President Donald Trump emerged from his highly anticipated meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping today with most of what he wanted from a deal with Beijing. Yet the agreement does little more than extricate Trump from crises of his own making. The pattern in Trump’s dealings with China raises a long-term concern: that he will one day wind up sacrificing American interests in the pursuit of deals of questionable strategic importance.
Today’s agreement, struck on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea, averts another escalation of tensions between the world’s two great powers. China agreed to postpone expanding export controls on rare-earth metals for one year. Those controls, announced earlier this month, threatened to choke off the flow of rare earths into industries vital to American security, including semiconductors and weapons systems. In return, the Trump administration will pause a new rule it announced in September, which imposed U.S.
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