China sees a weakened United States. U.S. President Donald J. Trump has arrived in Beijing for 2 days of talks with Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping. It is Trump’s first trip to China in nearly a decade. Historian Niall Ferguson coined “Ferguson’s Law”: every great power that spends more on debt servicing than on defense ceases to be a great power. The U.S. has reached this point. The British Empire most recently fell into this trap. Beijing analysts say the Trump team’s negotiating position is the weakest in years.
The U.S.-China Summit: Advantage Beijing?
President Donald Trump attends an event celebrating the 2025 NCAA Division 1 Men’s Basketball Champion Florida Gators, Wednesday, May 21, 2025, in the East Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
US President Donald J. Trump has arrived in Beijing for two days of talks with the penultimate leader of the world’s most populous nation, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping. It is the first trip to the country by the US leader in almost a decade, and in 2026, the situations inside both the US and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) – as well as their relations with one another – could hardly be more different compared to what they were during Trump’s previous visit.
There are serious topics the two leaders will have to discuss and reach at least some preliminary agreement on. But there is nowhere near enough time allotted to tackle them. The complications associated with any topic on the menu – take your pick – could easily consume the only two days’ worth of time allotted to their interactions.
Complicating these discussions is that there are also points of contention that remain unresolved from that previous November 2017, as the strategist, retired US Army Lt. Gen. and former Trump 45 administration National Security Advisor (NSA) H. R. McMaster, wrote about earlier this week. “They include the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) regional ambitions to subsume Taiwan, lay claim to the South China Sea, and establish primacy across the Indo-Pacific,” he lists for those who would like to make up a scorecard of sorts.
But the CCP also has a set of objectives that extend well beyond East Asia. “They also include Beijing’s global ambitions to displace the United States and gain the economic, diplomatic, and military influence to rewrite the rules of international discourse in favor of its authoritarian form of governance and its statist, mercantilist economic model.” Beijing’s strategy, as the former NSA described in his book Battlegrounds, “remains one of the three-Cs: cooption, coercion and concealment.”
Taking Advantage of the Upheavals
What Trump and his team are likely to discover in this set of talks is that little of the CCP’s long-range goals have altered in the past decade, say McMaster and others. Both the nature of the state and the institutions created in the PRC, as well as historical practices in Chinese culture, lead whoever is in charge in Beijing to play what we often refer to as “the long game.”
This strategy often works, reads one of many assessments of the US-China relationship published this week, because what the PRC political order and policy-making apparatus lacks in agility, it makes up for in continuity.
What favors the CCP’s position at this point is not just a solid adherence to what seems like this unchanging wish list, but also how deeply Washington is engaged (some would say preoccupied) in other parts of the world. At the top of the list would be the now more than two-month-old war with Iran that is causing considerable harm to the global economy. The conflict even delayed this planned summit, which had been scheduled a month earlier. And it is only one of several global conundrums that vex the US foreign policy and military institutions as of this morning.
“That’s why the administration is so distracted from its responsibilities vis-à-vis Beijing at present,” said a long-time, DC-based China analyst. “They came into office stating they had an ‘Asia First’ orientation,” he said. “But it is turning out to be almost the complete opposite.”
Beijing is acutely aware of the difficulties that Washington is grappling with, and the team sitting across the table from Trump and his advisors will exert maximum leverage to limit US options and strengthen their hand.
Likely Outcomes
While deliberating, the Trump team will realize its negotiating position is weaker than in previous years. Not only are there economic issues not trending in Washington’s direction, but the degree to which US military might is now deeply committed in the Iran conflict causes any US threats to escalate in the Indo-Pacific region if the PRC does not meet US demands to ring hollow.
President Donald Trump gives remarks after presenting the newly-created “Medal of Sacrifice” to three fallen officers’ families from the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, Monday, May 19, 2025, in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)
But Beijing sees it as a growing strategic advantage beyond its belief that the US is almost perennially bogged down in the Middle East. It gives Beijing what some analysts refer to as the strategic space it has been looking for – a space it is now filling with a list of new weaponry and expanded power-projection capabilities, including more and newer aircraft carriers.
But another reality threatens the US position in the world more than just the immediate competition with the PRC. “Ferguson’s Law,” coined by the historian and Hoover Institution Fellow Niall Ferguson, states that any great power that ends up spending more on debt servicing than on defense risks ceasing to be a great power in the future.
America Looks Weak
The US has reached this point, and the record is that almost every great empire that fell into this trap, most recently the British Empire, ended up as a geopolitical has-been. Xi and his leadership in Beijing understand this historical imperative all too well.
Trust that they will do everything in their power to maneuver the US into continuing down this same path.
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of Research at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two consecutive awards for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
