US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wants to make one thing clear: the United States isn’t trying to break up with China. It just wants to restructure the relationship so that both sides feel a little less exposed.
Speaking at the BTG Pactual CEO Conference in Sao Paolo, Bessent laid out what amounts to a recalibrated trade philosophy for the second Trump administration. The core message: de-risk, not decouple.
The specifics behind the slogan
Bessent proposed the creation of two new bilateral institutions: a “Board of Trade” and a “Board of Investment.” Their job would be to identify non-strategic goods that could qualify for tariff reductions, potentially covering around $30 billion worth of tariffs on each side.
That number sounds significant until you zoom out. China’s global trade surplus sits at an estimated $1.2 trillion. A $30 billion tariff rollback is roughly 2.5% of the surplus figure the US keeps pointing to as evidence that something is structurally off.
