare-earth supply chain and passing a $1.5 trillion defense budget to rearm,” The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board wrote earlier this week.

The problem is that Beijing has something entirely different in mind when it talks about stability.

Chinese leaders are convinced they are living through what Xi has called, including during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, “great changes unseen in a century.” That’s his shorthand for a historic shift in power away from a politically divided and financially indebted United States that has lost its commitment to running the global order, and toward a more confident, technologically capable, and geopolitically nimble China.

Kurt Campbell, who served as Indo-Pacific coordinator during the Biden administration, sums up Xi’s view in a new essay in Foreign Affairs: “Xi believes firmly that China’s rise is a historical certainty and that the United States will continue its hurtling decline—a viewpoint that imbues him with unwavering confidence as he prepares to meet Trump.”

Xi comes to the summit this week, Campbell argues, “on firmer footing in Trump’s second term” than when they met during his first term. “He responded to Trump’s so-called Liberation Day tariffs with a scalpel-like precision [on critical minerals] that effectively highlighted American vulnerabilities and seemingly cowed the administration.”

For Xi, achieving stability with the United States doesn’t provide an end-state. Rather, it is an opportunity to further consolidate China’s considerable gains while avoiding a crisis that might inadvertently unite the United States and its European and Asian allies—at a time when Beijing can instead stand aside and watch the Trump administration divide them.

The biggest danger is that Trump, in his desire to gain stability with China, might cede ground on providing China advanced technology or rhetorically change the US commitment to Taiwan in a manner that would ultimately be destabilizing.

As The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board put it, “The Venus fly trap Mr. Xi is setting for Mr. Trump is on Taiwan. Mr. Xi wants veto power over U.S. arms sales to the island, and he is pressing for the U.S. formally to ‘oppose’ Taiwanese independence, as opposed to the current posture of ‘not supporting’ it … Yet that change would disrupt decades of U.S. policy that, for all its delicate diplomatic wording, has held the peace.”

History offers sobering lessons about major powers navigating transitions. Britain and the United States managed one peacefully in the early twentieth century. Britain and Germany did not. During the Cold War, Washington and Moscow constructed guardrails after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis: arms control treaties, Helsinki Accords, crisis hotlines, superpower summits. That degree of stability wasn’t produced by trust but by fear of what unmanaged competition could unleash, up to and including nuclear war.

These two leaders certainly do not trust each other. But over the next two days, expect them to remain on message in saying friendly things about the other, and perhaps even make some progress on areas of mutual interest. The Atlantic Council’s Melanie Hart provides an excellent primer, where she argues success will be defined by outcomes on Taiwan, trade, export controls, detainees, and critical minerals. It’s a must-read for anyone concerned about the summit deliverables.

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board has it right, however, when it concludes, “Behind the talk of goodwill in Beijing, this reality hasn’t changed: Mr. Xi is playing a long game to overthrow the U.S. as the world’s leading power.” In search of momentary stability, it would be a mistake for Trump to help him advance toward that goal.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X @FredKempe.

Further reading

Image: US President Donald Trump walks with Chinese Vice President Han Zheng during an arrival ceremony at Beijing Capital International Airport in Beijing, China, on May 13, 2026. Photo via REUTERS/Evan Vucci.