W
ith Donald Trump, there is always a gap between the effusive adjectives he uses and reality, which is inevitably more complex. The president of the United States described his meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea, on Thursday, October 30, as "outstanding." He boasted, "On a scale from zero to 10, with 10 being the best, I would say the meeting was a 12." The Chinese president did not engage in this sort of evaluation, but he could have easily claimed to have achieved a far higher score, given the way he managed to rebalance the power dynamic between the two countries to his own advantage.
Subscribers only
Trump-Xi meeting brings temporary lull to escalation between US and China
While the meeting marks a respite in the US-China trade war, it mostly showed that Trump had overestimated his leverage, as he sought to bring Beijing to heel from the first demand. It only took one threat from China, on imposing export restrictions on rare earth elements, for the US to realize that Beijing, too, could assert its strategic interests, even in the face of the world's leading power.
