In the coming year, President Donald Trump may meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping up to a half dozen times, an intense period of high-level diplomacy amid unprecedented mutual trade and supply chain warfare with China.

The stage was set by the leaders’ Oct. 2025 summit in Korea, which Trump described as a convening of the “G2,” recalling a discarded diplomatic idea that the U.S. and China stand as peers above other countries and groupings like the G7 and G20, and should partner together to govern the world.

However, China has conspicuously declined to join Trump’s revival of the G2 label, even though Xi has sought to establish such global power-sharing arrangements with the United States in the past.

Xi’s change of heart is a reminder that, no matter how many times the leaders convene in 2026, the United States and China are headed for more conflict, rather than a turn toward cooperation.  

China “embraced” the G2 concept early in the Obama administration as a potential means to “make major global decisions without other U.S. partners present.” Later, China promoted a “New Type of Great Power Relations,” a similar concept which emphasized curtailing U.S. influence over the Chinese Communist Party’s so-called core interests.

Then and now, China’s own behavior ruled out such an arrangement. Instead, China’s actions continue pushing the world........

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