Brent Scowcroft Center Resident Senior Fellow Robert Manning writes for YaleGlobal on the challenges the United States and China face in overcoming their trust deficit:
Xi Jinping’s state visit to the United States took place amid great uncertainty and heightened tensions in US policy toward China.
The relationship between the world’s two largest economies and two biggest military powers, arguably the world’s most important, could be at a tipping point. Xi’s visit marked a major juncture in the relationship. Despite positive speeches and glad news of White House fact sheets, there are few signs that Xi is altering his nationalist economic policies biased toward creating “national champions” and using opaque, discriminatory legal and regulatory policies that complicate life for US investors. Nor are there indications that Beijing is rethinking its assertive foreign policies challenging the US posture in East Asia.