Two summits unfolded in the United States last week, and only one of them counted. In New York, world leaders filed into the United Nations General Assembly for its annual round of speeches, motorcades and corridor gossip. A couple of hundred miles away, in a White House where builders are still at work on a new ballroom, US President Donald Trump took tea with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The world’s parliament talked. The world’s two largest economies decided, or more exactly, agreed to put off deciding.
Measured by announcements, the haul was slim. There were lower tariffs on $30bn of goods in each direction, with American farm produce, timber and cosmetics on one side of the ledger and toys and small appliances on the other. There was a new trade council, a two-month extension of a truce that would otherwise have lapsed on November 10, and a pair of pandas for the zoo in Atlanta. Measured by what did not happen, the summit was a success: there was no fresh tariff salvo, no squeeze on rare earths and no public row over Taiwan. The real product was not a deal but a pause. The question worth asking is whom the pause serves.
Start with the calendars, because both men are reading one. The truce now runs to January 10, safely past America’s midterm elections. Beijing’s clock points further ahead, to next autumn’s Communist Party congress, the five-yearly gathering that will reshape the leadership serving under Xi. Before then he must contain a property crash in which apartment prices have fallen twice as far as America’s did in the late 2000s. That crash has eaten into household savings and starved local governments of the land-sale revenue they once lived on. For a leader with that in-tray, a quiet Pacific is worth more than any tariff concession.
Nor has Beijing wasted earlier lulls. Its trade surplus is heading for last year’s record of roughly $1.2tn as exporters reroute through Southeast Asia and Latin America. Its heavy bets on electric vehicles, renewables and a national grid have also blunted the oil shock of the Iran war. For Beijing, time is not idleness. It is construction.
Trump’s clock is shorter and ticks louder. A brief extension suits a Chinese leadership that may reckon its hand strengthens if the Republicans take a beating in November. Against that, the president offered personal warmth. He greeted Xi at the foot of the aircraft steps (for contrast, in Beijing last May, Trump only got to see the vice-president at the airport). He then led his guest through the National Archives to view America’s founding documents. Audiences in China will not have missed the asymmetry.
The issue is that rapport has become the policy rather than a tool of it. Hard questions, such as China’s fast-growing nuclear arsenal and its claims in the South China Sea, dissolved into talk of friendship. On Taiwan, Xi pressed Trump to oppose independence for the island, and by all appearances he left without a commitment.
Hawks in both American parties call this approach too soft. Their case runs into an awkward fact: these economies are welded together in ways that punish whoever swings hardest. Early in Trump’s second term, tariffs briefly hit 145%. Beijing responded by restricting exports of rare earths, the metals and magnets inside cars, electronics and weapons, and Washington blinked. Some two-fifths of the key starting materials in American-approved medicines come from China alone. The Cold War template of two blocs barely touching simply does not fit.
Two episodes this year made the point vividly. In July, AI agents from a leading American laboratory broke into a major American AI platform. American models, asked to help investigate, refused because their safeguards could not tell forensics from hacking, so a Chinese model stepped in. Oil, meanwhile, was widely forecast to hit $150 a barrel as the Iran war dragged on, yet it has stayed below that mark, largely because China cut its crude imports by some four million barrels a day. Beijing acted for its own reasons, but self-interest that steadies a market is still steadiness. Rivals in nature settle into co-operation when a shared habitat leaves no alternative. Washington and Beijing are learning the same lesson, whether or not they say so.
For the Gulf, the weightiest lines were treated almost as afterthoughts. The two sides agreed that Iran must keep its commitment not to build nuclear weapons, and that no country or entity should impose transit tolls on international waterways. Every shipping line and energy exporter in the region will read the second clause as a message about the Strait of Hormuz. The power that went to war with Iran and the power that remains its biggest trading partner are now saying the same thing about the same strait, and that narrows Tehran’s room to manoeuvre.
States such as Qatar have long practised the balanced engagement the two giants are only now stumbling towards. Qatar’s liquefied natural gas passes through Hormuz to buyers that include China, while its key security partner is the United States.
Then there is artificial intelligence, or “super intelligence”, as the White House now prefers to call it, a relabelling Beijing said it valued. Renaming a technology is easier than governing it. Hours before Xi arrived, Trump said he wanted to leave AI as it is, while Xi pointedly stressed that humans must keep control of AI agents. Yet the written outcomes contain the summit’s most valuable deliverable: a dialogue on the technology’s risks, with a round set for November, and a channel for reporting AI-related incidents.
That channel may outweigh every tariff concession combined. Washington and Moscow installed their hotline in 1963, only after the Cuban missile crisis had frightened both into it. This one, if it is staffed, trusted and used, arrives before the crisis. The label of a new Cold War fails on economics, but on AI, Cold War instruments are exactly what is needed. The nearest thing to one came not from the UN’s session on AI governance in New York but from a bilateral meeting in Washington.
Which brings us back to the empty chair. On his 2015 state visit to Washington, Xi also addressed the General Assembly. This time he skipped the short trip north, and India’s prime minister stayed away too. Opening the session earlier this month, Bangladesh’s foreign minister conceded that the UN needs reform. He argued, however, that it survives because nothing can replace it, and that the alternative does not bear thinking about.
The alternative is not unthinkable at all. It was on display at the White House: an order managed by two men, their moods and their calendars. In place of multilateralism, they offered a pledge to attend each other’s summits, the Asia-Pacific leaders’ meeting in Shenzhen in November and the Group of 20 major economies in Florida in December. That arrangement has bought a pause, and pauses have value. But rapport is not an institution, and a truce with an expiry date is not a settlement.
Beijing knows precisely what it intends to do with the time it has bought. It is far from clear that Washington does. China lends its pandas; it never gives them away. The calm it extended this week may come on the same terms.
- The writer is Deputy Managing Editor, Gulf Times.