By Carlotta Rinaudo - China & Asia Desk
The trade war between the United States and China increasingly resembles a failed divorce: expensive, chaotic, and ultimately impossible to finalize. Both sides threaten separation only to discover they are too deeply entangled to walk away: in October 2025 in Busan, the two unwilling partners found themselves forced back under the same marital roof. To make sense of this strange and dysfunctional relationship, over time many analysts have turned to an unexpected field: couple psychology.
Some analysts describe the relationship as a pragmatic partnership that dates back to the 1970s, forged out of necessity rather than mutual trust or alignment. The United States was burdened by the huge costs of the Vietnam War and a period of stagflation. Prices were rising, workers’ salaries were not, and consumption, the very engine of the American economy - was under threat. China, on the other side of the Pacific, was poor, isolated, and hungry for growth. The stage was set for what Zeno Leoni calls a “marriage of convenience”: two countries using one another as a quick fix for weaknesses they could not resolve alone. As Han Feizi puts it, it was an unlikely relation built on a clear imbalance: on one side, a weak country would work its way out of poverty, save aggressively, and lend money to a rich partner with a reckless spending habit – who would then use that money to buy even more of the poor country’s products. Strange as it sounded, the arrangement worked.
Walmart aisles quickly filled with low-cost clothes, toys, electronics, and household goods, contributing to affordable consumerism during a period of stagnant wages for many. Products that once felt like luxuries became accessible to most American families. For China, the benefits were just as tangible. American demand kept factories running, while millions of rural workers migrated to the coast in search of jobs that offered them a way out of poverty. Dollars flowed from US consumers to Chinese factories and then flowed back to Washington as purchases of US debt, allowing Americans to borrow and consume even more. As Stephen Roach said, China gave Americans a way to “repeal the basic laws of economics”: they could “live beyond their means, and that enabled the Chinese to do the same.”
Like many toxic relationships, however, this marriage of convenience also amplified each partner’s worst imbalances. In the United States, easy access to cheap imports deepened debt and hollowed out industrial towns like Martinsville, Virginia, where textile factories closed, jobs disappeared, and communities were left behind as production shifted overseas. In China, the costs were even more visible: rivers were polluted, air quality was deteriorated, and laborers were overworked. Also, like in human relationships, over time China’s behavior changed in ways that left the other feeling insecure. No longer a poor country desperate for jobs and dollars, China gradually became an industrial and technological powerhouse. With that rise came confidence, nationalism, and a growing desire to assert itself on the global stage. Also, China was no longer confined to filling Walmart aisles with cheap goods: now it began competing in advanced sectors once dominated by the US – from AI and telecommunications to robotics. For Washington, this shift in balance triggered something like an identity crisis, which brings us to the mutual resentment, finger-pointing, anxiety and suspicion we are seeing today. In human terms, this is often the stage that leads to separation, and the United States first attempted to follow that script. Washington began to openly speak of decoupling - a necessary “surgical strike” to reduce dependence on China, de-risk critical supply chains, and bring manufacturing jobs back home. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went so far as to imagine an “army” of workers assembling iPhones in the United States. The attempted separation reached its peak on what was called “Liberation Day”, when President Donald Trump imposed tariffs of up to 145% on Chinese products – to which China promptly responded.
Yet this tit-for-that soon revealed how separation between two economic giants can be messy, expensive, and ultimately self-defeating. Tariffs were not deployed like precision weapons, but more like land mines, harming almost everyone in their way. American workers and consumers – those the measures were meant to protect – quickly found themselves caught in the middle. Chinese-manufactured toys that once sold for $21.99 now cost $35, forcing long-standing toy storesin Manhattan to close. Farmers across the Midwest saw sales collapse as China restricted purchases of US soybeans. Nvidia, the crown jewel of American AI, lost billions of dollars in revenue due to restrictions on chip sales - money that could have been reinvested in domestic research. Even more, those same restrictions accelerated China’s push toward technological self-sufficiency.
The deeper lesson, however, goes beyond tariffs. In today’s interconnected supply chains, economic measures often have ripple effects, meaning that actions taken against a partner can have unintended consequences for both sides. Donald Trump often speaks of goods as if they were either “Made in China” or “Made in America,” yet while that worldview made sense in the industrial economy of the twentieth century, it does not make sense in the reality we live in today. In the age of container shipping and digital coordination, almost nothing is fully “made” in one place only: products are, more often than not, assembled from components sourced across multiple countries. Huawei - often depicted as the embodiment of “Made in China” – actually relies heavily on US firms such as Qualcomm and Broadcom for some of its components, and for years its operating system was Google’s Android. This means that sanctions aimed at Huawei inevitably end up harming US companies too. Such is the power of the supply chain in the 21st century.
Rare earths offer an even starker example of how US attempts to project strength can expose new vulnerabilities at home. China controls much of the global supply chain of these critical materials, essential for everything from electric vehicles to advanced weapon systems. When Beijing restricted exports in retaliation for US tariffs, the consequences were immediate. To mention one, Ford shut down a factory in Chicago after it was unable to secure the rare earths needed for electric motors. Research showed that it would take eight to twelve years to rebuilding domestic refining capacity of these materials – if Americans would be willing to shoulder the dirty business of rare earth refining itself. Looking at Baotoutoday, a dry town in China’s Inner Mongolia, it is clear that reshoring production would mean accepting environmental costs that Americans have long outsourced to China. In Baotou, decades of processing have poisoned groundwater and produced a “cancer epidemic” throughout what they are now known as “cancer villages.”
In October 2025, President Trump and President Xi Jinping met in Busan. The meeting felt less like a resolution and more like a tacit recognition of limits. Leading a slowing economy, Xi urged Trump to learn from the recent “twists and turns” of the trade war. On his side, Trump agreed to cut tariffs to 47% and called a “ceasefire” on further escalation. Beijing, in turn, suspended restrictions on rare earth exports for one year. It was, overall, a pause that restored a fragile status quo while leaving the underlying tensions intact. Yet the Busan meeting made one reality impossible to ignore. Over decades, the US and China built production systems projected to function together – one side designing, consuming, and spending; the other manufacturing, assembling, and absorbing the environmental cost. That same structure is now dictating the terms of the relationship for both partners. In a supply-chain world, even an unhappy and suffocating marriage can be cheaper to endure than to escape. And for two unwilling partners forced together by necessity rather than affection, learning how to live together may eventually prove easier than walking away.
