Today he’s resolved little more than a crisis of his own making. What might he trade away later for such negligible gains?
President Donald Trump emerged from his highly anticipated meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping today with most of what he wanted from a deal with Beijing. Yet the agreement does little more than extricate Trump from crises of his own making. The pattern in Trump’s dealings with China raises a long-term concern: that he will one day wind up sacrificing American interests in the pursuit of deals of questionable strategic importance.
Today’s agreement, struck on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea, averts another escalation of tensions between the world’s two great powers. China agreed to postpone expanding export controls on rare-earth metals for one year. Those controls, announced earlier this month, threatened to choke off the flow of rare earths into industries vital to American security, including semiconductors and weapons systems. In return, the Trump administration will pause a new rule it announced in September, which imposed U.S. export controls on certain subsidiaries of companies sanctioned by Washington. Trump also won’t impose the additional 100 percent tariff on Chinese imports he’d announced in retaliation for Beijing’s rare-earth controls.
According to Trump, China also met two of his other key demands: It agreed to resume purchases of U.S. soybeans, which it halted in the spring, and pledged to crack down further on the illegal fentanyl trade. In return, Trump will cut in half, to 10 percent, the tariffs he imposed on China earlier this year to pressure Xi to take firmer action on fentanyl.
In the end, Xi didn’t give up very much. He largely withdrew measures he’d taken in response to Trump’s policies. Most of these were meant to put pressure on the American president by exploiting his political vulnerabilities. China’s ban on U.S. soybeans hit American farmers hard and created a political hassle for Trump, but China is the world’s largest importer of soybeans, and buying a few from American farmers is hardly a major concession. Xi’s new rare-earth controls might not have lasted much longer anyway, because they alienated not only the United States but many of China’s trading partners.
