The U.S. and China have reached an agreement on phase one of the trade deal, Chinese officials said Friday. President Donald Trump confirmed the news in a tweet shortly afterward. The announcement comes after almost a year and a half of posturing between the world’s two largest economies that centered on trade imbalances, access to markets and concerns about intellectual property theft.

The precise conditions of the agreement are yet to be announced, but the U.S. will begin to remove the various tariffs it has levied on Chinese goods, China’s Vice Commerce Minister Wang Shouwen said Friday during a press conference.

The ceasefire comes after Trump held a closed-door meeting on Thursday with his top trade advisers, including U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who indicated an announcement on tariffs was “imminent.”

Washington and Beijing initially reached an agreement in October to implement a “Phase One” deal, under which China would purchase $40 billion to $50 billion of U.S. agricultural products, Trump said at the time. The agreement also included commitments by China related to its currency, intellectual property and access to Chinese markets, Trump noted.

The protracted tit-for-tat over tariffs between the two sides has weighed heavily on markets and on business sentiment over the past 17 months. While Trump dismissed the standoff in May as nothing but “a little squabble,” global markets have been roiled and organizations such as the International Monetary Fund predicted the trade war would damage global growth by 0.1 percentage points this year and next.

American companies and investors initially viewed Trump’s protectionist stance as a negotiating ploy, but fears began to mount over the summer that the stalemate would drag on indefinitely. Those concerns multiplied after Trump said this month that he saw no particular deadline for a resolution. “In some ways, I like the idea of waiting until after the election for the China deal,” Trump told reporters at the NATO summit this month.

Trump had threatened to implement a 15 percent tariff on $156 billion in Chinese imports, primarily consumer goods such as toys, clothes and electronics, set to take effect on Dec. 15. Economists argued that the economic fallout could be too great for the U.S. to bear and would reduce consumer spending and hurt job growth.

“I suspect even the China hawks in the White House don’t really want to impose the December tariffs,” said Mark Williams, chief Asia economist at Capital Economics. “Actually implementing them would just put up prices for American families.”

Market observers say much of the damage that has already been done cannot be easily undone.

“Firms will be postponing investments not just until we find out what the next deal is, but much longer than that, until future policies become clearer,” said Peter Petri, a professor of international finance at the Brandeis International Business School.

“That will hurt the outlook for investment and growth well beyond the next few months.”