October 31, 2025

The Trump-Xi Truce Shows Who Really Holds the Leverage

By: Ruby Scanlon

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

View All Reports View All Articles & Multimedia