The normalisation of US–China summitry is a good thing
In Brief
Trump and Xi will meet again in September 2026 for the seventh time, marking the first visit of a Chinese leader to Washington in more than a decade. We have seen the usual fuss over protocol reciprocity, laments by the Washington commentariat over ‘low expectations’ and bureaucratic panics over last-minute preparations. But amid all this noise, what is the signal?
US–China summit meetings are high-profile events for good reason. A face-to-face meeting between the leaders of the world’s two most powerful countries has the potential to affect many people and issues. Other states worry that the two powers may run roughshod over their interests. Such high-level meetings can force action on long-running negotiations that are close to agreement. And sometimes, a major breakthrough can occur.
The upcoming summit will mark a positive milestone in US–China relations, but not for the reasons that experts and pundits would normally cite. As far as we can tell, there will be no significant deliverables or breakthroughs — and that is fine. There will not be any grand bargain that will wrap up disagreements over Taiwan, trade and technology with a neat bow of mutual compromise. But this summit could be the one that finally inoculates the players against having to pretend that their mere meeting will produce a long list of achievements or deals.
The issues between the United States and China are longstanding, and if meetings can only be held in the glow of significant new agreements, they will not happen frequently enough to sustain stable relations. That the two leaders are meeting at all, despite an absence of expected summit outcomes, is telling. Regular in-person communication between US and Chinese leaders is essential to maintaining bilateral and global stability, even without demonstrable achievements. When meetings cease, history reveals a tendency towards crisis. This summit demonstrates that both sides have the confidence and will to regularise face-to-face leader-level engagement, with neither leader paying a political price for doing so.
In the past, US–China summits tended to become struggles over competing strategic narratives. But this too has shifted to the rear stage as both sides look to calm the waters in the face of international and domestic pressures. Trump is in clear need of a positive distraction from his ill-conceived war with Iran and wants to be seen as a statesman worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. Xi is eager to shield his economy from global protectionism and show that he can manage difficulties with Washington in the run-up to the 2027 Chinese Communist Party Congress that will anoint his fourth term in office.
Whether or not the two sides agree on the precise formulation of ‘constructive strategic stability’ as a descriptor for their aims, both leaders stand to gain from a display of US–China calm.
The understanding that the leaders reached on Taiwan during Trump’s May 2026 Beijing visit will likely be reiterated when they meet again, since neither side stands to gain in the short term from destabilising the cross-Strait situation. Beijing continues to warn against large US arms sales to Taiwan, but this issue has always been managed appropriately to avoid a crisis and can be again. Taiwan should not be a headline from this meeting, in keeping with both sides’ goal of projecting confidence.
The most anticipated headline is a further reprieve from the bilateral escalation of trade barriers. In practice, this could mean that the second Trump administration’s additional tariffs on Chinese products do not exceed earlier tariffs by more than 20 per cent, that China continues issuing licences for non-defence rare earth shipments and that both sides hold off on measures that would create new problems. Companies on both sides of the Pacific would of course rather the reprieve be longer, the tariffs lower and the licences granted more freely, but even a small window of predictability is better than nothing.
Many anticipate that this apparent US–China calm will not last. The past decade has seen the relationship oscillate wildly and both sides have recently crossed new thresholds in threatening the interests of the other. The 2026 US midterm elections in November may cast a new wave of uncertainty.
The 2026 US-China summitry points to two crucial evolutions. First, as recalcitrant as bureaucratic operatives on both sides can be, their fracases have continually been subordinated to leader-level reversion to stabilisation, which sits comfortably atop bilateral disagreements and competition. This reversion to the mean phenomenon provides hope that a major US–China crisis can be avoided and that the relationship has not lost its ballast.
Second, qualms over ideological and governance differences have receded from the fore in Washington’s considerations of interaction with Chinese leaders. Trump has normalised the highest protocol treatment, foregone obligatory scolding on human rights issues and tossed the briefing book. There will be no going back to the before times.
The outcome of this year’s US–China summitry may well lie in paving the way for more regular leader-level interactions, which could in turn build confidence for enhanced engagement on a fuller range of issues below the leader level. China is not going away, nor is it taking over the world. It is a major player that needs to be engaged. Trump seems attuned to this reality — at least for now.
Susan Thornton is a former US diplomat and Senior Fellow at the Yale Law School Paul Tsai China Center.