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
Red LinesChinese advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems pose a serious and growing threat to U.S. national security. At least seven Chinese developers now produce systems with f...
By Daniel Remler
-
Commentary
Technology & National Security
Britain Should Be Europe’s Silicon Valley. One Thing Is Stopping It.At the heart of the country’s economic struggles is a central weakness that must be fixed: risk aversion. This is not a cultural problem, as is often implied, but institutiona...
By Keegan McBride
-
Podcast
Technology & National Security
AI on the Battlefield: Project Maven and the Future of War with Jack ShanahanProject Maven stands as one of the earliest and most consequential efforts to bring AI into military operations. This week, Elisa sits down with Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, former...
By Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan
-
Reports
Technology & National Security
Adversarial DistillationThe Chinese Communist Party (CCP) views artificial intelligence (AI) as central to strategic competition with the United States and is pursuing every means to strengthen its A...
By Daniel Remler & Ben Hayum
