Washington | The trade truce between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping won't stop an increasingly "adversarial" clash between the superpowers as they test each other's limits on technology, markets and security, says Kevin Rudd.

Warning that the "2020s loom as a decade of living dangerously in the US-China relationship",  the former Australian prime minister said Beijing was becoming ever more confident of its role in the region just as the US questions its own place in the Asia-Pacific and whether it should pay in "blood and treasure".