Orville Schell expects the September 23 Trump-Xi summit to manage the rivalry at best

Much of Schell's case rests on the two men themselves. He writes that neither leader is suited to the bargaining their rivalry demands. Xi equates compromise with weakness and has a hard time understanding the give-a-little-to-get-a-little logic that Schell calls the heart and soul of diplomacy. Trump is so contradictory and impetuous that his "tech bro" side sits in tension with his belligerent side. Successful US-Chinese summits, he argues, have historically depended on leaders breaking through distrust. The superficial flattery and bonhomie Trump can produce does not generate the deeper confidence that reassured Chinese leaders in the past.

Xi's own summary of the May meeting was "constructive strategic stability," a phrase Schell calls euphemistic. Schell's version is that the summit may have helped sustain a cryptic peace without changing the fundamentally adversarial nature of the relationship. He expects the same limitations that crimped that meeting to constrain the one in Washington.

For a company deciding this quarter, the practical question is how much a summit like that changes. A summit that keeps a peace alive lowers the odds of a sudden escalation in the weeks around it, and it leaves both governments holding the same leverage they held before.

Two Trump-Xi meetings fall inside about four months. Schell credits May with sustaining the peace. What he adds is that despite Trump's simulacrum of camaraderie, the two lack the symmetries needed to build the fraternity and trust that resolving deep structural problems would require.

The examples that make breakthroughs feel available are old ones. Schell lists the 1945 surrenders, NATO in 1949, Kennedy's secret exchanges during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the Reagan-Gorbachev arms-control agreements of the 1980s. For China, he cites Nixon and Kissinger's weeklong 1972 visit with Mao and Zhou, and Carter's restoration of formal relations, marked by welcoming Deng Xiaoping to the White House in 1979. The Washington meeting falls 47 years after the later of those two China cases. Trump, Schell writes, has egged on the wish for another such moment by boastfully insisting that he alone can cut the kinds of deals the United States needs through force of personality.

This is one attendee's argument, and the essay does not specify which supply chains or which measures either side is squeezing. Its use for planning is the horizon it puts on the problem: the tenure of two leaders. A 2027 capital plan that assumes tariff or export-control relief after September 23 is underwriting the chemistry of the same two men Schell watched in Beijing in May.