WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States and China are not going to resolve all of the issues that divide them before presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping meet today in Busan, South Korea.

Yet they are likely to make enough progress on China’s stranglehold on strategic minerals, American export controls and other nettlesome problems to calm financial markets and prevent their rivalry from doing much more economic damage for now.

“They’re trying to get to some kind of détente,” said Jeff Moon, a former U.S. trade official and diplomat who now runs the China Moon Strategies consultancy. “There’s no pretense that they’re going to reach a grand bargain that solves everything in the relationship.’’

The two countries sent out reassuring signals over the weekend that an agreement was drawing closer.

China’s top trade negotiator, Li Chenggang, told reporters that Washington and Beijing had reached a “preliminary consensus.” Trump’s Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said there was “a very successful framework.”

Trump himself expressed confidence, saying Chinese officials “want to make a deal and we want to make a deal.”

Before the talks in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, over the weekend, U.S. and Chinese negotiators previously had met four times this year — in Geneva in May, London in June, Stockholm in July and Madrid in September — but only had managed to reach a truce to avoid escalating tariffs and a vague deal “framework,” not anything of substance.

When new tensions rose earlier this month, Trump had been threatening to slap another 100 percent tariff on Chinese products Nov. 1, on top of an already-high 57.6 percent, according to calculations by Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

In a sign the two countries are making progress, Bessent said on CBS’s “Face the Nation’’ that those punishing triple-digit levies are “effectively off the table’’ as talks continue.

China is the world’s leading producer and processor of rare-earth minerals and related technologies critical for fighter jets, robots, electric vehicles and a host of other high-tech products. In a show of strength and of the leverage it brings to the negotiating table, the country has limited exports of the elements, crippling U.S. and other foreign companies. Most recently, they tightened the restrictions Oct. 9, just ahead of the Trump-Xi summit.

“Rare earths are now the most effective lever that China can pull,” said Zongyuan Zoe Liu, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The rest of the world does not have readily available or affordable productive capacity.’’

The United States and other countries are investing heavily in rare earths to break China’s domination but it may take years for that to pay off. “They realize this is not a lever they can pull forever,’’ Liu said. “So they want to use it when it actually hurts.’’

Bessent said on ABC that he expected China to “delay’’ the rare earth export controls “for a year while they re-examine it.’’

Rare earths aren’t the only leverage China has. American farmers — among Trump’s most loyal supporters — have traditionally depended on China to buy about a quarter of the soybeans they produce. China has stopped buying American soybeans this year, though, choosing to use Brazilian and Argentinian suppliers instead.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker,” Bessent, who owns soybean farmland, suggested that relief might be coming to the nation’s heartland. “We are going to be able to discuss substantial soybean and ag purchases for American farmers,’’ he said.