On October 26th, Reuters headlined “US, China talks sketch out rare earths, tariff pause for Trump and Xi to consider” and reported that the advisors to both Trump and Xi have tentatively agreed to suspend their nation’s main recent retaliatory measures against each other’s country until the two leaders will meet in the next China-U.S. summit, which has not yet been scheduled. So: the advisors are recommending to their respective boss that the trade-war be cancelled at least temporarily.
Reuters reported that this information comes from the U.S. delegation, but that “Chinese officials were more circumspect about the talks and offered no details about the outcome of the meetings.” This means that the likelihood that Trump will do this is higher than that Xi will — the U.S. is more dissatisfied with the current trade-war between the two countries than China is.
Further indication of this is:
Trump and Xi are due to meet on Thursday on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Gyeongju, South Korea, to sign off on the terms. While the White House has officially announced the highly anticipated Trump-Xi talks, China has yet to confirm that the two leaders will meet.
Why would the U.S. be more eager to stop the trade-war than China is? Trump has been the initiator of increased trade-restrictions against China and China has responded by increasing its own restrictions against America, but now the U.S. side wants to put on hold its increasing hostility toward China if China will reciprocate and the entire situation will thus go back to the status-quo ante, the previous situation — which Trump (not Xi) has been consistently complaining about.
This is what would actually be expected if China’s restrictions would harm America more than America’s restrictions would harm China. In other words: Trump is finding that he has bitten off more than he can chew.
Another indication of this is given in the October 25th article by “Simplicius” headlining “RAND Urges for Major Chinese Re-Think Amidst Widespread Recognition of China’s Awakening”. It opens:
RAND think tank, famous for its influential policy papers which have shaped US-Russian relations, has released an eye-opening call for a change of course on China. This comes by way of the latest Trump-China escalations which, it appears, have greatly worried insiders of the ‘deep state’ system; enough so that for once they have begun swallowing their pride and envisioning a calmer, more placating approach toward China so as not to upset the global status quo too much.
He links to both the RAND summary (which isn’t as good as his own) and the detailed 115-page RAND analysis, which latter is titled “Stabilizing the U.S.-China Rivalry” and closes:
No agenda of this kind will be embraced in its entirety. U.S. and Chinese officials interested in stabilizing their relationship could start with a small set of these ideas and build from there. They could do so even as the rivalry rages in other areas — just as the United States and Soviet Union did during the Cold War. This analysis suggests that the potential exists to improve the stability of this perilous rivalry — if both sides are interested.
Throughout, the underlying false assumption is that aggression between China and America has been non-existent instead of consistently by the U.S. Government against China, and not in the reverse direction — which has been the actual history here. For example, the U.S. posts three military bases in Taiwan against the Chinese mainland and sells Taiwan weapons to be used for invading China, even though the U.S. is and since 1972 in the Shanghai Communique has been formally committed to, the principle that “Taiwan is a part of China.” Would the U.S. tolerate if China were to have three military bases in a part of the U.S. and sell it weapons to encourage it to declare independence from America?
With a history like this, how likely is it that China’s President Xi will agree to or even trust agreements (such as the Shanghai Communique, which America constantly violates) such as RAND is proposing?
The real significance of that new RAND analysis is that RAND happens to be the U.S. Department of War’s top think tank. On 3 January 2025, the Quincy Institute published their “Big Ideas and Big Money: Think Tank Funding in America” and reported that,
The U.S. government contributed at least $1.49 billion to U.S. think tanks from 2019 to 2023. The Department of Defense is far and away the top donor in the Think Tank Funding Tracker, with the vast majority of these contributions going to the RAND Corporation (more than $1.4 billion). RAND is unique on this think tank list in that it works directly for the U.S. government.
That RAND study comes from the Pentagon’s top think tank, not from one outside the Government.
In other words: The Trump Administration now finds itself in a bind and is trying to go back to the status-quo ante but the Xi Administration might, for example, keep in place its new licensure requirements on the export of rare-earths. More than anything else, that’s what this is really the most about. And by now, the Chinese Government can have absolutely no doubt that the U.S. and its allies are its enemies and cannot reasonably be trusted. That is America’s problem here: it can’t reasonably be trusted to comply even with what it had formally signed to.
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