October 31, 2025
The Trump-Xi Truce Shows Who Really Holds the Leverage
This article was originally published in The Australian Financial Review.
Since President Trump returned to office, the U.S.-China relationship has lurched between confrontation and accommodation. Policy choices depend on who is steering the ship at any given moment: the administration has assembled Washington’s most hawkish China advisors, but the president’s deal-making instincts routinely override their counsel. The pattern has earned him the Financial Times’ label as “the last China dove in Washington."
America retains formidable advantages: frontier AI capabilities, a network of wealthy allies, and control over key technological bottlenecks. Yet the administration repeatedly undermines these strengths.
These divisions have produced a strategically schizophrenic policy: tariff rates soaring to 145 per cent before plummeting to 30 per cent, bans on advanced chip design tools reversed for talks of selling powerful Nvidia Blackwell chips to Beijing, and continued uncertainty over Taiwan.
Read the full article on The Australian Financial Review.
More from CNAS
-
Reports
Technology & National Security
Quantum's Industrial MomentQuantum technologies are approaching a critical inflection point. Over the next three to five years, quantum sensors and computers that have long remained confined to laborato...
By Constanza M. Vidal Bustamante & Dr. John Burke
-
Podcast
Technology & National Security
Silicon Valley Goes to WarAs reports emerge of AI-powered weapons systems deployed in strikes on Iran, Dr. Sarah Shoker, Senior Research Scholar at UC Berkeley, and Paul Scharre, Executive Vice Preside...
By Paul Scharre
-
Podcast
Technology & National Security
Anthropic-Pentagon Clash Spotlights the Role of AI in WarAnthropic sued the U.S. Department of Defense on Monday over its decision to designate the San Francisco AI company a “supply-chain risk to America’s national security.” That’...
By Paul Scharre
-
Video
Technology & National Security
Jack Shanahan: An Inside Look at Track 2 AI Meetings Between the U.S. and ChinaJack Shanahan has become synonymous with the adoption of artificial intelligence in the U.S. Department of Defense. As the founding director of the Joint AI Center, which was ...
By Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan
