Talks in South Korea between US President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping on Thursday went as expected: the two leaders negotiated away from confrontation rather than toward it. The transactional nature of current US foreign policy is sometimes over-rated, but in the case of China it is clear, and China’s leadership is more than ready to behave similarly, transaction by transaction. Given that China has for many years been identified by Trump as the leading challenge to American status globally, his reconciliation with Xi suggests that moral arguments about the US’s duty to lead its allies in opposing authoritarian government and promoting free markets are being left behind. This was the contention of two important commentaries last week by Michael Beckley and Ian Bremmer. SIG’s view is that the domestic crisis Bremmer identifies and the US’s “rogue superpower” behavior (Beckley) will last well into 2026 but then moderate. The reasons are the same as the ones that led Trump to make a deal with Xi: a lack of better options.
Ian Bremmer, founder and head of Eurasia Group, sees US President Donald Trump as leading a domestic “political revolution” that could involve “the kind of political chaos, realignment, and violence that America saw in the decades after the Civil War.” On the international side, Beckley, of Tufts and the American Enterprise Institute, sees the Trump administration as caught up in “the same logic of raw power that helped spur two world wars…What looms is not a multipolar concert of great powers sharing the world, but a reprise of some of the worst aspects of the twentieth century.” These are loud alarms from highly credible people.
Bremmer and Beckley are both what American political science calls “realists,” with political views somewhere on the center-right. Ian Bremmer started Eurasia Group in 1998 in Manhattan, just four years after earning his doctorate in political science at Stanford. (His dissertation was on the ethnic politics of Russians in Ukraine.) In his 2015 book Superpower, Bremmer wrote, “I’m proud to be a political scientist, one who takes seriously his responsibility to offer unbiased analysis. I’m also intensely proud to be an American….I love my country.” Growing up in a rugged part of Boston, with multiple and varied heritages in his ancestry, Bremmer, like numberless Americans before him, developed a profound sense of the US as uniquely a land of opportunity for all. He also saw it as having a unique and positive international role, although by 2015 he had turned against a “superhero foreign policy.” He mainly thought the US should lead by democratic example, rooted in the constitution. (“Congress is the guarantor of our security and our liberties. The president, every president, must respect its authority.”) Although in 2016 he called Donald Trump “a buffoon…willing to use racism, xenophobia, and all of the worst and basest impulses” to gain power, Bremmer generally stuck to foreign rather than domestic politics. Nonetheless, a certain type of constitutional democracy at home was seen as the essential basis for leading by example overseas.
It is the “replacing” of “the rule of law with the rule of Don” that led Bremmer to write last week that “a constitutional crisis before the next elections looks increasingly likely.” If the American system has become personal rather than constitutional, then it can no longer lead by example. So Bremmer now speaks of a “post-American order” in which other nations cannot expect American leadership, even by example.
Michael Beckley made his name with Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower (2018). He had been advised as a PhD student by America’s international-relations royalty: Richard Betts, Andrew Nathan, and Robert Jervis. Beckley offered a very compelling argument that China’s prospects were over-rated and the US’s strengths were under-rated. It was read as an argument against US defeatism. Beckley, like Bremmer, was against US military problem-solving abroad. His worry, two years into the first Trump administration, was partisan division leading to the loss of “America’s purpose”: compared to fighting fascism or communism, “maintaining the liberal order may seem like an underwhelming call to greatness….But it is just as virtuous and just as vital.”
Seven years later, writing in Foreign Affairs, Beckley finds that, “As liberal democracy corrodes at home, liberal internationalism is unraveling abroad. In a world without rising powers, the United States is becoming a rogue superpower, with little sense of obligation beyond itself…. U.S. strategy is shedding values and historical memory, narrowing its focus to money and homeland defense. Allies are discovering what unvarnished unilateralism feels like, as security guarantees become protection rackets and trade deals are enforced with tariffs.”
Bremmer and Beckley are determinedly level-headed, experienced, deeply engaged political scientists at the top of their games. They both conclude that the US is falling apart at home, which in turn means that its status as a world power is also falling apart.
How does the Trump-Xi meeting look in this light?
They talked for two hours. Trump said Taiwan did not come up and that China signaled a desire for cooperation on Ukraine. The Chinese readout mentioned neither. The public takeaways included a US reduction in tariffs (and threatened tariffs) in exchange for additional Chinese measures to hinder exports of ingredients in fentanyl, an opiate that has become a leading killer of Americans who use it recreationally. China agreed to lift its ban on imports of US soybeans, returning them to roughly the same quantity as before the recent trade war. The US indicated it would ease restrictions on exporting to China advanced silicon chips, notably those produced by Nvidia. The Chinese readout said that the US had agreed to suspend for a year the implementation of a new rule targeting subsidiaries or affiliates of companies on the US Commerce Department Bureau of Industry and Security’s list of proscribed companies (Entity List) and military-related end users (MEU List). The first list is about 70% Chinese companies; the second is entirely Chinese companies. China in turn suspended for a year its export controls on rare earths and associated products going to the US.
In all of these, the US seems to have been at a disadvantage. On soybeans, US farmers suffered the loss of a market while China diversified its soybean suppliers; the result of Thursday’s talks was at most a possible return to pre-tariff US soybean export levels.
Fentanyl-related tariffs were announced by the White House on February 1 under the authority of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). They were paired with “illegal aliens” as twin aspects of a “national emergency” invoked in order to apply tariffs to imports from China, Canada, and Mexico. The declaration of a national emergency was necessary in order for the executive branch to gain the authority to impose the tariffs. (The administration cited the same emergency IEEPA authority for the April 2 “Liberation Day” tariffs, with high US trade deficits said to constitute a “threat to the national security and economy of the United States.”) Now the fentanyl tariffs are to be reduced in the case of China.
What was missing from the statements and readouts on Thursday was anything about fentanyl use itself — which is the legal basis for the White House’s imposition of the tariffs. Non-fatal fentanyl overdoses actually ticked up from January to June 2025 then declined into August, but they remain where they were when the tariffs were first applied. By contrast, fatal drug overdoses, the majority linked to fentanyl, have been dropping steadily since August 2023 and are now at about the same number as in April 2020. On the first figures, the fentanyl tariffs have been a failure, so why revoke them? On the second measure, the overdose emergency itself has been abating steadily for two years, with the pace seemingly unaffected by the tariffs, so why retain emergency powers at all?
On silicon chips, export controls have been based on national-security grounds, as were Liberation Day tariffs. The same was true of the proposed expansion of BIS Entity List and MEU List powers. These measures have now been suspended or possibly rescinded. So is China now less of a threat to the US?
China’s suspension of its rare-earths export controls was its only significant move and it seems provisional. (China did not suspend its rare-earths controls from April, only the new rules announced in early October and not yet implemented.) China’s strategic management of its rare-earth resources and capabilities has been a consistent feature of its foreign policy since it suspended such shipments to Japan in 2010 over a maritime dispute. A one-year suspension of a new export protocol again, as with soybeans, represents a return to the status quo more than a concession. And as Rush Doshi said on Bill Bishop’s Sinocism podcast yesterday, the rare-earths sector is mainly controlled by a tiny number of Chinese companies that defer to government direction. That tap can be turned on or off at any time.
The import of the Xi-Trump negotiations, then, is not so much in the rather insubstantial terms themselves but in what the talks imply about the Trump administration’s power. It was playing a weak hand from the beginning. China still controls 90% of the rare-earths supply chain. The US was bargaining with soybeans that could be purchased elsewhere, tariffs that are already being priced in and hurt US firms and consumers as well as Chinese suppliers, and technology exports that have already proved difficult to control and for which China is very energetically developing substitutes.
But Trump’s hand was also weak in a different, possibly more important way that puts the grim prognoses of Bremmer and Beckley in an interesting light. It isn’t just that the national-security justifications for presidential tariff powers and export controls have been revealed as opportunistic. It is that Congress has begun to push back in this slow-burn constitutional crisis. As the White House is keenly aware, the Senate resolved, on the heels of the Xi-Trump meeting, that the “national emergency” invoked on Liberation Day was over. This followed two earlier Senate resolutions to oppose tariffs imposed by the White House on Brazil and Canada. In short, Trump was bargaining with Xi partly on the basis of powers that a Senate majority said the president did not have. (Those powers will be reviewed by the Supreme Court as well, on November 5.) It is worth recalling that it was also the Senate that rejected (by 99 to 1) the White House’s bid to forbid states from regulating AI. Senators this week will have noted that the president’s approval ratings have slipped and, perhaps more important, independent voters have swung toward blaming the president and the Republican party for the government shutdown that just reached its thirtieth day. (The record is 35.) At the same time, there is no indication that Congressional Republicans or Democrats have concluded that China no longer poses the threat to national security that inspired BIS and other tech export controls or that Xi has been cowed. Or that China’s control of the rare-earths supply chain has really been weakened.
Bremmer and Beckley were abundantly justified in raising the alarm over America’s ongoing constitutional crisis and its implications for US foreign and economic policy. But they might have called the fight a bit too soon.