Bragging on Trade Breakthroughs
Terry H. Schwadron
Oct. 29, 2025
Once again, the evidence is lagging behind the hoopla, this time over a breakthrough agreement with China on trade and tariffs.
Even before Donald Trump meets with China’s Xi Jinping in South Korea on Thursday, Team Trump was trumpeting achievement for the “framework” of a deal that offset delays in a China order barring rare mineral exports to the U.S., the reopening of soybean markets in return and a better grip on ingredients for making fentanyl all in return for erasing U.S. threats on tariffs.
Good-news headlines on Monday, complete with positive market response, came with all the usual warnings that the “framework” did not yet reflect the handshake of the two leaders and could still change. For example, they may throw public resolution of the TikTok ownership deal into the mix as well, an international bruise long enough in the talking that people have forgotten that it was China’s perceived reaping of user information among the app’s users that had caused friction in the first place.
Or — as a New York Times analysis presented it — this is a framework to solve a problem that Trump had created, bringing us back to how things stood in the Spring before Trump started an escalating trade war with China. It seems like a lot of public bragging to return to what were the same claims made before Trump got unilaterally uppity about tariffs.
China only stopped buying soybeans and holding back on minerals after Trump set arbitrary trade taxes on Chinese imports that reached 100 percent at one point, undercutting the legal path to have Congress do so.
Any potential “progress” towards the longstanding complaints by the U.S. about Chinese appropriation of U.S. technology and industrial secrets or Chinese state policy advantage in business deals or currency manipulation — all items on Trump’s longstanding grievance list — were not mentioned. Trump has presented those efforts as necessary for U.S. businesses to have in place for stability.
Do farmers plant more soybeans now or continue to wait for Trump to get around to providing promised aid not to grow? Do small businesses put in orders for goods and parts or not?
Was it such a relief to possibly be over an inanely escalating schoolyard bully fight that prompted the immediate huzzahs? Is it the incessant need for immediate greed?
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Is There a Plan?
Is there no place here to ask why Trump can’t figure out where he wants to end up before he starts shooting his tariff bullets?
As The Times analysis noted, “Trump’s deal-making is famously unpredictable.” The analysis stopped well short of concluding that they are irrational, often illegal and hard to understand in any practical business terms.
From China’s perspective, all this trade talk is preliminary to what is really on the agenda — a sought-after U.S. retreat from support of Taiwan and continued domination of military and economic concerns in Asia. It’s a much richer tapestry than the transactional approach that Trump seems to bring consistently to international questions.
Even as there is forced appreciation for a Trump-Xi “breakthrough,” Chinese and American navies are bumping one another in the South China Sea, with each belligerent encounter between ships and planes circling ever nearer carrying the possibility of error and military conflict. Trump is seeking to shore up ties of fealty from Asian allies even as he asks them to thank him for slapping them around about tariffs, trade and U.S. investments. And China continues to extend its “soft” power influence in Africa, Latin America and in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, there is no such breakthrough with Japan, where the U.S. and Japan declared a “new golden age of the US-Japan alliance” with new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, or likely in South Korea. Indeed, Trump offered a campaign-style speech to U.S. troops, not details on Japanese manufacturing investment promised to this country.
But the images of a triumphal Trump march through Asia, settling wars, erasing conflict and generally selling an image of a retreating America in some still-relevant way is the order of the day. Trump even hangs out the possibility of an impromptu chat with the elusive North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as if this is something that just happens in some nearby chance café.
Trade deals — and nuclear disarmament negotiations — may be more complicated than a glance at headlines might indicate, but a spin job is easy to spot.
What Trump and the Chinese each have won even before the leaders meet is some ego-salving domestic policy juice. It’s partisan politics wrapped in the American flag, maybe helping U.S. businesses but maybe not, reliant on immediate transactions rather than seeking the substance of longstanding and reliable policy.
It might be more useful for all concerned to be publicly more honest about the differences that remain.
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