A Trump Xi Meeting, if It Happens, Will be a Nothing Burger.
HUA BIN • OCTOBER 27, 2025.
unz.com
All eyes are on Geyongju, South Korea for a rumored “side talk” between Trump and Xi later this week. Beijing has not confirmed but Trump and Bessent sounded positive.
Among the topics are rare earth, tariff, soybean, chips, and Taiwan.
While diplomatic protocols and direct talks between principals of major powers are important and some transactional deals may be reached, such a meeting is more likely a nothing burger and no grand bargain will be struck.
If the past 7 years, since Trump launched the first trade war on China, have taught us anything, the lesson is that the US is bent on containing China’s rise and blocking its progress.
Unless the US rids itself of its hostility towards China, with an odds less than zero, the two countries will remain in a long-term adversarial standoff.
In western political tradition, captured in Graham Allison’s Thucydides Trap and John Mearsheimer’s Aggressive Realism concepts, geopolitics is a zero-sum game. One nation can only preserve and grow its power at the expense of another.
China doesn’t subscribe to such a worldview and has never had in its 2,000-year political tradition. However, geopolitics is a race to the bottom – if your opponent defines the game as zero-sum, you are automatically brought to his level unless you don’t react to his provocations, take the beating, and turn the other cheek.
Imagine a school yard – you want to mind your own business, but the reigning bully won’t let you alone. He keeps pushing and threatening. However unwilling, you have to stand up and get into a fight to preserve your dignity and credibility, even when you know both will lose in such a fight.
We are at this point now. The US regime’s default position is to challenge and threaten China’s interests, from trade, technology to its territorial integrity in Taiwan.
It’s not one administration’s idiosyncratic behavior, but a bi-partisan agreement and national strategy. And there has been remarkable policy continuity from Trump 1 to Biden to Trump 2.
And it is not a one-on-one fight either. The US is mobilizing all its vassalized “allies” and pressuring nonaligned countries to join its side.
The recent case of US pressure on the Dutch government to steal Nexperia, a semiconductor manufacturer, from its Chinese owners is a perfect illustration of such dynamics. Of course, if these client states become the collateral damage, Washington will hardly shed a tear.
Beijing harbors no illusion that the US will give up its hegemonic ambitions and rescind its hostile policies voluntarily.
Beijing also has no trust in any deceptive reconciliation gestures from Washington as it has proven, repeatedly, to be commitment-incapable.
The list of US bad faith in dealing with others is long indeed –
- Its two-faced hypocrisy on the One China issue codified in the 1972 Shanghai Communique
- It lied to the Soviet Union about no expansion of NATO (“not one inch east”) after the Soviets agreed to German reunification
- Its unilateral withdrawal from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty
- Its bad faith withdrawal from Paris Accord global climate pact
- Its unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran
- Its numerous violations of UN laws on aggression against other countries such as the invasion of Iraq with fabricated lies
- Its violation of UN non-proliferation obligations by supporting Israel’s illegal possession of nuclear weapons
In short, the US has proven itself a rogue actor on the world stage operating under a false and cynical “rule-based world order” fig leaf.
The biggest wish for Trump in the meeting with President Xi is to ensure access to Chinese rare earth products, despite the bravado he put up when signing the joint rare earth development deal with his Australian lackey Albanese.
Regardless of the flurry of activities by the west to reduce its dependency on China, the reality is simple and harsh – it is physically impossible for the west to build an alternative rare earth supply chain at scale, especially in the most critical heavy rare earth category, any time soon (say in 5 years).
To build such a supply chain would require these countries to identify mineral deposits, secure permits, build separation and processing facilities, develop rare earth mining technologies/equipment, and acquire the relevant engineering skill sets.
Also it may be desirable to have chemical and radioactive cleanup to deal with the aftermath.
According to a CSIS report, in 2023, there were just 327 American degrees awarded in mining and mineral engineering, compared to the 1,000 undergraduates and 500 graduates at China University of Mining and Technology, the country’s top mining school in Xuzhou.
There are a few hundred other universities in China with mining and metallurgy majors.
When it comes to rare earth, the skill crunch is nothing short of dire in the West – there may be just “a couple of dozen” experts in separation and refining in the US, Europe and Japan collectively, compared to tens of thousands in China, according to CSIS.
Beijing has already started to catalogue the country’s experts in this field to ensure they don’t work in overseas mining projects and reveal industry secrets, The Wall Street Journal reported in June.
Combining its rare earth export control with tighter controls on tech and talent, Beijing is building a fortress of critical minerals expertise that will take the West years, if not decades, to overcome.
Trump and his advisors know the US war machine will literally stop when its rare earth stockpile runs out in a few months. He’s desperate for China to open the spigot.
Let’s go back to the meeting, if one does happen. Regardless of how the summit might go, China will not walk back on its rare earth chokehold.
Beijing might consider increasing supplies for civilian industries if the US rolls back its own escalatory policies after the Switzerland trade talks, such as the expanded Entity List that targets overseas subsidiaries of Chinese companies or the under-handed pressure campaign on its client states that led to the situation with Nexperia in the Netherland.
After all, during the Korea War, China fought 5 major battles with the US from 1951 to 1953 and pursued a policy of “fighting while talking” (bian da bian tan), which eventually led to a truce. Beijing will make tactical deals with Trump as well, if they serve its interests.
But military end use is completely off the table. Why would Beijing enable the US war industry when it is directly targeting China and its friends?
Same goes for the European weapon manufacturers. China has zero interest to enable NATO militarization against Russia.
The US has played all its cards. Its goal has been to weaken China without inflicting too much damage on itself. Whenever it finds such an opportunity, it will take it. This is why Washington breaks agreements.
Escalation is built into US policy. However, this strategy has a short shelf life and requires a weak opponent who cannot retaliate.
Unfortunately for the US, it has no leverage over China. China’s manufacturing output represents 35% total global output, 3 times that of the US and bigger than the next 8 biggest industrial nations combined. China is simply much bigger and stronger than the schoolyard bully.
Confucius said, “Don’t do unto others what you don’t want others to do unto you”. The 2,000-year-old political wisdom may be too profound for a country with a little over 200 years of history. But even idiots have survival instincts.
Trump enjoys photo ops with strong leaders he admires, but nothing of substance will come out of the meeting with Xi.
Unless Washington drops its delusion of supremacy and comes to the table as a rational player, the struggle will continue. |
