Tariffs and Tensions: Is Trump Really Shifting on China?

After almost a year of an escalating trade war, U.S. President Donald Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea last week. While official statements from both sides framed the summit as a positive move forward in a period of growing political, economic and military tensions on the international scale, it may also mark a distinct change in the U.S. approach. The Trump administration had imposed extremely high tariffs on Chinese exports to the US this year. China then imposed its own retaliatory tariffs.

But despite Trump’s triumphalist language around the meeting, the U.S. continues to place economic restrictions on China. It will restrict China’s access to NVIDIA’s latest Blackwell generation of chips, despite CEO Jensen Huang saying last week he hoped to be able to sell the chips in China. And the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments this week about Trump’s tariffs against Chinese and other international goods, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington ruled over two months ago, on August 29th, that the President overreached his executive power in imposing the tariffs by invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Ultimately - and despite a perhaps temporary lowering of temperatures - the trade war is far from over and may spill into other significant geopolitical areas.