One of the difficulties in analyzing summit meetings between leaders like Xi Jinping and Donald Trump is that the events are a mixture of public theater and private discussion.
With previous presidents of China and the United States, such summits represented the culmination of lengthy negotiations between top specialist officials, providing a predictable structure and predictable results. But with power in both countries now concentrated in the hands of their respective leaders rather than in wider governing systems, the summits have less structure and more theatre, while private discussions are more important and more secretive.
So it could take weeks, months or even years to reach a clear understanding of what happened during the two-day summit held in Beijing between the leaders of the world’s two superpowers on May 14-15. Very little was publicly announced, even on long-standing issues related to Chinese trade and purchases of American products.
Under Presidents Bush, Obama or Biden, such silence would have meant that structured and formal negotiations had failed. But with Trump everything is personal and little is structured. We cannot judge whether the summit was a success or a failure until we see what happens next.
The only thing that is clear is that Trump and Xi intend to continue meeting in this way, with a mutual summit now scheduled to take place at the White House on September 24. The question for Europe and the rest of the world is whether they should feel happy that the world’s two biggest military and economic powers are regularly talking rather than fighting – or worried that the rest might hurt us.
An answer to this question is likely to emerge not in Asia or America, but in the Middle East. On the surface, Iran and the United States have reached an impasse with Trump dismissing Iran’s peace proposals as “unacceptable,” with Iran refusing to give up its uranium enrichment and nuclear programs and with both sides still blocking the Strait of Hormuz.
But Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Arraghchi, visited China shortly before the Trump-Xi summit, apparently to relay his government’s position and hear China’s views. And Trump asserted after the summit that he and Xi “feel very similar” about ending the war, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and Hormuz. All this suggests that there is room to break the deadlock.
The Chinese were more cautious than Trump about what he and Xi told each other about the Middle East. However, both Trump and Iran’s real rulers, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite military group that has taken control since Supreme Leader Ali Hossein Khamenei and others were killed by Israeli bombs, must now decide what their next steps should be. It will be in those decisions that we may be able to discover an outcome from the Beijing summit.
One option, threatened by both sides, is the resumption of hostilities, both against each other and against the Arab states on the opposite side of the Persian Gulf from Iran. But that would hardly fit with what Trump claims to have discussed with Xi.
The other, more likely option is a new exchange of peace proposals and the resumption of negotiations through the current Pakistani mediators. It would not be at all surprising if the next exchange had Chinese fingerprints all over it, particularly with regard to nuclear weapons and the handling of Iran’s remaining stockpile of nuclear material.
Trump will not have asked Xi to publicly intervene in the negotiations because he understands that Xi would refuse to do so. But he may have asked him to help persuade Iran to reach a nuclear deal that he, Trump, could publicly present as a success.
For Trump, the compromise must appear to ensure that Iran will never become an official nuclear-weapon state. A simple promise from the Iranian government would not be enough, especially while it maintains uranium enrichment capabilities and highly enriched material thought to have been buried by Israeli and US bombs last year. But Chinese involvement in overseeing that material may have the credibility it needs.
Outsiders often worry, with good reason, that Trump might be persuaded to trade waning American support for Taiwan in exchange for this kind of Chinese help on Iran’s nuclear program. In Beijing, President Xi reserved his sharpest and clearest language for the Taiwan issue, warning America to handle the issue carefully or conflict could erupt.
To the relief of many pro-Taiwan Asian governments, particularly Japan, Trump made no public comments about Taiwan in response, although he declined to say whether he had decided to approve a major US arms sale to Taiwan.
One of the biggest conundrums about this second Trump administration is that although President Trump has surrounded himself with people who in the past were considered “China hawks,” people who favored fairly aggressive policies on trade and military postures to resist Chinese strategic advances, the president himself often sounds soft and even friendly toward China.
And in an administration where personal decision-making is far more important than the views of the governing establishment, this makes US China policy unpredictable and worrisome.
However, Taiwan may not be the biggest reason to worry about such a personal deal between the superpowers. China does not seem to be in a rush to try to take control of Taiwan. She also knows that any progress she can make with America under Trump will likely only last until the end of his term in January 2029, and may still be implausible.
The biggest cause for concern is symbolized by the fact that President Xi’s next visitor to Beijing will be Russian President Vladimir Putin, who will reportedly fly there as early as Wednesday, May 20.
In Beijing, Trump spoke highly of his host, praising Xi as “a great leader.” Meanwhile, during his second term, Trump has aided Putin in his war against Ukraine, ending US arms supplies to Ukraine and often seeking to bully Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into giving more territory to the Russian invaders.
Trump has eased sanctions on Russian oil and even brokered a weekend ceasefire agreement between Ukraine and Russia to make it easier for Putin to hold his May 9 Victory Day military parade. without fear of Ukrainian long-range attacks.
The real reason to worry is that Trump’s apparent closeness to Xi and Putin could lead him NO to betray Taiwan in the long term, but to betray Ukraine in the near future.
Thanks to European support and its own domestic production, Ukraine has regained some of the initiative against its occupier. With Russia now looking in a weaker position, despite its still frequent missile attacks on civilians in Ukraine, Putin may be tempted to use China to push America to further cut its support for Ukraine in exchange for aid to the war in Iran.
This, to quote the title of Trump’s own book, is “The Art of the Deal.”
A former longtime editor-in-chief of the Economist, Bill Emmott is the author of Prevention, Diplomacy and the Risk of Conflict over Taiwan (2024). This article, reprinted with permission, is the English original of an article first published in Italian translation by La Stampa. It can also be found, along with many other items, at Bill Emmott’s Global View.
