The Busan Bargain: Trump and Xi are quietly redrawing the Ukraine endgame

The handshake in Busan last month between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping looked, at first glance, like just another round of tariff haggling. They resulted in lower U.S. duties on Chinese goods, a one-year pause on Beijing’s rare-earth squeeze, a vague promise to do something about fentanyl. Business as usual, the headlines said. But if you listen to what the two men actually said, and watch what they have already started to do, a different picture emerges.

The real deal struck in South Korea was not about soybeans or semiconductors. It was about Ukraine. And the price tag was nothing less than a quiet American retreat from the old dream of dominating the Western Pacific.

For more than a decade, Washington’s China policy rested on a single verb: contain. President Obama’s pivot to Asia moved 60 percent of U.S. naval and air assets into the Pacific Command. The unspoken mission was to keep the People’s Liberation Army bottled up behind the first island chain. Every administration since has repeated the same line: America must dominate the region to protect freedom of navigation, Taiwan, and the rules-based order. And the operative word is “dominate,” not “balance.”

Trump has just scrapped that script. When reporters asked if Taiwan came up in Busan, he said no. When they asked about China’s purchases of Russian oil, he waved the question away. A day later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth met his Chinese counterpart in Kuala Lumpur and declared that Washington now seeks only a “balance of power” in the Pacific. Balance, not domination. In plain English, that is a U-turn.

Why would Trump give up the old hawkish posture? Because he wants something bigger: an exit ramp from the war in Ukraine. He has tried the direct route with Russian President Vladimir Putin and come away empty. In Alaska this summer, Putin refused even to discuss a ceasefire. Trump admitted as much in public. So he has turned to the one capital that still has real leverage over Moscow: Beijing.

China is Russia’s economic lifeline. Bilateral trade hit $244 billion last year, most of it Chinese purchases of discounted Siberian oil and gas. Moscow’s war machine runs on Chinese machine tools, microchips and bank transfers. Xi cannot force Putin to fold, but he can make life uncomfortable. A quiet word that future dual-use exports will be scrutinized, a hint that energy deals might be renegotiated, a slowdown in yuan liquidity — any of these would sting. Trump knows it. Xi knows he knows it.

The Busan bargain is therefore straightforward. The U.S. dials back the military pressure in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. Regular military-to-military talks resume at every level, from theater commanders down to ship captains. Crisis hotlines stay open. Incidents at sea are managed, not escalated. In return, China leans on Russia to accept a frozen conflict in Ukraine: no formal peace treaty, perhaps, but a durable ceasefire along the current front line, with monitors on the ground and reconstruction money tied to neutrality guarantees.

For Trump, the payoff is enormous. He ends a war he did not start and claims the title of peacemaker. He preserves NATO — weakened, yes, but intact — while forcing Europe to spend more on American weapons. And he opens the door to energy deals with a post-war Russia that will need markets and capital.

Soybeans and rare earths are nice, but they are the cover story. The real prize is a Europe that is no longer bleeding a trillion dollars a year into a black hole on the Donbas.

Xi gains even more. With the Pacific quiet, China can pour money into its 15th Five-Year Plan: green steel, sixth-generation wireless, ultra-high-voltage grids, the industries that will define the next decade. Security competition costs treasure and focus. Trump has just handed Beijing a multi-year holiday from both. The People’s Liberation Army can modernize without constant American shadowing. The Belt and Road Initiative can expand into a distracted Europe rebuilding Ukraine.

None of this is guaranteed. Putin has spent three years proving that time is his ally. He may calculate that a few more months of attrition will collapse Ukrainian morale and fracture Western unity. European leaders — especially in Paris, Berlin and London — still dream of bleeding Russia the way the Soviets were bled in Afghanistan.

Yet the incentives line up. Trump wants a legacy before the midterms of 2026. Xi wants a stable periphery while he crushes domestic debt and tech bottlenecks. Putin wants sanctions relief and a face-saving pause. A frozen conflict gives each man something he can sell at home. Ukraine gets to live. NATO survives. The Pacific stays calm.

The old G2, floated informally by Zbigniew Brzezinski in 2009, was an American fantasy. It posited that China would police the world inside institutions built and run by Washington. Beijing listened, smiled and ignored it.

Trump’s G2 is different. It is a transactional understanding between two leaders who believe their countries are too big to be managed by anyone else. They will talk regularly — phone calls, letters, summits every year. They will keep the militaries on a leash. And they will try to solve problems that multilateral forums have failed to touch.

If the Ukraine deal holds, the implications are wide-reaching. India and Pakistan, mentioned in passing in Busan, will watch to see whether great-power jawboning can freeze their own disputes. The Middle East, exhausted by proxy wars, may find that American and Chinese envoys can impose truces where the United Nations cannot. Africa, courted by both powers, will measure the new global governance not by speeches in Davos but by who actually delivers electricity and railways.

For now, the proof will come in small steps. Watch for a drop in People’s Liberation Army Navy sorties near Taiwan. Watch for Chinese customs data showing tighter scrutiny of exports to Russia. Watch for a joint U.S.-China statement after the next phone call between the two presidents, something bland about “supporting de-escalation in Europe.” Those will be the signals that the bargain is real.

History rarely announces its turning points with trumpets. Sometimes they arrive in the form of a handshake in a hotel ballroom in Busan, followed by two defense ministers using the word “balance” instead of “dominate.” If Trump and Xi can pull this off, they will have done something no multilateral body has managed in three years: give Ukraine a livable future and the world a breather from great-power rivalry. That is worth more than any tariff cut.

 

* Imran Khalid is a physician and has a master’s degree in international relations.

 

Source: https://thehill.com/opinion/international/5600604-pacific-balance-power-shift/