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View all search resultsThe US and China must learn to coexist
The Beijing summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping showed that competition between the United States and China need not become a zero-sum struggle for supremacy.
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United States President Donald Trump (left) takes part in a welcome ceremony with China's President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on May 14, 2026. (AFP/Brendan Smialowski)
T
he recent summit between United States President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing produced no major breakthroughs on tariffs, Taiwan or ongoing geopolitical conflicts like the Iran war, prompting many observers to dismiss it as inconsequential. Yet its restrained and cordial tone suggested a new, more pragmatic approach that implicitly acknowledges the two countries’ deep economic interdependence. The US and Chinese presidents were not viewing the bilateral relationship solely through the lens of geopolitical competition.
Recognizing China as a formidable economic competitor is not a concession; it is simply an acknowledgment of reality. Over the years, the debate in the US over China’s rise has followed a familiar pattern: denial, anger and eventual acceptance. During the era of double-digit Chinese growth, many US analysts dismissed official Chinese statistics as unreliable or inflated. As China’s economic transformation became difficult to ignore, its success was often attributed to industrial policy, imitation and unfair practices, including intellectual-property theft and currency manipulation.
But those narratives are harder to sustain now that China has reached the technological frontier in several strategic industries. Most notably, Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers have emerged as major global competitors across a broad range of market segments, from low-cost models to increasingly sophisticated premium brands. In pharmaceuticals, Chinese firms have evolved from imitators into innovators, shedding the old “free rider” label. And in semiconductors, China has made significant strides in producing advanced chips, though it still trails behind global leaders like TSMC.
These advances are the product of a sweeping transformation rather than any single policy or industrial strategy. Instead of focusing primarily on slowing China’s technological progress, the US should accept that Chinese competition is here to stay and establish frameworks for economic coexistence and limited cooperation.
One key priority should be securing US firms’ access to Chinese markets. The prominent US CEOs and business leaders that accompanied Trump to Beijing underscored the message that, although the era of deep economic integration may be ending, complete decoupling is neither realistic nor desirable. A more plausible path lies in selective interdependence and continued engagement in sectors where mutual gains remain substantial.
Xi, for his part, has characterized the bilateral relationship by invoking the “Thucydides trap,” a term coined by the political scientist Graham Allison to describe the risk of conflict when a rising power (in Thucydides’s case, Athens) threatens to displace an established one (Sparta).
But the analogy is imperfect. Despite the many challenges the US faces, some of them resulting from its own decisions, it is far too early to describe it as a declining power. The US remains the world’s leading center of innovation and entrepreneurship, producing many of the transformative technologies of the past century, from computing and the internet to smartphones and artificial intelligence. While talent exists everywhere, no other country matches its combination of scientific leadership, deep capital markets, entrepreneurial culture and institutional flexibility. As billionaire investor Warren Buffett once observed, “no one has ever been a success betting against America since 1776.”
