At their May summit in Beijing, U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping seemed sincere in their desire to resume robust trade relations and manage the tricky Taiwan issue. They agreed to promote a “constructive relationship of strategic stability” between the United States and China—a vague phrase that the two sides likely interpret differently but is nonetheless a sign of a shared aspiration to cope with their differences.
Yet neither strategic trust nor friendship is sufficient for stability, and despite the seemingly positive top-level sentiment, cooperation between Washington and Beijing is now more challenging and precarious than ever. Both Trump and Xi have brutally shaken up their respective political systems and centralized power in their hands, mangling the institutions, communication channels, and bureaucracies essential to avoiding or de-escalating crises. This erosion of both process and predictability has decimated the diplomatic guardrails that, in the past, prevented the two superpowers from reaching the brink.
At their May summit in Beijing, U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping seemed sincere in their desire to resume robust trade relations and manage the tricky Taiwan issue. They agreed to promote a “constructive relationship of strategic stability” between the United States and China—a vague phrase that the two sides likely interpret differently but is nonetheless a sign of a shared aspiration to cope with their differences.
Yet neither strategic trust nor friendship is sufficient for stability, and despite the seemingly positive top-level sentiment, cooperation between Washington and Beijing is now more challenging and precarious than ever. Both Trump and Xi have brutally shaken up their respective political systems and centralized power in their hands, mangling the institutions, communication channels, and bureaucracies essential to avoiding or de-escalating crises. This erosion of both process and predictability has decimated the diplomatic guardrails that, in the past, prevented the two superpowers from reaching the brink.
Trump and Xi have discarded expertise and competence in favor of absolute loyalty through massive purges of foreign-policy and other professionals. In Washington, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency slashed expenditures and terminated government employees in droves, justified by Trump’s criticism of what he saw as “woke” bureaucrats and government waste. Meanwhile, dozens of generals have been demoted or denied promotions, while hundreds of diplomats have been fired or pressed into taking early retirement.
In Beijing, relentless anti-corruption campaigns have become the main instrument for removing officials deemed disloyal to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and, especially, to its “core”: Xi himself. Of those officers purged across the Chinese military through February, 61 percent held key operational roles. The Chinese foreign-policy bureaucracy has suffered greatly: Foreign Minister Qin Gang, for example, disappeared from view in mid-2023, becoming the shortest-serving chief diplomat in the history of the People’s Republic of China. Accomplished diplomat Liu Jianchao, one of Qin’s most likely successors and head of the CCP International Department, was then suddenly detained in 2025.
Key policymaking institutions have also been savaged. In the United States, the National Security Council (NSC) has traditionally been vital for interagency coordination across the federal government and for providing expert day-to-day advice to the president. However, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as Trump’s national security advisor, appears focused squarely on his State Department portfolio—and distracted by his chief administrator role for Venezuela—rather than on interagency coordination, while his perplexing changes to NSC processes have rendered the body largely defective.
In China, Xi’s ongoing purges of top military leaders have slashed the Central Military Commission (CMC)—the supreme military leadership body—down to an unprecedented two members. After the removal of five top generals, only the civilian chair (Xi) and one uniformed general (Zhang Shengmin, the head of the CMC’s Discipline Inspection Commission) remain. The CMC is intended to provide China’s commander in chief with professional advice on critical military affairs. The current body cannot fulfill that function.
The valuation of loyalty over expertise and the undermining of key policymaking institutions shape the management of U.S.-China relations in two ways.
The first is the erosion of clarity, further enabled by a lack of initiative to resolve the issue. Identifying appropriate Chinese counterparts for U.S. officials and organizations has been a perennial problem for the United States that has only worsened in recent years. It is not clear who, other than Trump and Xi, has been designated to speak authoritatively or negotiate on any given issue. For example, the U.S. government seems to have identified Defense Minister Dong Jun as the Chinese counterpart to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Yet Dong’s title is purely honorific: He has yet to be appointed to the CMC despite assuming the ministry post in 2023, a departure from precedent and a likely result of Xi’s shake-ups. Regardless, Hegseth seems content to hold pro forma meetings with his purported institutional equivalent.
China faces the same problem. Chinese officials and analysts are at a loss to identify an individual or individuals in the Trump administration who have primary responsibility for managing security or economic relations with China. In terms of security, Hegseth is far from focused on China, while Rubio is spread too thin, wearing too many hats. On trade, is it Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick or Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—or, perhaps, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner?
The second major consequence of repeated personnel purges and weakened institutions is a drastic decline in predictability. When leaders are unconstrained and surrounded by officials who have little incentive to speak truth to power, policy becomes as erratic and extreme as their own views on any given issue. It is extremely difficult to know whether Xi’s or Trump’s declarations will translate into long-term policy changes—or last only until the next post on Truth Social or article in Qiushi, the official journal of the CCP Central Committee.
Take Taiwan. While it has long been the most contentious issue in U.S.-China relations, tensions have escalated in recent decades, and the potential for a military conflict has risen, a problem that has only been further exacerbated by two dysfunctional administrations. On the one hand, Trump’s recent public comments calling a $14 billion U.S. arms package to Taiwan—which is currently on hold despite being preapproved by Congress last year—a “very good negotiating chip,” and reported discussions with Xi in May, indicate a willingness to negotiate a change in Washington’s policy to accommodate the Chinese position. On the other hand, the Trump administration continues to engage in a robust set of alliance-like activities with Taiwan, including training and providing weapons to the Taiwanese armed forces.
For China, a favorable Taiwan deal with the Trump administration seems tantalizingly conceivable. Yet Beijing cannot trust Washington to deliver on a negotiated agreement. In the view of Chinese leaders, successive U.S. administrations have failed to deliver on multiple formal commitments made to Beijing in the 1970s and early 1980s to walk away from Taiwan. From Beijing’s perspective, this enduring manifestation of U.S. duplicity has continued in the second Trump administration.
It is also highly questionable that Beijing would meet any commitments that it might make to Washington to dial back pressure on Taipei. In 2022, then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a controversial visit to Taiwan. Pelosi’s status—third in line to succeed the head of state as well as a member of the president’s own political party—signaled, in Beijing’s view, a qualitative change in Washington’s Taiwan policy. Since then, China has operated in one mode vis-à-vis Taiwan: high gear with heavy pressure tactics. Beijing has ramped up gray-zone activity against successive Democratic Progressive Party administrations in Taiwan, and any deal with Washington is unlikely to produce an enduring downshift in cross-strait provocations.
Fixing a broken political system or a dysfunctional policy apparatus is much more challenging than rebuilding trust in bilateral relations and far more difficult than devising and executing a workable policy. In the United States, this raises the uncomfortable question of whether the country’s own democratic institutions still possess the discipline, expertise, and accountability required for effective foreign policy. It also means that the global hegemon and its most powerful rival will likely be even less able than before to resolve, or even effectively manage, contentious issues.
The danger, then, is not a new cold war but a highly unstable form of great-power competition in which both sides are powerful, insecure, and increasingly unpredictable. Trump and Xi may sincerely wish to avoid war. They may even believe that their enhanced personal control over their respective systems gives them potent authority to manage rivalry more effectively than their predecessors. Yet the concentration of power around them weakens the institutions that make stable competition possible.
The central challenge for the United States and China, then, is institutional rather than geopolitical. Taiwan, trade disputes, and technology competition are difficult under any circumstances, but they become far more dangerous when both sides are governed through increasingly personalistic systems. A stable U.S.-China relationship does not require friendship, strategic trust, or even resolution of all major disputes. Stability does, however, require functioning institutions, reliable channels of communication, and adequate bureaucratic competence to forestall policies of impulsivity and unpredictability. Without this foundation, leaders such as Trump and Xi—who insist they want stability—may find themselves the unwitting generators of diplomatic chaos.