Newsweek analysis - 5 Traps for Trump and Xi - Published May 14, 2026 at 10:39 AM EDT - By Newsweek Editors

 Newsweek

analysis

5 Traps for Trump and Xi

Published

May 14, 2026 at 10:39 AM EDT

By Newsweek Editors

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At Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, Xi Jinping put a question to Donald Trump, the answer to which has profound consequences not only for China and the U.S., but the whole world. 

"Can China and the United States overcome the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm of major country relations?" Xi asked the U.S. president as the two men held a meeting during Trump's state visit to Beijing. 

Xi also warned mishandling Taiwan could lead to "clashes and even conflicts," while the Beijing summit put trade, Taiwan, Iran and technology into the same diplomatic room. 

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The more useful lesson is counterintuitive. Taiwan is the obvious danger, and for good reason. But the more plausible path to crisis may be slower: a breakdown of rules, incentives and trust.

As Xi and Trump attempt to manage their great power rivalry rather than resolve it in Beijing, here are five traps they must avoid, ranked in reverse order of how likely they are to shape the next phase of U.S.-China relations.

5. The Thucydides Trap

Coined by political scientist Graham Allison, this describes the structural stress and heightened risk of conflict that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one.  

It comes from Thucydides' account of the destructive Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, in which he said: "It was the rise of Athens, and the fear that rise engendered in Sparta, that made war inevitable."

But the present Trump-Xi dynamic is too pragmatic and transactional to fit a simple inevitability narrative, dominated by bargaining over tariffs, rare earths, chips, signals over Taiwan and purchase commitments. 

The military risk is real around Taiwan, and Xi's warning showed why the issue remains the most dangerous flashpoint in the relationship. 

Yet deliberate hot war still ranks as the least likely of the five traps, because nuclear arsenals and deep commercial ties make escalation catastrophically expensive for both governments. 

Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) and over $500 billion in interconnected bilateral trade are powerful deterrents. 

Trump and Xi are testing leverage through markets, technology and diplomatic choreography before they test it through force, as the Busan agreement showed in its focus on rare earths, fentanyl precursors, semiconductor retaliation and farm exports. 

The Thucydides frame remains useful as a warning, but it can distract from the more probable failures already shaping the relationship. 

4. The Hobsonian Trap

This is a version of J.A. Hobson’s argument in 1902 that imperialism grew from powerful domestic economic interests seeking foreign markets and investments for goods and capital they could not absorb at home. 

These pressures force leaders to pursue aggressive, highly nationalist foreign expansion or trade wars to distract from internal structural failures. 

A Hobsonian trap now appears as domestic imbalance converted into nationalist trade pressure. 

China is still managing a property downturn and weak consumer confidence, while Trump’s trade program treats tariffs and industrial capacity as tools of national strength. 

The danger is a cycle in which Beijing answers economic anxiety with industrial self-reliance and export pressure, while Washington answers worker anger with tariffs, investment screening, and market restriction. 

Rather than collaborating, both leaders are trapped by their home domestic audiences; they must act aggressively outward to maintain political control at home, leading to a tit-for-tat escalation of tariffs and market restrictions. 

The Hobsonian Trap turns domestic audiences into invisible negotiators, making compromise abroad look like weakness at home. 

This trap is a moderate risk because, though both leaders can gain short-term political value from external toughness, the reality is their economies still need selective cooperation with each other to avoid self-harm. 

3. The Jevons Trap

This trap is rooted in the theory of economist William Stanley Jevons. The Jevons paradox began as an economic argument that efficiency gains can raise rather than reduce total resource use. 

In a geopolitical context, it refers to a trap in which increasing the efficiency, security, or defensive barriers of a system—like implementing strict cyber defense and trade barriers—actually accelerates the aggressive pursuit of that resource. 

The geopolitical analogue is now visible in semiconductors: U.S. export controls were designed to restrict China’s ability to obtain and manufacture high-end chips used in AI and military applications. 

But as the think tank CSIS laid out recently, U.S. and allied controls had "clearly accelerated Beijing’s long-standing drive for semiconductor self-reliance," even while limiting China’s short-term access to frontier tools. 

This trap is moderate-to-high risk for Trump especially because every successful barrier becomes both a constraint and an incentive, pushing Beijing to spend more, substitute faster and treat technological autonomy as regime security. 

2. The Tacitus Trap

This one is named after the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote that "when a ruler once becomes unpopular, all his acts, be they good or bad, tell against him." That ancient line has become the shorthand for a modern credibility trap. 

The theory holds that when a government or leader becomes deeply unpopular or mistrusted, any action—good or bad—will be viewed with intense hostility and suspicion by their counterpart. 

The U.S.-China version is bilateral distrust: Pew found in 2025 that 77 percent of Americans held an unfavorable view of China, even after a modest softening from 2024. 

If Xi stabilizes rare-earth supplies, hawks in Washington can treat the move as leverage disguised as cooperation; if Trump pauses tariffs, Chinese hard-liners can read the pause as proof that pressure worked.  

This trap is highly likely because the political reward for suspicion is immediate, while the reward for trust requires years of enforcement, verification and domestic patience. 

It can prevent long-term agreements from sticking, keeping both leaders locked in an endless cycle of suspicion.  

The Tacitus Trap also explains why a summit can produce warm choreography and brittle substance at the same time. 

1. The Kindleberger Trap

Coined by Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye, drawing on the work of economic historian Charles Kindleberger, this trap ranks first because it is the most likely to shape Trump and Xi's relationship. 

It occurs when a rising power, like China, is unwilling or unable to provide global public goods, while the established power, like the U.S., becomes less willing to bear the costs of doing so.

Trump's second-term trade policy explicitly says it will put "the American economy, the American worker, and our national security first," an inward-focused formulation that narrows the political space for costly global stewardship. His NATO policy is a case in point. 

Xi, at the Busan meeting, stressed China's own economic resilience, said Beijing had "no intention to challenge or supplant anyone," and told Trump the two countries "must not fall into a vicious cycle of mutual retaliation." 

The 2025 Busan deal itself was transactional: the White House said China would suspend rare-earth export controls, curb fentanyl precursor flows, end retaliation against U.S. semiconductor firms and reopen markets to U.S. farm exports. 

The trap's likely product is a world in which crises over rare earths, shipping lanes, AI standards, and climate finance arrive faster than either capital's appetite for collective repair. 

The risk is that neither leader is willing to pay for global stabilization. A leadership vacuum does not produce immediate war, but a decay of global economic and climate frameworks, forcing both leaders into unpredictable regional crises. 

Decay Before Disaster

At the Beijing summit, Xi named the most famous trap while both leaders were already living inside less cinematic ones. 

The next phase will depend less on whether Trump and Xi can recite the language of stability than on whether they can make small, enforceable bargains survive suspicion, domestic pressure and technological escalation. 

If they fail, the danger will probably arrive through decay before disaster, which is why the Kindleberger Trap should worry Washington more than the ancient Greek one.