President Donald Trump emerged from his highly anticipated meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping today with most of what he wanted from a deal with Beijing. Yet the agreement does little more than extricate Trump from crises of his own making. The pattern in Trump’s dealings with China raises a long-term concern: that he will one day wind up sacrificing American interests in the pursuit of deals of questionable strategic importance.

Today’s agreement, struck on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea, averts another escalation of tensions between the world’s two great powers. China agreed to postpone expanding export controls on rare-earth metals for one year. Those controls, announced earlier this month, threatened to choke off the flow of rare earth

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