Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Trump pose for photographers as they arrive to view documents at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., on Friday, September 25, 2026, as a part of Xi’s state visit.By Brahma Chellaney, The HillChina has long sought peer validation from the only country whose recognition would carry decisive strategic weight — the U.S.President Trump has now handed Beijing that prize. By repeatedly framing his summits with Chinese President Xi Jinping as a U.S.-China “G2” or “group of two,” Trump is granting China recognition as America’s principal strategic peer.In fact, by hosting Xi last week for a state visit while world leaders gathered at the United Nations, Trump effectively portrayed the U.S.-China relationship as the axis of a bipolar world — a depiction that risks alienatingU.S. allies and partners, such as Japan, India, Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea and NATO members.The symbolism surrounding the latest Trump-Xi summit was hard to miss. In an unprecedented departure from American diplomatic practice, Trump personally traveled to Joint Base Andrews, Md., to greet the arriving Xi with a lavish ceremony, which included a red carpet lined by U.S. service members and a military flyover featuring two B-1 bombers. The following morning, a 479-member military honor guard greeted the Chinese leader during a White House arrival ceremony, capped by a flyover of a B-2 Spirit bomber escorted by four F-22 Raptors. Besides a state dinner, the visit also included a Trump-escorted tour of the National Archives.These ceremonial flourishes communicated a powerful message: The leaders of the world’s two preeminent powers were meeting as equals.More revealing than the pomp and pageantry of the summits with Xi has been Trump’s own language. He has repeatedly described his meetings with Xi as the G2. Before last October’s summit in Busan, South Korea, he announced on Truth Social, “THE G2 WILL BE CONVENING SHORTLY!” Afterward, he celebrated “My G2 meeting with President Xi.” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth also echoed the summit encounter as a “historic ‘G2 meeting.’”Trump revived the G2 terminology during his Beijing visit in May, as if to highlight the formal end of the unipolar age. While previous American presidents carefully avoided legitimizing China’s claim to peer status, Trump’s use of the G2 concept during press encounters projected that the U.S. was now treating China as its true peer.Trump has also been displaying a strikingly deferential posture toward America’s principal geopolitical rival. In the run-up to Xi’s Washington visit, Trump dismissed or excused reports of China’s actions against the U.S., such as providing Iran satellite imagery to target American assets, while portraying the Chinese leader as a personal friend, claiming he had “never gotten along better” with Xi.Beijing has long rejected American hegemony while simultaneously seeking equal treatment from Washington. Beijing’s preferred phrase has been a “new model of major power relations” — a formula that seeks mutual respect for each side’s core interests, including China’s communist system and its territorial claims, including on Taiwan and the South China Sea. The objective was not to establish a formal G2 institution but to normalize the idea that no major global issue could be decided without China. Trump’s summit diplomacy has brought Beijing much closer to realizing that objective.The latest summit may have achieved little in concrete terms, with no agreement on any of the contentious bilateral issues and the truce in the trade war extended only by two months. But for Xi, the visit was a propaganda coup, conveying to the Chinese people and the wider world that, under his leadership, China has become America’s equal. The optics indeed reinforced Beijing’s narrative of Xi-led national rejuvenation. Trump’s summit diplomacy has also helped Beijing advance one of the key objectives of its broader strategic messaging: demonstrating to domestic and international audiences that the U.S. can no longer dictate terms unilaterally.Trump’s courtship of Xi represents a remarkable evolution from Trump’s first term, when tariffs, sanctions and technological restrictions were presented as instruments for reshaping China’s behavior. Today, Washington’s objective is no longer to transform China but to manage strategic rivalry through direct leader-to-leader bargaining, even if it means accepting the world’s largest autocracy as a co-equal on the global stage.China is still not America’s equal in terms of economic, diplomatic or military power. But peer competition has never required matching strengths. The defining characteristic is the capacity to resist coercion and independently shape international outcomes. When Beijing last year responded to American tariffs by restricting rare-earth exports, it not only showed that economic interdependence cuts both ways but also demonstrated its capacity to impose retaliatory costs on the U.S.The problem is not engaging a powerful rival to help avert costly miscalculations, but the public elevation of China into a privileged bilateral condominium. The real losers are likely to be America’s own allies and partners, whose interests could be subordinated to Washington-Beijing bargains, forcing them to hedge against U.S. unreliability.The prospect of a U.S.-China duopoly, in which Washington and Beijing negotiate the rules of global governance while everyone else adjusts to the outcome, is a strategic nightmare for U.S. friends in Asia in particular. They want a stable balance of power, not a Sino-centric Asia.History offers ample reason for their anxiety. Major powers have repeatedly sought stability through exclusive understandings while middle powers and smaller states absorbed the consequences.The White House’s accommodative approach will likely gain greater salience as Trump has indicated that he will meet Xi again in November and December — first at the APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Shenzhen, China, and then at the G20 summit in Miami.China’s greatest diplomatic victory in recent years has been won not on the battlefield or through economic coercion, but in Washington, where Trump has validated Beijing’s claim to peer status. For Xi, no concession could have delivered a more valuable prize than America itself recognizing China as a co-leader of the international system.Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.“