ANALYSIS || The Trump administration wanted to paint the trip to Beijing with gold, but the war in Iran has complicated everything, and it is unlikely that the American president will be able to achieve the dividends he seeks. Analysts are keeping expectations low for now, but will keep an eye on everything that will – and won’t – be said
It is the seventh time that Donald Trump has met with Xi Jinping in the last decade, but only the second since the beginning of his second presidential term, in January 2025. At the end of October of that year, the American president met with his Chinese counterpart on the sidelines of the APEC summit, in South Korea, to discuss a truce in the global tariff war that Trump had inaugurated months before – which, in the case of China, involved duties of 145% on products exported by the country to the USA, leading Beijing to promise retaliatory tariffs of 125% on North American imports.
It was a short trade war that was suspended precisely at this meeting for a period of one year, a pause that should end in October this year if the two leaders do not reach a new understanding. It was also a first demonstration of how the Americans’ arch-rival had tricks up its sleeve to force a concession from the Trump administration, in this case the rare minerals on which the US technology industry depends so much.
The issue of the pending trade war will be one of the inescapable topics of the summit that will take place this Thursday, in the context of Trump’s first official visit to China in this second term, after a first in 2017 – and one that the American leader hopes will be reciprocated with a trip by Xi to Washington DC later this year. The issue of the suspended trade war will be one of the topics to be addressed, but it is far from being the only one – especially because the same war in Iran that led Trump to postpone this trip to May continues with no end in sight, making life difficult for the American president in his quest to project an image of undeniable strength and power.
“It’s remarkable that President Trump is willing to go to China under these circumstances,” said earlier this week , president of The Asia Group who was Joe Biden’s adviser on China affairs — “but I also have to say that it is deeply unusual that China is willing to host him.”
Geopolitically, the summit could not be more risky. And the fact that the war in Iran has not yet come to an end adds an element of unpredictability to a summit that was initially prepared with an exclusive focus on economic issues. “There is an element [a guerra no Médio Oriente] which is of utmost importance to both sides” and which “complicated matters” for Trump, Edgard Kagan, former US ambassador to Malaysia and current Freeman Chair of China studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “Obviously, the president would have preferred to go to China with a satisfactory resolution that would give him a great boost for the future.”
In search of unlikely dividends
There are those who believe that Trump’s visit to Beijing will be the American president’s “last act” before moving forward with a ground operation in Iran, as military expert Jorge Saramago mentioned yesterday in . At the very least, it is expected that the American president will try to obtain some kind of diplomatic help from China to reopen the Strait of Hormuz – whose closure is not only having disastrous consequences for the global economy, including for Washington and Beijing, but has also opened a huge hole in the image of American hegemony.
The big question in the air is what kind of concessions will Beijing demand in exchange for this help, even if covert, to help the crossings in Hormuz resume – will they be commercial concessions or also in relation to Taiwan, a territory over which China claims sovereignty and which it defines as one at this summit, which before the Trump administration always had the USA as its great ally? As a former senior US official pointed out to CNN: “These are not the desirable strategic conditions for a summit between great powers.”
The US aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on patrol in the Strait of Hormuz. US Navy photo via Getty Images
Before leaving for Beijing, on social media he is “very excited” about the trip to China – “an incredible country, with a leader respected by everyone” – before promising that “great things will happen for both countries”. But it is not unimportant that his arrival in the Chinese capital takes place a week after the visit of the Iranian Foreign Minister to Beijing.
This visit raised hopes in Washington that China could be prepared to broker a solution to the war, but several experts interviewed by the American media counter that it may have been choreographed so that Xi could tell Trump that he had already done what he could in diplomatic terms to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and restore navigation in what is one of the most important arteries of maritime trade in the world.
The interest in having Hormuz unblocked is important for both countries, but Beijing may have more to gain from the impact of its closure on the Trump administration, at home but above all internationally. “Perhaps it is much more interesting for China that the United States is sacrificing its respectability and legitimacy than what is actually happening,” argues the international policy analyst. Especially because “China is watching an opponent shoot itself in the feet and will not stop him from shooting himself in the feet.”
Trump continues to insist that an agreement with Iran is close, but before leaving for Beijing he also assumed that the current ceasefire is “on life support”, a contradiction that casts doubt on Washington’s real capabilities to end the war without the US administration having to assume total defeat. And, “the circumstance of Donald Trump emerging in China as someone who is capable of resolving things is not very compatible with the beginning – or the resumption – of hostilities, which this time would have to be much stronger than the skirmishes of recent times, especially considering that China has a strong inclination towards Iran”.
The truth, says Azeredo Lopes, is that Trump would like to “recover dividends” from this visit to China, when the fact is that he arrives in Beijing with no achievements to boast and “with the child in his hands” – “and Iran is playing with that”.
For all of this, and taking into account what will be between the lines of the visit, the Trump administration continues to invoke as its main objective the maintenance of what has been the the state in which of the Sino-American relationship – maintaining maximum stability between rivals, especially on the economic and commercial front. On Monday, speaking to journalists, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly highlighted that Trump’s aim is to “rebalance the relationship with China and prioritize reciprocity and justice to restore American economic independence”.
For now, experts maintain low expectations regarding the possible geopolitical results of the meetings on Thursday and Friday, especially because both sides have incentives to ease tensions and avoid international incidents. Above all, says Kyle Chan of the Brookings Institute, Trump and Xi want to “reaffirm their relationship and have stability – everything else is secondary.” But even so, statements throughout the visit will be scrutinized as much as possible, looking for clues about what might come next. And what will come soon after will be Vladimir Putin’s visit to China, at a time of equally great unknowns regarding the war in Ukraine.
