Trump's G2 framing hands China the peer status it long sought
For decades, Beijing has angled for one thing above all: acknowledgement from Washington that it stands as an equal. That acknowledgement has now arrived, delivered by President Trump, who has repeatedly branded his summits with Chinese President Xi Jinping as a U.S.-China "G2" or "group of two." In doing so, he has positioned China as America's foremost strategic counterpart.
Hosting Xi for a state visit last week, at a moment when other world leaders had converged on the United Nations, Trump effectively cast the U.S.-China relationship as the spine of a bipolar order. That portrayal carries a price: it threatens to antagonise partners and allies such as Japan, India, Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea and NATO members.
The pageantry surrounding the encounter left little to interpretation. Breaking with normal American diplomatic practice, Trump travelled in person to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland to welcome Xi, staging an elaborate ceremony that included a red carpet flanked by U.S. service members and a military flyover of two B-1 bombers.
A 479-member military honour guard received the Chinese leader at the White House the following morning, with the arrival ceremony closing with a B-2 Spirit bomber flying alongside four F-22 Raptors. A state dinner and a Trump-escorted tour of the National Archives rounded out the visit.
Such ceremonial gestures sent an unmistakable signal: the heads of the world's two dominant powers were convening on equal terms.
Even more instructive than the spectacle has been Trump's choice of words. On several occasions he has referred to his meetings with Xi as the G2. Ahead of last October's summit in Busan, South Korea, he declared on Truth Social, "THE G2 WILL BE CONVENING SHORTLY!" Afterwards he marked "My G2 meeting with President Xi." Secretary of War Pete Hegseth likewise described the encounter as a "historic 'G2 meeting.'"
Trump returned to the G2 phrase during his May trip to Beijing, seemingly to mark the formal end of the unipolar era. Where earlier American presidents took pains not to legitimise China's bid for peer status, Trump's use of the G2 label in press settings signalled that Washington now regards China as its genuine equal.
Trump has also struck a conspicuously deferential tone toward America's main geopolitical rival. In the period before Xi's Washington visit, he waved away or justified reports of Chinese actions against the U.S., among them supplying Iran with satellite imagery to target American assets, even as he described the Chinese leader as a personal friend and said he had "never gotten along better" with Xi.
Beijing has consistently objected to American hegemony while at the same time pressing for equal treatment from Washington. Its favoured formulation has been a "new model of major power relations," which envisions mutual respect for each side's core interests, including China's communist system and its territorial claims, among them Taiwan and the South China Sea.
A formal G2 institution was never the aim. The goal was to make it normal for the world to accept that nothing of global consequence can be settled without China. Through his summit diplomacy, Trump has carried Beijing much nearer to that ambition.
In practical terms, the latest summit yielded little: no agreement emerged on any of the contentious bilateral issues, and the trade-war truce was extended by just two months.
For Xi, though, the visit amounted to a propaganda triumph, communicating to the Chinese public and to the wider world that China has become America's equal under his leadership. The imagery bolstered Beijing's narrative of Xi-led national rejuvenation. Trump's summit diplomacy has also helped Beijing push one of the central aims of its strategic messaging: showing audiences at home and abroad that the U.S. can no longer set terms on its own.
Trump's cultivation of Xi marks a striking departure from his first term, when tariffs, sanctions and technology restrictions were framed as instruments for reshaping China's behaviour. Today Washington's aim is not to transform China but to manage strategic rivalry through direct leader-to-leader bargaining, even if that entails accepting the world's largest autocracy as a co-equal on the global stage.
China remains behind America in economic, diplomatic and military power. Yet peer competition has never demanded matching strength. What defines it is the ability to resist coercion and to shape international outcomes independently. When Beijing answered American tariffs last year by restricting rare-earth exports, it demonstrated both that economic interdependence cuts both ways and that it can impose retaliatory costs on the U.S.
The problem is not engaging a powerful rival to help avert costly miscalculations, but the public elevation of China into a privileged bilateral condominium. Those most likely to lose are America's own allies and partners, whose interests could be subordinated to Washington-Beijing bargains, forcing them to hedge against U.S. unreliability.
The prospect of a U.S.-China duopoly, in which Washington and Beijing negotiate the rules of global governance while everyone else adapts to the outcome, is a strategic nightmare for U.S. friends in Asia in particular. They want a stable balance of power, not a Sino-centric Asia.
History gives them ample reason for concern. Major powers have repeatedly sought stability through exclusive understandings while middle powers and smaller states absorbed the consequences.
The White House's accommodative approach will likely gain greater prominence as Trump has indicated he will meet Xi again in November and December — first at the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting in Shenzhen, China, and then at the G20 summit in Miami.
China's greatest diplomatic victory in recent years has come not on the battlefield or through economic coercion, but in Washington, where Trump has validated Beijing's claim to peer status. For Xi, no concession could have delivered a more valuable prize than America itself recognising China as a co-leader of the international system.
Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning "Water: Asia's New Battleground."
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