‘xi Jinping’s Got Stature’: Trump’s China Summit Challenge

The U.S.-China relationship is on tenterhooks amid an ongoing arms race over AI, trade feuds over rare earths and chips, a still-simmering war in Iran and a perpetual standoff over Taiwan.

President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are unlikely to make much progress on any of it.

Xi is expected to arrive in Washington Wednesday evening amid a shifting power dynamic that has left Beijing with more leverage on key issues and given Trump little room to maneuver.

That combined with Trump’s challenging domestic political landscape makes it unlikely that Trump will seriously confront the Chinese leader on a host of sensitive subjects. Xi, meanwhile, arrives with greater diplomatic heft — and a readiness to flex it — than he had at their last meeting in Beijing in May, reducing his interest in negotiating concessions to the U.S.

Xi “won't bend a finger to help Trump on Iran, but he will try to make Trump feel important, like they're the two guys who are running the world,” said Liza Tobin, former director for China at the National Security Council during Trump’s first term.

Even if the leaders don’t agree to any major breakthroughs, White House officials and those close to them emphasize the value of the meeting itself — two powerful leaders sitting down together and demonstrating that they can maintain a working relationship.

The goal of the three-day meeting is “to prevent something very bad from happening,” said a former Trump administration official, who like others in this story was granted anonymity to preview the summit. “There’s not really a deal to be done. It’s about keeping the tensions within manageable bounds.”

The White House, asked for comment, referred to a Friday press briefing in which senior U.S. officials laid out expectations for the trip but deferred questions on specific deliverables.

“We’ll know more once the two leaders meet,” one of the officials said.

Still, the Trump administration has for months been loath to push China too far on several important issues to the United States.

Amid Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s “economic D-Day” on Iran, the administration has refused to go after Chinese banks for facilitating the country’s oil trade with Iran, a lifeline for the Iranian economy. And even as multiple world leaders call for the two superpowers to reach an agreement on regulating the development of artificial intelligence, Trump and Xi are expected to make little headway toward a substantive agreement as both countries reiterate that they are in existential competition with one another.

And on trade, it’s unclear whether the leaders will agree on an extension of a truce expiring in November that keeps tariffs in the low double-digit range and lifted Beijing’s export restrictions on rare earths, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told reporters Monday.

Beijing may condition any more substantive results on Trump maintaining a delay in a $14 billion arms sale to Taiwanthat he imposed in May.

Trump “likes to be like, ‘Oh, we get along great,’ and it's like, okay, well, at the same time, these guys are a massive threat to us. We're in an AI race with them. They're supplying Iranians with intelligence and weapons,” said one person close to the White House. “He's missing the message here. No one cares whether you're friends with the guy or not … Are you advancing our country's objectives or not?”

Trump, politically, has his own headwinds to contend with. The president is facing the worst approval ratings of his term and the prospect that the GOP could be swept from power in November.

“The Chinese are already beginning to look through and past President Trump into what comes next in the United States,” said Ryan Hass, former director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia at the National Security Council in the Obama administration. But they see the summit as a means “to sustain and extend this period of fragile calm.”

But Xi has problems too. The country’s property sector implosion in 2021 is still rippling through the economy, denting business confidence and consumer spending and contributing to a deflationary spiral that has defied policy fixes. Youth unemployment levels hover around 20% while China’s demographic challenge of a rapidly aging society is fueling a widening mismatch between retirees and the working population that’s slowing economic growth. That weak domestic demand, combined with excess industrial capacity, has pushed China to rely more heavily on exports and search for alternative markets for Chinese goods.

Those vulnerabilities give Trump leverage of his own as the leaders negotiate.

The White House has said the meeting between the two leaders will include discussion of AI safety andextending the trade truce. Trump’s challenge will be to push Xi to deliver on the pledges he made in their May meeting — the purchase of 200 Boeing aircraft and $14 billion in agricultural products — that arein limbo four months later. It’s likely that Beijing’s failure to restore exports of rare earths to pre-trade war volumes will also be on the agenda.

Still, White House officials haven’t been shy in telegraphing the fact that the optics of the visit — two powerful leaders meeting cordially — may themselves be the main highlight. The show begins Wednesday when Trump welcomes Xi onto the red carpet after his arrival at Andrews Air Force Base. At the White House, Xi will get a celebrity-heavy state dinner and a military review in the Rose Garden.

“It’s a further opportunity to show that, yes, while we can be adversaries, we can have two leaders that can work together and can at least meet and have face-to-face conversations,” said one senior White House official.

Xi’s visit follows his weeks-long international outreach campaign. He participated in leader-level meetings of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Kyrgyzstan earlier this month and the BRICS group of countries in New Delhi last week. The Chinese leader stole the show at the meetings of those groups — whose 46 members and partners include the largest economies in Asia, Africa and the Middle East — with calls for greater engagement withhis signature Belt and Road infrastructure investment program and initiatives to expand trade and access to AI open source models.

“Xi Jinping is going to feel like he's got some real tailwinds here” with “a pretty hefty share of middle powers — if nothing else, it shows Xi Jinping's got stature,” said Danny Russel, former assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Obama administration. “He's got friends. He's not struggling. He's not isolated. He’s free and he’s dating other people.”

The summit results may ultimately also hinge on whether the two leaders intend to have follow-up meetings at the APEC leaders’ summit in China in November and at the G20 meeting that Trump will host in Miami in December. Bessentsaid in January that Trump-Xi meetings are possible at both events.

“What I've heard from some Chinese colleagues is that if this is going to be the only meeting, there might be a little bit more give from the Chinese side to get a little more done,” said Jonathan Czin, a former CIA China analyst now at the Brookings Institution “But if they think there's going to be another couple of meetings, then they're going to want to sit on any meaningful outcomes for a little bit longer.”