The President of the United States and the President of China will sit down in the Oval Office today, Xi Jinping’s first visit to the White House in 11 years. On the table are a trade truce that now runs only to January 10 and a proposed hotline for accidents involving artificial intelligence. Both are modest, and both matter. The Church has a name for the bond that already ties these two countries together whether they like it or not, and she says plainly what that bond asks of them.
The News Story
Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in the United States on Wednesday, September 23, for a three-day state visit, his first to the White House since 2015. President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump met Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, at the foot of his plane at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland shortly before 6 p.m. Eastern time. Presidents usually receive visiting leaders at the White House, and the Associated Press called the planeside greeting rare. The ceremony included a cannon salute, an honor cordon, fighter jets lined up on the tarmac, and a flyover by 2 B-1 bombers. [1]
Hours earlier, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the two governments had agreed to extend their trade truce by 2 months. The arrangement, reached when Trump and Xi met in Busan, South Korea, cut tariffs that had climbed into triple digits during last year’s tit-for-tat escalation, and China agreed to resume exports of rare earth magnets and other critical minerals. The truce was due to expire on November 10 and now runs to January 10. Many observers had expected an extension of 6 months or longer, CNBC reported. [2]
Bessent spoke after a 90-minute meeting with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng at World Bank headquarters in Washington, their second meeting in 4 days. He said Beijing had raised the prospect of a larger deal during 12 hours of talks in New York on Sunday, without describing its scope. “We met today to see if we could do a bigger deal as opposed to just a series of smaller things,” he told Fox News. He said China was meeting its commitment to buy 25 million tons of soybeans but was behind on a pledge to buy $17 billion in other farm goods; U.S. officials said last week that rare earth deliveries were also lagging. Bessent said the summit could bring announcements on lifting tariffs from about $30 billion in non-sensitive goods on each side, on financial services and on agricultural purchases. He also said the two sides had agreed to set up a hotline for reporting AI safety incidents. China’s state news agency Xinhua said only that artificial intelligence was discussed. [3]
The leaders hold their talks on Thursday: an Oval Office meeting, an expanded session with aides and a state dinner, with technology executives including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and SpaceX’s Elon Musk expected. On Friday, the two couples are due to have tea and tour the National Archives. Bessent called this the second of possibly 4 Trump-Xi meetings in 2026, after Trump’s May visit to Beijing and before planned meetings in Shenzhen and Miami. [4]
The visit comes amid disputes over Taiwan, technology and the U.S. war with Iran. The Wall Street Journal, citing U.S. officials, reported that Chinese entities gave Iran high-resolution satellite images of Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan before a July 17 Iranian missile strike there that killed 3 U.S. service members. Asked on Sunday whether he would raise the report with Xi, Trump said China “spies on us” and “we spy on them, too,” and that Xi had “behaved reasonably well.” On Wednesday he said Iran would be among “many other subjects” he planned to discuss. [5]
Some Republicans objected to the welcome. Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a Senate speech on Tuesday that Trump should not have invited Xi, and called him “a brutal, unelected and oppressive dictator.” Democrats have also criticized the visit. [6]
Catholic Social Teaching Analysis
Interdependence Comes First
It may seem like a strange place to start, but our analysis begins with the soybeans. China has committed to buy 25 million tons of them, and Scott Bessent says Beijing is keeping that promise. It is behind on a separate pledge of $17 billion in other farm goods, and American officials say it is behind on rare earth magnets too, the same magnets China choked off last year until the Busan truce reopened the flow. So a harvest in the Midwest waits on a buyer in China, and an American factory waits on a Chinese refinery. The two governments spent 2025 pushing tariffs into triple digits, and both of them learned what that costs.
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church begins exactly where the soybeans do. “Never before has there been such a widespread awareness of the bond of interdependence between individuals and peoples, which is found at every level.” Then comes the sentence this whole summit turns on: “The new relationships of interdependence between individuals and peoples, which are de facto forms of solidarity, have to be transformed into relationships tending towards genuine ethical-social solidarity.” And it names the tools for the job, “the creation or appropriate modification of laws, market regulations, and juridical systems,” so that the structures that now govern relations between peoples become “structures of solidarity.” [7]
De facto. That’s the Church being hard-headed. Trade makes nations need each other long before anyone decides to love anybody. A soybean contract is solidarity the way a marriage of convenience is a marriage: the bond is real, and the will hasn’t caught up with it. The Compendium’s demand is that the will catch up.
A Truce Is Concord
St. Thomas Aquinas asks whether peace is the same thing as concord, and he answers that peace includes concord and adds something to it. Concord is an agreement of wills. Then he gives the case that settles it: “if one man concord with another, not of his own accord, but through being forced, as it were, by the fear of some evil that besets him, such concord is not really peace.” [8]
That is a fair description of a trade truce. Each capital lowered its tariffs because the alternative, triple-digit duties and rare earths held hostage, was worse. Trust had very little to do with it. The Busan arrangement is concord kept in place by the memory of an evil both sides lived through. It’s good concord, and I’d rather have it than not. But a 2-month extension, when many observers expected 6 months or more, tells you how far either side trusts it to hold.
Thomas also says where the real thing comes from. Peace is “the work of justice” indirectly, “in so far as justice removes the obstacles to peace: but it is the work of charity directly.” [9] Justice, here, is the unglamorous part: keeping the commitments already signed. Beijing is behind on its farm purchases and its magnets, and Bessent is right to press it to meet them in full. The Catechism frames the same duty in the language of solidarity, which “presupposes the effort for a more just social order where tensions are better able to be reduced and conflicts more readily settled by negotiation.” [10] Credit where it’s due. Bessent and Vice Premier He Lifeng met twice in 4 days, once for 12 hours. That is what negotiation looks like, and it’s more than these two governments managed for much of last year.
The Logic Of Blocs
In 1987, Pope John Paul II looked at a world split between Washington and Moscow and called it by its name: “a world which is divided into blocs, sustained by rigid ideologies, and in which instead of interdependence and solidarity different forms of imperialism hold sway, can only be a world subject to structures of sin.” [11]
The blocs have changed partners since then. The difference is that the Soviet Union never bought American soybeans. China buys them by the tens of millions of tons, which makes this rivalry stranger than the last one, and in one way more hopeful. The interdependence John Paul could only urge on the superpowers of his day already exists between these two. What’s missing is the rest of his argument: “interdependence in itself demands the abandonment of the politics of blocs, the sacrifice of all forms of economic, military or political imperialism, and the transformation of mutual distrust into collaboration. This is precisely the act proper to solidarity among individuals and nations.” [12]
Mutual distrust is concrete this week. U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal that Chinese entities gave Iran satellite images of an air base in Jordan before a July strike there that killed 3 American service members. The president’s answer was that China spies on us and we spy on them. Solidarity asks for more honesty than that. A Catholic can want this summit to succeed and still want that report raised in the Oval Office, plainly, because a collaboration built around a subject both sides agree to avoid rests on sand. Pope Leo XIV describes the world we’ve drifted into as “a disorderly and conflict-ridden multipolarism with a prevailing sense of mistrust.” [13] Trust gets rebuilt by telling the truth about what broke it.
Disarming The Race
The smallest item on Thursday’s agenda may turn out to matter most. Bessent says the two sides agreed in New York to set up a hotline for reporting AI safety incidents. China’s state news agency said only that AI was discussed. And the president has said he won’t “stifle” AI growth and means to keep America’s lead in what he calls “super intelligence.” [14]
Leo XIV wrote an entire encyclical on artificial intelligence in May, and his sharpest paragraph fits Thursday exactly. He wants AI disarmed, freed from the mentality of “armed” competition, which he says “is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon.” It takes the form of “a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance.” And to disarm, he writes, “means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern.” [15]
Two governments, each afraid the other will get there first, is the race he describes. So the Pope asks for specific things: “robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility,” and, where the technology meets war, a shared framework that reaches the international level “in order to curb the technological arms race.” [16]
Washington and Moscow installed a hotline in 1963, months after the Cuban missile crisis. It helped keep accidents from becoming wars. Slowing the arms race took treaties, and they came much later. If the AI hotline survives Thursday, good. The Pope is asking for the treaty.
What Persevering Would Look Like
The Catechism doesn’t leave this to chance. “International solidarity is a requirement of the moral order; world peace depends in part upon this.” [17] And the Compendium defines the virtue in words a 2-month truce can’t meet: solidarity is “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good.” [18]
Persevering is the word to hold these two leaders to. It would look like a trade arrangement measured in years, with the soybeans, the $17 billion, and the magnets all delivered as promised. It would look like an AI agreement with something inside it besides a phone number. It would look like the satellite report laid on the table where both men can see it. And it would remember everyone else. John Paul II wrote that “the stronger and richer nations must have a sense of moral responsibility for the other nations,” [19] and there are no stronger or richer nations than the two whose leaders sit down today. When they quarrel, smaller economies that sell to both of them absorb the damage.
The farmer in the photograph above has one question about all of this: will the beans coming out of that field this week have a buyer in February? Interdependence got him a buyer. Solidarity is what would let him plan past January 10.
This story turns on solidarity: the Church’s teaching that interdependence between nations is a fact before it is a virtue, and that it has to become a firm and persevering commitment to the common good.
One principle from the Church’s social teaching, applied to the week’s news, in your inbox each Saturday.
Footnotes
- Michelle L. Price, “China’s Xi kicks off state visit to Washington with a rare planeside welcome from Trump,” Associated Press via PBS News, September 23, 2026, pbs.org; “Donald Trump kicks off Xi Jinping state visit with rare welcome at Joint Base Andrews,” The Hill, accessed September 24, 2026, thehill.com; “Trump welcomes Xi Jinping as US-China trade truce extended by 2 months,” ANI via Business Standard, September 24, 2026, business-standard.com. ↩
- “US, China agree to extend trade truce by two months, work on bigger deal, Bessent says,” Reuters via The Korea Times, September 24, 2026, koreatimes.co.kr; “U.S. and China agree to extend trade truce through Jan. 10, Bessent says,” NBC News, accessed September 24, 2026, nbcnews.com; “U.S.-China trade truce extended for two months, Bessent says, as Xi begins state visit,” CNBC, September 24, 2026, cnbc.com. ↩
- Reuters via The Korea Times, “US, China agree to extend trade truce”; ANI via Business Standard, “Trump welcomes Xi Jinping.” ↩
- ANI via Business Standard, “Trump welcomes Xi Jinping”; Associated Press via PBS News, “China’s Xi kicks off state visit”; Reuters via The Korea Times, “US, China agree to extend trade truce.” ↩
- “Trump says China ‘spies’ on US after report ties Chinese imagery to Iran strike,” Fox News, accessed September 24, 2026, foxnews.com; ANI via Business Standard, “Trump welcomes Xi Jinping.” ↩
- Associated Press via PBS News, “China’s Xi kicks off state visit”; The Hill, “Donald Trump kicks off Xi Jinping state visit.” ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), nos. 192-193, vatican.va. ↩
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 29, a. 1, ad 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org. ↩
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 29, a. 3, ad 3. ↩
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 1940, vatican.va. ↩
- Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Sollicitudo Rei Socialis: On Social Concern (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, December 30, 1987), no. 36, vatican.va. ↩
- Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, no. 39. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, May 15, 2026), no. 201, vatican.va. ↩
- Reuters via The Korea Times, “US, China agree to extend trade truce.” ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, no. 110. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, nos. 106, 200. ↩
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1941. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 193. ↩
- Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, no. 39. ↩
Books Cited
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- Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
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