REPORTAGE: The U.S.-China "Board of Trade," an Institutional Rapprochement Worrying the West

Introduction: When Washington and Beijing Invent a New Trade Architecture

A Mechanism Born in the Backrooms of Major Capitals

It was in Paris, at the OECD headquarters, on March 16, 2026, that the phrase was first uttered in public. Jamieson Greer, U.S. Trade Representative, had just spent a day and a half in a conclave with his Chinese counterparts, paving the way for a summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing. He let it slip, almost as if the idea had just occurred to him: "We discussed the possibility of a mechanism between the United States and China, something we might call a 'US-China Board of Trade'." Three words that would resonate through every chancery in the West.

Since then, this mechanism has moved from a floating idea to a formally established bilateral institution—announced as the centerpiece of the Trump-Xi summit in May 2026 in Beijing. In just a few weeks, a concept sketched out before Parisian journalists has become one of the most significant—and controversial—instruments of the trade relationship between the world's two largest economies. What it truly represents for America, for China, and above all for the rest of the West, is what this report intends to dissect.

The Genesis of an Idea That Traveled Fast

Before Paris, there was Geneva in May 2025, then London in June 2025—negotiation cycles that laid the groundwork for a trade ceasefire between the two superpowers. The 2025 tariff war had been brutal: the United States had imposed duties of up to 145% on Chinese imports, and Beijing had retaliated at 125%. Markets had trembled. The Geneva truce lowered tensions, and the October 2025 truce, sealed during a Trump-Xi summit in South Korea, extended the reprieve for a year. But none of these agreements created a permanent management structure. This is precisely the institutional vacuum that the Board of Trade claims to fill.

Li Chenggang, China's Vice Minister of Commerce, had mentioned on March 16 in Paris the idea of establishing a working group examining cooperation mechanisms for bilateral trade and investment. Both parties, each on their own side, were thus converging toward the same architecture. Scott Bessent, U.S. Treasury Secretary, described these exchanges as "constructive" and emphasized the "stability" of the relationship. The machine was in motion.

The Beijing Summit: When Trump Plays Solo

A State Visit That Changes the Diplomatic Landscape

On May 14 and 15, 2026, Donald Trump conducted a state visit to China—a remarkable event in itself that immediately cast the concerns of Western allies into the shadows. For over two hours on the first day, Trump and Xi Jinping discussed a common economic architecture. The White House announced that China had agreed to purchase 200 Boeing aircraft, provide guarantees on engines and spare parts, and commit to buying at least $17 billion a year in American agricultural products from 2026 to 2028. Beijing, through its Ministry of Commerce, confirmed certain elements while leaving others in deliberate vagueness.

Xi Jinping wanted, according to a statement from his Ministry of Foreign Affairs, "to make 2026 a historic and landmark year for Sino-American relations." The announcement of the Board of Trade and the Board of Investment—a parallel platform dedicated to bilateral investment—constituted, according to the White House, "the cornerstone of this historic agreement." These two mechanisms were presented as the backbone of a new era in the bilateral economic relationship. But official enthusiasm masked gaping holes.

What the Summit Did Not Solve

An analysis by the consulting firm Kreab, published on May 22, 2026, dryly summarized the situation: the summit's outcome was "stronger on imagery than on substance". Export controls on semiconductors? Not addressed. Greer himself confirmed it. Blacklists of companies on both sides? Unchanged. Restrictions on outbound investment? Still in place. U.S. arms sales to Taiwan? A subject prudently avoided. The fact that Beijing has, according to the same analysis, "perhaps prioritized its technological autonomy over short-term relief" on semiconductors is perhaps one of the most alarming signals from this summit.

Between June 8 and 13, 2026—less than a month after this summit presented as historic—the U.S. Department of Defense added 188 new Chinese entities to its list of military companies (the so-called 1260H list), including names like Alibaba, Baidu, BYD, COSCO Shipping, China Mobile, or WuXi AppTec. Beijing's reaction was swift: its Ministry of Commerce expressed "strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition," threatening "decisive and firm countermeasures." The honeymoon lasted exactly as long as a press conference.

The Architecture of the Board of Trade: What the Mechanism Really Does

An "Adapter" Between Two Fundamentally Incompatible Economies

The official American wording is enlightening. According to the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) document published on June 2, 2026, in the Federal Register, the Board of Trade will function as an "adapter"—a mechanism designed to "promote reciprocity, sustainability, and balance" in the U.S.-China trade relationship. The USTR acknowledges without detour that the two economies "operate very differently" and have fundamentally distinct objectives and guiding principles. It is a remarkable concession: Washington implicitly admits that China will never be a normal trade partner in the liberal sense, and that a specific tool must therefore be built to manage this asymmetric relationship.

Concretely, the Board of Trade will focus on non-sensitive products—those that do not touch national security, not advanced semiconductors, not strategic high-value critical minerals, not weaponizable artificial intelligence. The U.S. Treasury cited fireworks and low-end consumer goods as examples—products that the United States "never intended to reshore", according to Bessent. The starting threshold? $30 billion of goods on each side—a modest figure compared to the roughly $414 billion in trade in goods between the two countries in 2025, according to the USTR.

Public Consultation and Institutional Dynamics

On June 2, 2026, the USTR officially launched a public consultation period on the Board of Trade. Comments were due by July 10, 2026, with a possibility for rebuttals until July 27. Greer stated on May 26 during a Council on Foreign Relations event: "We are going soon to be putting out a notice in the Federal Register. I have read it, I have reviewed it, I have personally annotated it, and it will set out what we are going to do on the American side." This consultation process represents, according to researcher Ma Xue of China-US Focus, a paradigm shift: moving from a transactional and ad hoc approach to more institutionalized and predictable management.

The Chinese government, through its Ministry of Commerce, interpreted this turn as a shift from a "crisis-type response" to "mechanized management" of the trade relationship. The Chinese Ambassador to the United States, Xie Feng, went even further during a US-China Business Council gala in Washington on June 18, 2026, by proposing to raise the ceiling for duty-free trade under the Board of Trade from $30 billion to $300 billion—a tenfold increase. "Personally, I would argue for doubling the figure to $60 billion, or even raising it to $300 billion," he declared. An ambition Washington has not yet endorsed.

The G7 Fracture: Trump Alone Against His Allies

Évian-les-Bains, June 2026: The Gap Exposed in Broad Daylight

The G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, in June 2026, highlighted what diplomats had been avoiding saying too loudly: Trump is going the distance with China without waiting for his allies. Politico's weekly trade newsletter, published on June 15, 2026, cited a senior U.S. administration official who summarized Washington's position bluntly: "The United States is not waiting for the world to hold hands to find a coordinated approach to China. We are acting now through various measures." He added that the U.S. was "happy to cooperate with other countries on how to solve these massive imbalances," but the initiative and tempo remained American.

Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, was attempting to rally G7 partners around a common approach to the surge of subsidized Chinese products disrupting global markets. He had even organized a conference with G7 officials and Chinese representatives to discuss the problem. But the White House had not put China on its list of priorities for the summit. While Macron was trying to forge a coalition, Washington was negotiating one-on-one with Beijing—and planning a new bilateral Trump-Xi summit in Washington for September 2026. The fracture is structural, not circumstantial.

Transatlantic Divergence as a Strategic Gift for Beijing

The Atlantic Council, in its November 2025 report on U.S.-EU coordination, delivered a harsh assessment: the United States and the European Union face "strikingly similar" challenges regarding Chinese industrial overcapacity and dumping, but their trade approaches diverge to such an extent that no coordination was possible under the Trump administration. And the logical conclusion of this analysis was worrying: China "exploits the loopholes created by this U.S.-European inconsistency to its advantage."

What Washington is doing with the Board of Trade is unilaterally defining the terms of engagement with Beijing without consulting its allies. The EU continues to impose countervailing duties on Chinese electric vehicles. The UK is negotiating its own regime. Japan and South Korea are torn between economic dependence on China and their American security anchor. Meanwhile, Washington is building permanent bilateral infrastructure with Beijing—infrastructure that could, over time, make coordinated Western action against China's abusive trade practices more difficult. The fragmentation of the Western front is a strategic dividend for Xi Jinping—and he seems determined to cash it in.

Strategic Sectors: What Won't Be Touched—and Why It's Concerning

The Red Line of Critical Technologies

The stated logic of the Board of Trade rests on a clear distinction: on one side, non-sensitive products, candidates for tariff reductions; on the other, strategic sectors, preserved from trade negotiations. The list of untouchables is significant: advanced semiconductors, high-value critical minerals, defense-related components, cutting-edge AI hardware. The China-US Focus analysis specifies that these categories remain subject to existing tariff barriers and export controls, and that investments in these sectors remain subject to rigorous screening.

But reality on the ground is more complex than this neat distinction suggests. The fact that Greer explicitly confirmed that export controls on semiconductors were not discussed during the Beijing summit is a double-edged sword: on one hand, it means no concessions were made in this sensitive area. On the other, the Kreab analysis suggests that Beijing may be advancing its strategy of rising technological autonomy at a pace that makes these export controls less and less decisive. Every month that passes without China yielding on semiconductors is another month for its domestic ecosystem to catch up.

Critical Minerals: Vague Promises and Insufficient Execution

The critical minerals issue is emblematic of the ambiguities plaguing this agreement. According to the Beijing summit, China had promised to "address U.S. concerns" regarding shortages of rare earths and critical minerals, including yttrium, scandium, neodymium, and indium, as well as restrictions on associated production and processing equipment. Bessent's response to this promise, on May 20, 2026, according to China Briefing, was diplomatically scathing: "satisfactory, but not excellent."

This caution is well-founded. Chinese restrictions on rare earths—from gallium to germanium, antimony to graphite—have for several years constituted an economic weapon in their own right. The November 2025 agreement saw China grant general licenses for the export of these materials to American end-users, but implementation has remained partial. The fact that this file remains "not fully resolved" despite months of negotiation should alert anyone tempted to believe the Board of Trade creates a lasting relationship of trust. It creates management channels—not trust.

The Question of "Managed" Trade: An Ideological Break

"Managed Trade" as an Admission of Free-Trade Failure

The official USTR document, in the June 2026 Federal Register, uses a striking phrase: "managed trade". "This new phase, appropriately, requires a new approach: managed trade", it says. This is a major ideological break for an American institution that has, for decades, preached the virtues of free trade. Admitting that the trade relationship with China requires bilateral management by governments rather than market regulation is to recognize that the hope of "normalizing" China through trade integration—the great illusion of the 1990s-2010s—is definitively buried.

The organization Global Trade Alert, in an analysis published on May 15, 2026, did not mince words: the Board of Trade is likely "a vehicle for a progressive and politically managed dismantling of the tariff hikes imposed on Chinese goods in 2025." The mechanics are clear: create a permanent institution, launch a public consultation process, identify "non-sensitive" products eligible for tariff reductions, and progressively normalize trade flows that the tariff war had disrupted. It's pragmatism—but it's also potentially the beginning of a way back to the dependence that America claimed it wanted to reduce.

Winners and Losers of the Model

The USTR's public consultation revealed an internal fracture in the American coalition: according to the China-US Focus analysis, agricultural groups, large multinationals, and energy companies are generally in favor of expanding tariff reductions—on agricultural products, energy sources, and consumer goods. Conversely, lower-end domestic manufacturing segments want to maintain strict constraints. Trump promised to defend American workers—but the Board of Trade risks favoring first the sectors with the best lobbyists in Washington.

On the Chinese side, the analysis is symmetrical. China has an imperative of stabilizing its foreign trade and resilience of its supply chains. It has every interest in institutionalizing predictable trade relations with the United States, especially at a time when its economy remains weakened by industrial overcapacity, weak domestic consumption, and a record trade surplus of $1.2 trillion in 2025—a figure that concentrates tensions with the rest of the world. The ultimate irony: it is precisely because China is in a position of relative economic strength that it can afford to play the game of institutional appeasement.

The Mirror Effect on European Allies

Brussels Watched from Afar, Excluded from the Table

For the European Union, the U.S.-China Board of Trade represents a nightmare scenario: Washington defines the terms of its trade engagement with Beijing unilaterally, without coordination with its allies, effectively creating a two-tier bilateral trade architecture. On one side, the U.S. and China directly manage trade flows worth tens of billions of dollars. On the other, the EU continues its own battle, alone, with countervailing duties on Chinese electric vehicles and investigations into solar panel subsidies.

The November 2025 Atlantic Council report strongly recommended re-establishing a Transatlantic Trade and Technology Council, creating a transatlantic trade defense forum, and coordinating approaches on semiconductors, AI, and critical minerals. These recommendations have remained dead letters under the Trump administration. Worse: by building a bilateral mechanism with Beijing, Washington sends a clear signal—it doesn't need European coordination. Brussels finds itself both excluded from U.S.-China negotiations and unable to discipline its own members in the face of Beijing, whose ability to divide the EU is well-documented.

The Risk of Asymmetric Competition

If the Board of Trade lowers duties on certain Chinese products for American importers, European companies selling those same products to the U.S. could find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Conversely, if Chinese producers obtain preferential tariff access to the American market on certain categories, European exporters to China could fall victim to an implicit preference given to Americans in Chinese negotiations. The logic of bilateral reciprocity is by definition exclusive: what is negotiated between Washington and Beijing does not apply to third parties.

Japan, South Korea, and Australia are in a similar situation, with the added burden of structural economic dependence on China that makes any firm posture extremely costly politically. The West is not a homogeneous block against Beijing—and the U.S.-China Board of Trade will further fragment what remains of collective coherence. Allied countries must either negotiate their own terms with Beijing or accept the externalities of a deal they did not negotiate. It is a delicate position, and Beijing is perfectly aware of it.

Beijing's Institutional Legitimation: The Systemic Risk

What a Board of Trade Means for Chinese Credibility

Beyond the trade figures, what the Board of Trade does for China is offer something precious: top-tier institutional legitimation. When the United States creates a permanent trade management mechanism with a country, they implicitly recognize that country as an indispensable systemic interlocutor—not as a threat to be contained, but as a partner with whom one must coexist in a structured way. For Beijing, which has spent years seeking this recognition on the world stage, the Board of Trade is a diplomatic trophy.

The Global Trade Alert's analysis of the situation was particularly lucid: "the scale is modest, the institutional necessity is vague, and the most plausible reading is that this Board is a vehicle for a progressive and politically managed dismantling of the tariff hikes imposed on Chinese goods." If this is the case, the Board of Trade is not a balance—it is the beginning of a process of trade normalization with a regime whose economic model remains fundamentally incompatible with free market principles. And this normalization has geopolitical costs that balance sheets don't capture.

China as a Systemic Threat—A Reality the Mechanism Minimizes

The China of 2026 is not just a commercial competitor. It is a power that actively supports Russia in its war of aggression against Ukraine—Moscow and Beijing having reaffirmed during their May 2026 summit their united front against unilateral sanctions and interference in internal state affairs. It is a power that maintains security partnerships with Iran and North Korea, continues to militarily threaten Taiwan, and whose accelerated military modernization program constitutes the most structural security challenge for the West on the 2030-2040 horizon.

Yet the Board of Trade treats China exclusively through a commercial lens, as if this dimension could be isolated from the rest. But the 188 Chinese companies added to the military list in June 2026—including Alibaba, Baidu, and BYD—remind us that the line between commercial and military is, in China, deliberately blurred. The concept of military-civil fusion is inscribed in Beijing's official doctrine: every Chinese economic entity can be mobilized for defense or intelligence objectives. Establishing a permanent trade mechanism with these entities without accounting for this reality is building on sand.

Trump, a Necessary Evil: The Paradox of the Negotiator-in-Chief

Firmness as a Method, the Deal as the Objective

One must be honest about what Trump has accomplished. Where his predecessors multiplied speeches on the need to force China to play by the rules, Trump used tariff power as real leverage. The 2025 trade war—as brutal and destabilizing as it was for markets—forced Beijing to the negotiating table much more concretely than decades of WTO rounds. The fact that China agreed to create a permanent trade management mechanism is, to some extent, the result of this pressure.

Greer said it explicitly in the Federal Register document: "This new phase, appropriately, requires a new approach: managed trade." The underlying idea is that the tariff war fulfilled its role by forcing China to recognize the need for a bilateral framework. Now, we move to a more institutionalized phase of management. There is a logic in this sequence. It is not devoid of tactical intelligence. But the strategy remains deeply transactional—and the risk is that once immediate advantages are cashed in, structural pressure on China evaporates along with the mechanism meant to maintain it.

The Risk of the Permanent Deal in an Asymmetric Relationship

Trump loves deals. The problem with China is that Beijing plays a much longer game. The trade truce expires in November 2026. The Washington Trump-Xi summit is scheduled for September 2026. Negotiations on extending the truce are underway. Meanwhile, the 188 companies on the military list testify that technological and security confrontation continues in the background. The Board of Trade is perhaps what's needed to stabilize the relationship in the short term—but stabilizing is not resolving.

Analysts at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy (NCAFP), in their May 2026 document, summarized this paradox: the most likely result of these negotiations would be "a set of carefully choreographed but limited agreements: an extension of the trade truce, a modest easing of tensions on export controls, the resumption of rare earth deliveries, and high-profile Chinese purchases of U.S. products"—all accompanied by "familiar rhetoric on 'responsible competition'." This isn't a strategic victory. It's a trade armistice.

The Rhetoric of "Balanced Partnership" Faced with Realities on the Ground

30 Billion, 414 Billion: The Figures of Disalignment

Let's put the numbers in perspective. The Board of Trade, in its initial configuration, covers about $30 billion of goods on each side. Total trade in goods between the U.S. and China amounted to roughly $414 billion in 2025, according to the USTR. In other words, the mechanism covers barely 7% of total bilateral trade. Chinese Ambassador Xie Feng, meanwhile, would like to see this figure reach $300 billion—or 72% of bilateral trade. This is a considerable gap, revealing Chinese expectations and American caution.

Beyond the numbers, China's trade surplus reached a record level of $1.2 trillion in 2025—a phenomenon fueled by industrial overcapacity, weak domestic consumption, and the dumping of subsidized products on global markets. This is precisely what Macron and his European partners were trying to address in Évian. Yet the Board of Trade does not touch this issue: it manages specific bilateral flows on non-sensitive products without attacking the structural distortions represented by Chinese state subsidies in steel, solar panels, electric vehicles, or chemicals.

The Question of Real Reciprocity

The principle of reciprocity is at the heart of the American discourse on the Board of Trade—the USTR explicitly speaks of "reciprocity, sustainability, and balance". But reciprocity in a relationship between a market economy and a command economy is a deeply asymmetric notion. When China reduces its tariffs on American exports, it does so in a context where the state controls who can import what, where state-owned enterprises enjoy systemic advantages, and where the purchasing decisions of large companies respond to political logic as much as commercial logic. It's not reciprocity—it's a simulation of reciprocity in a fundamentally non-reciprocal institutional framework.

The USTR's Federal Register document implicitly acknowledges this: "As long as China maintains its non-market policies and practices and refuses..."—the sentence cuts off in the available excerpt, but the meaning is clear. Washington recognizes that China is not an ordinary trade partner, and that tariffs and other tools will have to continue to be used to manage the relationship. The Board of Trade is thus not a normalization—it is an institutionalized management of abnormality. A crucial distinction that supporters of the agreement tend to minimize.

Signals Sent to Moscow, Tehran, and Pyongyang

A U.S.-China Rapprochement Seen from the Authoritarian Axis

One must measure the geopolitical ripple effect of this institutional rapprochement. For Vladimir Putin, whose war regime depends on Chinese economic and political support, seeing Beijing seal a large-scale trade agreement with Washington sends an ambiguous signal. On one hand, it proves that China is capable of simultaneously navigating its partnerships with Moscow and its economic interests with the West—a demonstration of Beijing's strategic flexibility. On the other, it means Washington is ready to maintain a structured economic relationship with Beijing despite China's ongoing support for Russia.

For Tehran and Pyongyang, the message is similar: if China can both support pariah regimes and institutionalize its trade relations with the United States, then the U.S. policy of pressure on Beijing's allies has clear limits. The Russia-China-Iran-North Korea axis—often described as an "axis of refusal" of the Western order—is watching closely to see whether Washington isolates Beijing or not. A Board of Trade sends a signal of accommodation. And accommodation, in this context, is encouragement for regimes that defy the international order.

Ukraine and the Consequences for Western Support

The war in Ukraine remains the ultimate test of the strength of the Western order. During the G7 summit in Évian, support for Ukraine was on the agenda. But the West's ability to maintain coherent pressure on Russia depends partly on its ability to present a united front on China—which provides Moscow with the economic base necessary to continue its war effort. If Washington normalizes its economic relationship with Beijing without demanding trade-offs on the Russian file, it deprives its allies of an essential lever to convince China to reduce its support for Moscow. The war in Ukraine and the Board of Trade are not separate files—they are intrinsically linked in Western grand strategy.

Yet, to date, no public evidence suggests that the Board of Trade has been conditioned on a reduction of Chinese support for Russia. U.S.-China trade negotiations seem to have been deliberately isolated from geopolitical files—an artificial separation that serves Beijing's interests much more than those of Kyiv or the Atlantic Alliance. Ukraine resists, Zelensky holds on, the Europeans supply. But if the United States builds a permanent trade architecture with China without demanding a quid pro quo on Ukraine, the deterrent effect on Beijing progressively disappears.

The November 2026 Deadline: What Is at Stake in the Coming Months

The Trade Truce and the Countdown

The clock is ticking. The U.S.-China trade truce, inherited from the October 2025 agreement, expires in November 2026. Negotiations on its extension are underway, but no agreement has been formalized at this stage. The Washington Trump-Xi summit planned for September 2026 will likely be the occasion to seal this extension—or let the relationship fall back into a zone of turbulence. In this context, the Board of Trade plays the role of a stabilizer: by creating permanent discussion channels, it makes a brutal break less likely. This is its primary added value—and its primary flaw as seen from the outside.

Because stabilizing is not resolving. Unresolved files—truce extension, semiconductors, rare earths, company blacklists, export controls, investments—will continue to pile up. The USTR's decision on June 2, 2026, to propose a 12.5% tariff on Chinese imports as part of an investigation into forced labor—above the 10% rate applicable to other countries—illustrates that American tariff pressure on China has not been lifted; it has simply been reorganized. The Board of Trade coexists with a battery of other pressure instruments. The balance is fragile.

The July 2026 Public Consultation: A Decisive Moment

The date July 10, 2026, marks the close of the USTR's public consultation on the Board of Trade. What companies, unions, farmers' associations, and lobby groups submit in the coming weeks will draw the contours of what the mechanism will actually be. According to the China-US Focus analysis, this consultation could allow for anchoring negotiations in American industrial realities and "reducing the maneuvering room for extremist politicians to push for generalized tariff hikes". This is an optimistic reading—one of institutional wisdom acting against political impulses.

The pessimistic reading is that this consultation process creates a framework in which the best-organized lobbies—agribusiness, large retail, multinationals present in China—will have a structural advantage over workers in sectors exposed to Chinese competition. The Board of Trade risks becoming, like so many other trade mechanisms before it, an instrument captured by the most powerful interests. Which would be, with a different government tomorrow, politically unsustainable—and therefore fragile in the long term.

What the West Must Demand: Clear Safeguards

Conditions for a Mechanism Acceptable to Democracies

Let's be clear: a trade management mechanism between the United States and China is not in itself a catastrophe. If the terms are well-defined, if strategic sectors remain out of reach, and if the mechanism does not weaken the West's ability to exert collective pressure on Beijing, it can have its place in the diplomatic landscape. But these conditions are not automatically met—they must be demanded, maintained, and verified. The West must therefore formulate its demands with a precision that the enthusiastic declarations on both sides of the Pacific currently mask.

First and foremost, the Board of Trade must remain strictly limited to non-sensitive products, with precise definitions and independent verification mechanisms. Any slide toward critical technologies, strategic minerals, or dual-use goods must trigger automatic alert mechanisms. Second, the mechanism must not be used as a substitute for multilateral coordination: Washington must continue to work with its allies on core issues—export controls, investment, Chinese overcapacity. Third, the Board of Trade must be conditioned on measurable progress on sensitive geopolitical files—notably the reduction of Chinese support for Russia.

The Need for Permanent Institutional Vigilance

The history of dialogue mechanisms with China teaches a constant lesson: what Beijing signs on paper is not always what Beijing applies in practice. Scott Bessent's approach of judging Chinese execution on rare earths as "satisfactory but not excellent" is the latest illustration. Robust verification mechanisms, automatic suspension clauses, and real consequences for non-compliance will therefore be required. Without these safeguards, the Board of Trade risks becoming what so many agreements with China have become: political announcements dressed up as structural advances, whose effective execution remains at Beijing's discretion.

European, Japanese, and Australian allies have a role to play here. They must push Washington to maintain coherence between bilateral trade commitments and the West's collective strategic goals. The Sino-American relationship is too important for the rest of the free world to be managed exclusively as a bilateral file. What is decided in Washington and Beijing in the coming months will reshape the global trade architecture for decades to come. America's allies cannot afford to watch this process as passive spectators.

Conclusion: A Mechanism to Watch, a Threat to Never Underestimate

The Precarious Balance Between Pragmatism and Vigilance

The US-China Board of Trade is, in its official design, an instrument of economic pragmatism. It recognizes that the world's two largest economies need a permanent institutional framework to manage their exchanges in a context of systemic rivalry. It creates communication channels, reduces unpredictability, and offers concrete outlets for American agricultural and industrial sectors. For all that, it deserves to exist—under strict conditions.

But the risk of drift is real. A mechanism designed to manage trade in fireworks can, through institutional creep, expand into more sensitive sectors. An institution created to stabilize the relationship can, through inertia, become a brake on necessary strategic pressure. And a bilateral architecture built without allies can, in aggregate, weaken the collective coherence of the West against the most structural threat of the 21st century. China remains a systemic threat. This mechanism does not change that fundamental reality.

Maxime Marquette, in the Eye of the Storm

This report ends with more questions than certainties—which is, I believe, the honest intellectual posture when facing such a complex file. What I know with certainty: the West cannot afford to lower its guard. The Board of Trade must be monitored, evaluated, and, if necessary, questioned by the democracies that bear the burden of the global liberal order. Trump is perhaps the necessary evil of our time—but it belongs to all those who believe in this order to ensure that his short-term calculations do not compromise the long-term strategic interests of our open societies. The West deserves better than a deal—it deserves a strategy.

Signed Maxime Marquette, columnist

Sources

Primary Sources

USTR — Public Consultation on the U.S.-China Board of Trade — June 2, 2026

White House — Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Secures Historic Deals with China, Delivering for American Workers, Farmers, and Industry — May 17, 2026

Politico Weekly Trade — Trump and G7 Split on China Strategy — June 15, 2026

Secondary Sources

South China Morning Post — Chinese Envoy Xie Feng Calls for Tenfold Rise in Tariff-Free Trade Under Board of Trade — June 18, 2026

South China Morning Post — China and U.S. Agree to Establish Trade and Investment Councils After Xi-Trump Summit — May 16, 2026

Kreab Beijing — Weekly China Insight: Xi-Trump Summit, Institutional Boards, More Imagery than Substance — May 22, 2026

China Briefing — U.S.-China Relations in the Trump 2.0 Era: Full Timeline — June 17, 2026

Atlantic Council — Recommendations for Coordinating U.S.-EU Policy Toward China — November 2025