The latest summit, due to begin in the United States on Sept. 24, looks set to focus on the same set of issues again. The main difference will be that the technology element has been given added urgency by the sudden and rapid shift in developments in artificial intelligence.

What’s less clear is whether the two sides will be able to come to any sort of transformative agreement on that, or any other issue.

Tweaks to trade?

The most urgent issue, but also the simplest to solve, will be on trade.

Nearly a year ago at Busan in South Korea, Trump and Xi hammered out an agreement whereby the U.S. agreed to lift some export controls on high-end technology and to reduce the then three-figure tariffs on Chinese goods. For its part, China agreed not to restrict the flow of critical minerals and rare earths to U.S. users.

That pact is now up for renewal. Both sides are likely to want a continuation of the current arrangement, and while there may be some tweaking on the side, the new deal will probably be similar to the old one.

Each side has proposed in previous meetings that there should be a new instrument, a Board of Trade, that will assess non-sensitive U.S.-China business interests.

However, details about the institution remains vague. Some announcements are likely during the summit, but business leaders will want to know how comprehensive and lasting the arrangements for the board will be.

There is still less information on a proposed Board of Investment, which remains on the drawing board. The Chinese side has proposed bringing major Chinese CEOs to the summit to match the likes of Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Tesla’s Elon Musk – both of whom accompanied Trump on the Beijing trip.

But the choice of business leaders is likely to turn on which aspects of trade China thinks are likely to develop most effectively in the short term.

The always thorny issue of Taiwan

Taiwan is a much harder issue to solve, but it’s unlikely that much that is discussed on Xi’s visit will determine its outcome.

Trump has been less willing than his predecessor to commit the U.S. to defending the island should Beijing invade, instead reasserting Washington’s long-held position of strategic ambiguity.

And although the U.S. is currently distracted from East Asia by the Iran conflict, China still prefers to find methods short of war to bring the island under Beijing’s control.

The island’s January 2028 presidential election is likely to be a more crucial moment for Taiwan’s future, particularly if the opposition — and more China-friendly — Kuomintang party wins the presidency, or indeed if an isolationist candidate becomes U.S. president later that year. If the next U.S. president opted to change course by taking a less active involvement in overseas issues — as has been floated by early contenders on both the left and right — that would change things all the more.

For now, Beijing will continue to build the People’s Liberation Army’s naval capacity to have the option of military action against the island. But its preference will be to take advantage of changes within Taiwan’s internal politics while combining economic incentives and coercion, squeezing Taipei’s international footprint and hoping for a slackening of U.S. interest in the western Pacific.

Other international issues are likely to gain less attention. China is expected to make clear its unhappiness about the war on Iran, and the U.S. may remind China that it has passed new legislation allowing sanctions on countries that buy Russian oil – of which, China is the largest purchaser. However, neither issue is likely to lead to any major change in practice.

Turning to tech

It’s really in the area of tech, and AI in particular, where both sides will be trying to make diplomacy catch up with reality. The May summit surprised many because the question of mutual agreement on regulation of AI came up in a way that had not been on the agenda for the first year of the Trump administration.

However, both sides agreed that talks in principle about regulation might be possible and even desirable because of the growth in the importance, but also unpredictability, of AI. And on Sept, 20, the U.S. and China mooted the idea of a “hotline” to notify the other over AI national security risks.

Between the May and September summits, fears about AI in the U.S have created an increasingly unfriendly atmosphere toward unregulated AI.

In China, public sentiment about AI is less openly hostile and some of its major benefits in areas such as healthcare have softened people’s attitudes. Yet there are still plenty of concerns expressed in private about whether China’s troubled economy will definitively benefit from the AI boom. Although many argue it has created new opportunities for consumers, others point to the relatively few jobs that have been created for a workforce that finds itself buffeted by wide-scale job elimination.

Both the U.S. and China have reasons to talk about AI regulation. The alarming prospect of rogue AI companies causing intense social disruptions through their business choices is clearly one such reason, and in the U.S., voters’ more immediate concerns about data centers are another.

There are also China-specific reasons that Beijing may seek restraint. One of the most common concerns about AI is that it may well run out of control. And “out of control” is a kryptonite phrase for the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. That’s particularly true of Xi who, as a youth, spent years in rural exile after his father fell to a purge just before the Cultural Revolution – an upheaval during which China’s politics turned to anarchy. It was a formative experience for Xi, which has no doubt influenced his tendencies as a leader toward exercising as much control as possible.

AI that undermines the unchallengeable leadership of the Communist Party would be an unwelcome guest in China’s cyberspace, and regulation that solves that problem would not be rejected out of hand.

However, this recognition of mutual concern about AI – albeit for very different reasons – is still not likely to see much progress in the short term. The competition between the U.S. and China on AI is real, and neither governments nor private sector actors in either country are willing to make concessions that could advantage the other side.

Levels of trust between Washington and Beijing remain very low on the issue. Talks about talks seem the most likely public outcome, though what happens behind the scenes may be pursued more discreetly.

It’s good to talk

The Trump-Xi summit is less important in terms of any major change in policy on either side, and more because it marks part of a commitment to maintain some form of dialogue between the leaders of the world’s two most powerful countries. The leaders may well meet twice more in the near future, at the G20 and APEC summits.

To meet four times in just over half a year is a good sign; refusal to meet would be much more worrying.

But the underlying difficulties of the three Ts, where the leaders seem to have fundamentally incompatible agendas, remain the thread beneath the ostensibly polite and occasionally amiable conversations.

Rana Mitter, Professor of U.S.-Asia Relations, Harvard Kennedy School

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This phrase, popularised by contemporary US political scientist Graham Allison in the early 2010s, is used to describe how two countries can drift toward war when an existing superpower feels anxious about an emerging one. Allison had China and the US in mind specifically.

It takes its name from Athenian historian and general Thucydides, who wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War, about the 27-year war between Athens and Sparta that broke out in 431 BCE.

But what did Thucydides really say on this? And what do Athens and Sparta have to do with the current state of US–China relations?

An implied fumble

The implication in the term “Thucydides trap” is that the established superpower manages the rising power badly and feels obliged to go to war when that’s not necessarily the only option.

It is based on a quote from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (book one, chapter 23). He said:

The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon [Sparta], made war inevitable.

In other words, Thucydides is saying what made the Peloponnesian War inevitable was the rise of Athenian power.

At the time, lots of Greeks were saying Athens and Sparta had gone to war again because of smaller disputes.

But Thucydides says no, the real cause was the overall fear that Sparta (the traditional superpower) had for the new powerful state: democratic Athens.

The general idea, of course, is that in its anxiety about the rise of China, the US may tend toward war when other options are available.

But many scholars of ancient Greece take issue with the way the term is used today.

A contested term

The word “trap” implies Sparta made a mistake in 431 BCE and could’ve handled things better. But that’s not what Thucydides really narrates in book one of his History of the Peloponnesian War.

He shows that, in fact, Sparta had good reason to fear the rising Athenians. Athens was, by then, a predominate naval power in the Balkans and the Aegean Sea. It was stripping allies off Sparta left, right and centre, and beating up the ones that refused to defect.

Those allies basically said to Sparta in 432 BCE: listen, you have got to do something about Athens and if you don’t act, we will join them.

It was pressure from these allies that pushed the Spartans to act against Athens.

So yes, in a sense Sparta’s own anxieties about ever-increasing Athenian power led to war. Sparta felt compelled to wage total war against Athens to maintain its system of alliances, and in 431 BCE broke the peace treaty it had with Athens.

A longer-term perspective

More generally, the term “Thucydides trap” is about how over the longer term things didn’t turn out so well for Sparta; although they won the Peloponnesian War, it took them 27 years to do so.

And after the victory, Sparta engaged in a huge expansion to become an even greater superpower. That ended up making all the other Greeks very fearful for their security. This growth in Spartan power after 404 BCE caused many of its allies to become enemies. All those Greek states then came together to confront Sparta, which was completely and utterly destroyed in 371 BCE at the Battle of Leuctra.

The whole security architecture of Sparta collapsed; they lost all their allies, all their slaves were liberated and Sparta was reduced to just a minor state.

So the lesson for the US implied in the term Thucydides trap is that fear of superpowers is a potent shaper of international affairs.

But many people who use the term Thucydides trap forget to mention what happened to Athens in the longer term.

Athens survived the Peloponnesian War and restored its democracy and military, and became a regional power. But what’s fascinating is that by the early 4th century BCE Athens was under immense pressure from the Persian empire, which was many times more powerful than any Greek state.

So Athens clipped its own wings and gave up on being this huge Mediterranean superpower; it decided to forego any attempt to reassert its imperial control over the many Greek states of Anatolia, allowing them again to be subjects of the Persian empire.

Athens decided to focus more closely on the Aegean Sea and give up on fighting Persians; it recognised the constraints of its power.

So it’s not as though Sparta’s decision to enter war with Athens in 431 BCE led, in the long run, to total world domination by Athens.

A lesson for today

The history of the Peloponnesian War provides important lessons for China–US relations today.

One is that it may be foolish for an established superpower to check the rise of an emerging one. Sparta learned that trying to do so can come at a terrible cost.

Accommodating Athens would have allowed Sparta to continue as a superpower well into the fourth century.

Another lesson is that an established superpower, such as the US, can cut back its ambitions and focus on regions closer to home.

This is exactly what democratic Athens did after the Peloponnesian War. Doing so allowed it to flourish culturally and politically and keep enemies well away until the 310s BCE.

David M. Pritchard, Associate Professor of Greek History, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.