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
-
Commentary
Technology & National Security
CNAS Insights | Setting the Rules for AI WarfareThe escalating feud between the Pentagon and Anthropic, one of world’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies, highlights a crucial question that will shape security i...
By Paul Scharre
-
Video
Technology & National Security
The Pentagon and Anthropic - NBC’s Meet the Press NowPresident Trump is in Texas speaking about the economy ahead of the state’s high-stakes primary. Retired Lt. Gen. John “Jack” Shanahan, CNAS adjunct senior fellow and former d...
By Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan
-
Commentary
Technology & National Security
Fighting AI Cyberattacks Starts with Knowing They’re HappeningThis article was originally published in Lawfare. Anthropic reported in November 2025 that Chinese threat actors used its Claude model to launch widespread cyberattacks on com...
By Janet Egan & Michelle Nie
-
Commentary
Technology & National Security
The Sovereignty Gap in U.S. AI StatecraftThis article was originally published in Lawfare. As the India AI Impact Summit kicks off this week, the Trump administration has embraced the language of “sovereign AI.” Thro...
By Pablo Chavez
