The TOI correspondent from Washington: In what appears to be a tectonic shift in American foreign policy and world order, US President Donald Trump has openly embraced China as a functional equal, heralding a new duopoly that jettisons Washington’s decade-plus view of Beijing as an existential threat, while leaving other powers like EU, Russia, India, and Japan as also-rans.
Shortly after announcing “THE G2 WILL BE CONVENING SHORTLY!” ahead of his meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping last week, Trump doubled down on the formulation on Saturday, confirming that it is more than a tactical ploy. “My G2 meeting with President Xi of China was a great one for both of our countries. This meeting will lead to everlasting peace and success. God bless both China and the USA!” he posted on X.
US defense secretary Pete Hegseth followed Trump’s post, saying he agreed with the President that the relationship between the US and China “has never been better.” After Trump’s meeting with Xi, Hegseth said he had an “equally positive meeting” with his counterpart, China’s minister of national defense Admiral Dong Jun in Malaysia, where incidentally he also signed a ten-year defense framework agreement with India’s defence minister Rajnath Singh.
“The (Chinese) Admiral and I agree that peace, stability, and good relations are the best path for our two great and strong countries. As President Trump said, his historic “G2 meeting” set the tone for everlasting peace and success for the US and China. The Department of War will do the same — peace through strength, mutual respect, and positive relations. God bless both China and the USA!” Hegseth said in a post. A China-phobic Fox News host not so long ago, Hegseth said Dong and he agreed to set up military-to-military channels to deconflict and deescalate any problems that arise and they would have more meetings on the subject coming soon.
The twin statements constituted an astonishing turnaround by an administration that held the view going back to the first Trump term that China was a hostile adversary that had “ripped off the US, “stolen” its technology, and needed to be challenged and contained if not defeated. As recently as May this year, CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis explicitly stated, "China is the existential threat to American security in a way that we really have never confronted before." Several MAGA lawmakers, notably Tom Cotton, who heads the Senate intelligence Committee, are anti-China hardliners who have gone to the extent of wanting to expel Chinese students from U.S universities for purported spying.
The term “G-2” in relation to China was first coined during the Bush era by the economist C. Fred Bergsten. Also dubbed Chimerica by the historian Niall Ferguson), it proposed a hypothetical U.S.–China condominium to establish a "systematically cooperative relationship" aimed at addressing challenges like trade imbalances, climate change, and financial stability. The idea faded during the Obama era when China came to be seen as a belligerent power and Washington decided to support India’s rise as a counterweight to China. After Trump took office in 2017, China was subjected to bitter invective, including being blamed for the pandemic.
The immediate reason for the turnaround, according to the Washington punditocracy, is the economic and diplomatic setback Trump faced after he launched a tariff war against China and found that Beijing held the aces. Despite his characteristic bravado and bluster in projecting his meeting with Xi as a win-win, almost across the board, the global commentariat is almost unanimous in concluding that Trump has made more concessions than China after unleashing a tariff war.
A Financial Times report on the Trump-Xi summit ran with the headline “China emerges as a peer-rival” to the US. The Associated Press also concluded that Trump gained little in the talks, concluding, the “deal between the US and China is undoing damage from a self-inflicted trade war”.
The immediate casualty of this bipolar framing is the rest of the world, including once-influential players such as the European Union, Russia, and India, which now find themselves relegated to secondary status in a US–China duopoly. In fact, Beijing’s official readout from the summit echoed the US sentiment: “China and the United States can jointly shoulder our responsibility as major countries and accomplish great things for the good of our two countries and the world.”
Rajghatta is author of Kamala Harris: Phenomenal Woman