Donald Trump’s summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping this week is a capstone event meant to demonstrate the president’s indelible mark on world history.
But while Chinese pageantry will portray him as an honored statesman, the visit will also show how some of Trump’s decisions — including a war with Iran that he can’t end — risk undercutting his authority and American power.
A tumultuous global situation consciously created by the American president will make the backdrop for this summit unlike any meeting of US and Chinese leaders since President Richard Nixon coaxed China onto the world stage in the 1970s.
US and Chinese summits have long pursued stability in what has become the world’s most important diplomatic relationship. But Trump is the antithesis to steadiness: He’s turned the US into one of the world’s top sources of instability.
Trump has also loosened traditional foundations of American primacy, including free trade, alliances and an international order that favors Washington. He sees this transformation as an affirmation of naked American power and unilateral freedom of action. Critics view it as an act of self-sabotage that neuters US global advantages at the very moment American supremacy is being tested on multiple fronts by an aspiring Chinese superpower.
The president’s failure to deliver a clear victory in Iran and the calamitous global economic aftershocks of his war also raise new questions about US power that China may seek to exploit. Iran’s latest snub to Trump’s quest for a deal and an off-ramp on Monday confound his claims that it’s about to cave. The defiance of a smaller power in the face of US might leaves him looking personally weakened.
Trump met with his national security team on Monday evening. And CNN cited sources saying the president was considering a resumption of military action against Iran more seriously than he has for weeks. Tehran, meanwhile, sent a pre-trip taunt to the president.
“Mr. Trump, never imagine that by taking advantage of Iran’s current calm, you will be able to enter Beijing triumphantly,” said Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to the new supreme leader, according to a report from Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency.
How China may try to leverage Trump’s discomfort
The war offers challenges and opportunities for China.
While the administration wants it to lean on its nominal allies in Tehran, its displeasure over the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — a significant supply route of its oil imports — could instead trigger pressure on Trump. And any diplomatic help that China does offer is likely to come with strings attached, on trade or even an issue that Beijing regards as existential: its claims of sovereignty over Taiwan.
“These are not the strategic conditions you would want to have going into a major power summit,” a former senior US official said.
And Edgard Kagan, Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the Iran war adds a wild card to a summit prepared as a mainly economic affair by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.
“This is different, because there is an issue (Iran) that is of tremendous importance to both sides. I think that’s what complicated about it. Obviously the president would have far preferred to go to China having a satisfactory resolution and one that gave him a big lift going into this,” said Kagan, a former US ambassador to Malaysia.
China traditionally seeks a stable relationship with the US. It needs predictability as it manages a powerful economy that suffers from deep structural problems. It’s spent the first quarter of the century using relatively benign relations with Washington to build its powerhouse new military and regional might.
Trump, especially in his pyrotechnic second term, has made a sharp break with the more predictable policies of presidents dating back to Nixon. There may be some truth to the belief of Trump fans that his unpredictability is an asset that can wrong-foot opponents like Xi. Yet it risks playing into Beijing’s hands.
For example, Thailand, a US treaty ally, is one of many southeast Asian neighbors that viewed Washington as a hedge against an overbearing modern China. But it’s being forced into tough foreign policy reevaluations by the second Trump administration. Its Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow complained last month that the US had done nothing to alleviate the economic impact of its Iran war.
“We don’t want to condemn the US directly, but this is not something that should not have been started,” Sihasak told the Washington Post from the sidelines of talks with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi. The meeting was intriguing, since China would stand to benefit from any permanent estrangement between the US and its friends in southeast Asia.
China and Iran both exposed the limits of Trump’s improvisation
The downside of the president’s approach is not simply geopolitical. It may also shape Chinese perceptions that Trump’s power is ebbing.
Ian Lesser, a distinguished fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, said Trump’s frantic foreign policy activism in his second term likely surprised the Chinese.
“Now that said, this activism doesn’t necessarily add up to increased influence. In fact, I think the unresolved nature of some of these interventions, in a sense, raises more questions than it answers,” Lesser said.
Lesser argued the open-ended Iran war is a recipe for the United States being seen in Beijing as “somehow weaker, at least more distracted than it might otherwise have been.”
Trump’s visit to China may highlight another unflattering aspect of his second term: For all his claims of dominant global power, both Beijing and Tehran have exposed the liabilities of his improvisational approach and forced him to blink.
Beijing played its best card against Trump last year by using its control over rare earth elements on which the US tech industry relies to force him to drastically cut tariffs on Chinese exports. China became the first power to outflank the president in his multiple global trade wars.
Iran has also showed the power of economic leverage over the US by effectively shutting down the Strait of Hormuz and creating a global energy crisis, which is exerting a heavy political price on Trump through rising gasoline prices.
China has no choice but to deal with a disruptive Trump
Still, despite the oppressive international environment clouding the summit, there are good reasons to believe both sides want a success.
Trump can’t afford yet another foreign policy crisis, and he craves the spectacle of a return state visit to the US by Xi, perhaps as early as this year. The Chinese leader would like to persuade the US to step back in Iran to alleviate rising global energy prices that pose complications for its economy. China’s export-led growth depends on a healthy global economy.
Unlike Trump, Xi can play the long game, since his totalitarian rule could endure past January 2029, when term limits require Trump’s exit from office.
The fact that Trump and Xi share many characteristics may facilitate a showdown over Iran and other contentious issues.
Each is hyper-aggressive in projecting his own power. Both disdain the global international order. In Xi’s case, this is to be expected, since Beijing views a rules-based international system as biased toward the United States. But for an American president to hold similar views flouts generations of US foreign policy.
Both Trump and Xi are unapologetic nationalists and appear to relish the imagery of convening talks between the world’s two most powerful men.
“I have a great relationship with President Xi,” Trump said on Monday, underscoring his view of inter-state relations as inseparable from his personal relationships with foreign leaders — a tendency that some may see as a way to extract concessions through flattery.
Kagan said the Chinese have come to anticipate the president’s unpredictability and respect some of his unexpected successes on the world stage, and have reasoned an effective leader-to-leader relationship is essential. “The Chinese want stability,” Kagan said. “In their minds, the best way to deal with a Trump administration is to have a very strong relationship with President Trump.”
But any expectations Trump may hold that his friendship with Xi will yield decisive pressure on Iran are likely to be unfounded. Beijing, for all its rising power, is typically circumspect in exerting power far from its immediate region. It has no interest in a more US-friendly regime in Iran. Having the US bogged down again in the Middle East and transitioning military assets from Asia also hampers the endlessly postponed US pivot to Asia. And Trump’s inability or unwillingness to order the US Navy to reopen the Strait of Hormuz has raised more strategic questions about his willingness to defend Taiwan.
A visit by Iran’s foreign minister to Beijing last week raised some hopes in Washington that China was preparing to broker a solution to the war. But several experts said this may have been designed so Xi can tell Trump he’s already called on Iran to reopen the strait.
Any US president’s state visit to China marks a critical moment of their administration and an important moment for the world.
It will be ironic if the results of some of Trump’s own decisions serve to demonstrate constraints on his power, rather than the global dominance he hoped to project in Beijing.
