This was a rare spectacle in the US. On September 23, President Donald Trump went to the Joint Base Andrews, a highly important military base in Maryland, to receive his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.
After 1962, this was the first time when an American President personally welcomed a foreign leader at an air force base, instead of welcoming him at the White House, indicating how much importance America under the Trump administration gives to Xi Jinping. For the Chinese President, this was the second visit to the US since 2015.
But then it should not be forgotten that both the US and China treat each other as rivals and have lost no opportunity to box each other out of the ring. They compete with each other in several areas including military strength, security, strategy, space and technology.
Rivalries between US and China
On the technological front, especially in the area of computing power, AI models and chips, rivalry between the two countries is very intense. Experts maintain that leading US AI models are roughly six months ahead of their Chinese counterparts. For example, American companies like Anthropic, xAI, Google and OpenAI are facing tough competition from China’s Alibaba and DeepSeek.
On September 22, a day before the Chinese President Jinping was to land in the US, Alibaba Group announced developing China’s most powerful artificial intelligence chip – three times more powerful than its predecessor, Zhenwu M890.
Speaking to the media, Alibaba Group’s CEO Eddie Wu Yongming identified, “AI models, AI chips and the AI cloud” as the three cornerstones of the machine intelligence era. By 2032, Alibaba Cloud global data centre capacity will go up to 20 gigawatts, claimed Yongming.
Trump’s personal reception of President Xi at Joint Base Andrews marks the first air force base welcome for a world leader since 1962, signalling China’s paramount importance to US foreign policy
All of this is unfolding in the AI field despite US’s restrictions on China’s access to advanced chips. There is a growing awareness among Chinese youth of the need of making their country a leading workplace for top-tier AI talent hubs.
China already has a formidable domestic AI industry, backed by DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, where talent is encouraged through monetary compensation, with engineers and developers earning salaries that are pretty much comparable to those offered in Silicon Valley.
Clearly, China has no intention of backing down from breathing down the US’s neck on the AI front. But that does not mean Beijing is on the way to closing the technological gap with Washington. A yawning gap persists on industrial policy, other areas of technology, security and the shape of the international order.
Trump’s compulsions
However, if Trump appears keen to woo China, then it is because he wants rare earth minerals, win the US midterm election which is scheduled for November this year, contain India’s rise and get out of the Middle East crisis.
Trump’s strategy aims to keep China within a close ‘G2’ bilateral orbit to undermine emerging non-Western blocs like BRICS and prevent an alternative geopolitical order
In fact, the US President wants to keep China in the US’s tighter embrace, using ‘G2’ as glue, while shaping his country’s relations with Beijing, before the latter along with other international players cut into America’s influence, a glimpse to which was pervasive at the India-held BRICS summit, where both symbolism and substance revealed the counters of shifting balance of global power.
Chinese President Xi Jinping visited India for the first time in seven years, marking a notable diplomatic shift in India and China’s frayed relationship. However, what added momentum to the BRICS leadership summit was Prime Minister Modi’s gesture of holding hands with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
This symbolised engagement among major non-US powers in the Eurasian region. At the time when Russia and China are keen on building a parallel structure to chip away Western influence altogether, PM Modi’s gesture of holding hands with Xi and Putin would have sent a clear message to the US: It could no longer remain the dominant power to shape the global strategic landscape.
But for Trump, the message may have been less about accepting the emergence of an alternative non-American order than about finding a way to prevent it. This he wants to do by simply keeping China in the US’s close orbit, while discarding interests of Washington’s Asian partners like India. To this regard, Trump is weighing options to impose 100% tariffs on India after American lawmakers approved Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act on the top 5 purchasers of Russian energy.
To keep China close, Washington is leveraging aggressive trade moves – such as threatening 100% tariffs on India over Russian oil purchases – risking long-term trust with New Delh
In contrast, following the Chinese President’s visit, both Washington and Beijing agreed to tariff reductions for $30 billion worth of goods in non-sensitive sectors, extend by two months a trade truce that was due to expire on November 10 and set up a communication channel for AI incidents.
To strengthen personal rapport between them, both Presidents also agreed to meet again at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen in China in November and the G20 summit in Miami in the US in December.
Trump’s Pakistan love
The US, under Trump’s presidency, appears all set to check India’s rise by using all options available at its disposal. At the geopolitical level, while its strategy to win China to its side is also aimed at curtailing India’s influence in the Indo-Pacific region, there is an uncanny design to keep South Asia unstable by backing Pakistan’s anti-India stances even as they have only nuisance values.
Consistent with what appears to be his increasingly discriminatory disposition towards India, Trump on September 25 shared on Truth Social a video clip of Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s speech at the United Nations, in which Sharif thanked the American president for his timely intervention in bringing Operation Sindoor to an end.i
By publicly amplifying Pakistani narratives on military operations and mediating regional rivalries, the US is actively counterbalancing India’s strategic rise in the Indo-Pacific
Although Trump offered no comment, his decision to endorse the video by uploading it on his social media handle, provides an indication of the narrative he chose to support on the India-Pakistan conflict. In the video, Sharif describes Operation Sindoor, launched in May 2025 in response to the Pahalgam terrorist attack, as an act of external aggression, while crediting Pakistan’s Army Chief, Asim Munir, for what he portrays as courageous leadership during the confrontation.
Clearly, this shows Trump’s willingness to amplify a Pakistani narrative that is unfavourable to India. Moreover, the US President has been at the forefront to project himself as a saviour of the deadly conflict between India and Pakistan in May last year. In his speech at the UN, Trump claimed that his administration successfully resolved eight major global conflicts, including India-Pakistan military confrontation. He described Pakistan as a “great country” and called its Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif a “terrific man”.
Overall, in his speech at the UN, the US President targeted India for his continued purchase of Russian crude oil, but was silent on Europe which continues to have energy engagement with Russia, though, in Q2 2026, Russian oil accounted for only about1% of EU petroleum-oil imports, while some Russian energy still enters Europe indirectly.
These developments suggest that while the US, under Trump, is seeking accommodation with China and maintaining close ties with Pakistan, it is trying every bid to play with Indian interests. However, by doing so, Washington risks creating a strategic environment in which India is pushed to reassess the reliability and long-term direction of its relationship with the US.
The writer is a senior journalist with wide experience in covering international affairs. The views expressed are of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of Raksha Anirveda
