Xi-Trump meeting tests whether US and China can avoid ‘Thucydides Trap’

A burst of interest in the phrase “Thucydides Trap” followed Xi Jinping’s closely watched meeting with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday, after China’s leader invoked the concept during talks that also touched on issues as contemporary as artificial intelligence and advanced computer chips.

For many readers, the immediate question was obvious: why was an ancient Greek historian suddenly at the center of a summit about 21st-century rivalry?

The term was popularized in 2011 by US political scientist Graham Allison. It draws on Thucydides’ account that Sparta’s fear of a rising Athens helped drive the Peloponnesian War.

Since then, it has become a familiar shorthand in debates over US-China ties, especially as China’s ascent has sharpened American anxiety.

The era of Deng Xiaoping’s dictum to “hide your strength, bide your time” looked far away in Beijing this week.

Xi instead projected the image of a leader openly asserting China’s power, claiming the moment and, above all, engaging the US president on equal footing.

“Currently, transformation not seen in a century is accelerating across the globe,” he said, repeating a formulation he had previously used with Russian President Vladimir before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

He did not repeat another familiar line — “the East is rising and the West is declining” — but the message was hardly difficult to detect.

“The world has come to a new crossroads,” he said, before posing the question of whether China and the United States could overcome the Thucydides trap and “create a new paradigm of major country relations”.

That challenge lingered over the summit, a tightly stage-managed encounter that appeared to leave a strong impression on the visiting Americans.

Trump’s welcome included a Chinese military parade outside the Great Hall of the People, with goose-stepping troops and a marching brass band setting the tone.

Schoolchildren holding bouquets and waving US and Chinese flags bounced in formation, shouting “welcome, welcome!” as Trump smiled and applauded.

After reviewing the troops, the two leaders walked side by side up a red carpet toward the vast building. At the top, they paused to look east across Tiananmen Square. Xi motioned toward the view and said something to Trump, though presumably not about the student protesters shot by the army nearby in 1989 — a subject that remains taboo in China.

A copy of the Economic Daily newspaper with a front page photo and headline which reads ‘Xi Jinping holds talks with US President Trump’

Trump, for his part, offered praise throughout the trip.

He described China as “incredible” and “beautiful” while sidestepping shouted questions from the travelling press corps about Taiwan.

His flattery toward Xi bordered on what younger audiences might call “glazing”.

“You’re a great leader, I say it to everybody, you’re a great leader,” he said when the men were face to face across the table, flanked by their most senior cabinet ministers, all of them men.

“Sometimes people don’t like me saying it,” he added.

One possible candidate was his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, long viewed in Washington as a classic China hawk.

Rubio remains under Chinese sanctions imposed over his criticism, while serving in the Senate, of Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghur minority, which has barred him from entering the country.

But when Rubio became Secretary of State, China altered the Chinese characters used in the transliteration of his name — an apparent diplomatic workaround that allowed him to attend the summit.

Trump also appeared particularly pleased to be invited into the gardens of Zhongnanhai, the secretive Communist Party leadership compound in central Beijing. He asked whether other presidents and prime ministers were granted the same access.

“Rarely,” Xi replied, before citing Russia’s Vladimir Putin as one earlier visitor.

A garden for strongmen, in other words.

Donald Trump talks with Xi Jinping at the Zhongnanhai leadership compound

Xi, like many top Communist Party officials, revealed far less than his guest.

Still, he looked at ease and carried himself with evident confidence.

He also moved quickly to the most sensitive issue, issuing a stark warning to Trump in their first meeting.

If the situation regarding Taiwan were to be “mishandled,” he said, according to the Chinese readout, their two countries could “clash or even enter into conflict, pushing the entire China-US relationship into a highly dangerous situation”.

Beijing considers the self-ruled island part of its territory and has never renounced the use of force to take control of it.

Opinion polling in Taiwan has consistently shown support for maintaining the status quo — neither accepting rule under China’s one-party system nor declaring formal independence.

Surveys also indicate that most of Taiwan’s 23 million people want the power to decide their own future.

The United States has long supplied Taiwan with arms while maintaining a policy of “strategic ambiguity” on whether it would intervene militarily in the event of a Chinese invasion.

A $14 billion arms package for Taiwan has been approved by Congress, but it appears to be moving slowly through the White House after objections from Beijing.

The underlying message in Xi’s remarks seemed plain: Trump could avoid the Thucydides Trap by stepping back on Taiwan.

From Beijing’s perspective, Taiwan remains the “reddest of red lines,” said Wen-Ti Sung, non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub in Taipei.

For China, “Taiwan is the identity-defining issue in US-China relations,” he told RTÉ News.

“Get Taiwan right and we are friends; get Taiwan wrong and we might become foes before you know it,” he said.

As RTÉ News reported last week, some analysts had wondered whether the US president might be persuaded to shift Washington’s Taiwan posture in exchange for Chinese help in ending the war with Iran or as part of a broader deal between the powers.

No such shift was announced, but the possibility has not disappeared.

Even without that, Xi emerged with a notable gain this week. Why?

Because he drew the US president into a face-to-face discussion on Chinese soil about American arms sales to Taiwan — an issue that had been effectively off-limits for decades following US assurances to Taipei.

The two men discussed arms sales “in great detail,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on the trip home on Friday.

“What am I going to do?” he said, “Say, “I don’t want to talk to you about it” because I have an agreement signed in 1982?”

“No, we discussed arms sales,” he said.

For Beijing, that alone may suffice for now, because it suggests further concessions could become possible.

“When dealing with a transactional administration, anytime an item moves from sacrosanct to negotiable is a win for China,” said Mr Sung of the Atlantic Council.

If Taiwan dominated Xi’s thinking, trade sat at the top of Trump’s agenda.

He arrived with a roster of “brilliant” billionaires to make that point unmistakable.

Seventeen executives, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Tesla CEO Elon Musk accompanied the president.

And what they want is greater access to the enormous Chinese market.

“I will be asking President Xi, a Leader of extraordinary distinctions, to ‘open up’ China so that these brilliant people can work their magic,” Trump posted on social media before the summit.

“China’s door to the outside world will only open wider,” Xi told business leaders, according to China state media.

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang pictured arriving at a state banquet in Beijing

But any opening, almost certainly, will come on Beijing’s terms.

Foreign companies are legally required to form joint ventures with Chinese firms and frequently hand over intellectual property to secure meaningful access to the market.

At the same time, Beijing has made self-reliance a strategic priority, aiming to reduce dependence on the United States and other countries.

Nvidia, for instance, had sought to sell advanced AI chips into China. That effort was initially constrained by US export controls and is now further hampered by China’s determination to rely on domestic technology.

Beyond Trump’s announcement that China had agreed to buy Boeing aircraft and American soybeans, few details emerged about other major commercial deals.

And between the focus on Taiwan and the drive for trade, there was little space left for human rights — once a central, if uneasy, element of democratic America’s engagement with authoritarian China.

Earlier US presidents often raised difficult subjects such as Tibet, Xinjiang and individual freedoms during visits to China, even if in muted terms.

At a town hall with students in Shanghai in 2009, then president Barack Obama described freedom of expression, worship, access to information and political participation as “universal rights” belonging to citizens everywhere.

A few years later, China’s leader Hu Jintao acknowledged the “universality of human rights” during a visit to the United States.

Seen against that backdrop, the near-total disappearance of the subject from US-China discourse may amount to Beijing’s biggest victory of the week.

“The US, along with other nations, has long prioritised economic interests over human rights,” said Christine Ryan, of Columbia University Law School’s Human Rights Institute.

“But now that prioritisation is magnified,” she said.

“It’s a huge loss when the US – a major superpower – drops human rights entirely from its foreign policy,” she said.