Washington — The images from Sept. 24 were made for television: a new helipad on the South Lawn finished just in time, a tour of Marine One, an elaborate military review, a black-tie dinner for 130. What the first Trump-Xi summit of this term produced on paper was a good deal thinner. Nearly two weeks on, the White House still had issued no formal readout of the leaders’ roughly 90 minutes of talks, and the gaps dividing the world’s two strongest powers — war in Iran, trade, Taiwan, artificial intelligence — remained precisely where they were before the state visit began.
The optics were the message, to a degree. “From the time of my first election in 2016, President Xi and I have forged a friendship, a truly great friendship, actually, built on mutual respect and the vital interests of our people,” Trump said as he welcomed his guest. Xi was sharper, calling the two nations’ interests “deeply intertwined” and insisting the “competition should be a healthy one and should be kept within bounds.” He repeated his warning about the “Thucydides trap” — the idea that a rising power displacing an established one usually ends in war. “It should be a race of catching up with one another, not a wrestle in which one either wins or loses,” he added.
The Deliverables Were Thin
Strategically, the one concrete result came a day early: on Wednesday the sides extended their one-year trade truce, which had been set to lapse on Nov. 10, by two months — buying time for a broader bargain. Beyond that, the ledger depends on whose state media you read. Xi, per Beijing’s accounts, urged Trump to “prudently handle the Taiwan issue,” the issue China calls the most sensitive in the relationship. Trump has been sitting since May on final approval of a record $14 billion arms package for Taipei, and he once described such sales as a “very good negotiating chip” — leverage the calculus in Washington clearly intends to keep.
On Iran, the divide was starker. Trump has pressed Beijing — with threats as well as pleas — to lean on Tehran and force an end to the nearly seven-month war, arguing that China, which relies on Gulf oil far more heavily than the United States does, has ample incentive. Beijing instead condemned the American and Israeli military action, with Xi having warned of a return to the “law of the jungle.” Per Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, Xi used the talks to back a return to the interim deal signed in June, which collapsed within weeks as the sides traded fire over the Strait of Hormuz.
Tech Tensions Without A Framework
Artificial intelligence — rebranded by Trump as “superintelligence” in a morning social media post — sat high on the agenda with no shared rulebook beneath it. “I want to leave it exactly where it is,” Trump wrote of regulation. “That is China’s position also.” Xi, in his public remarks, took a different register, saying the two countries had “the capability and responsibility to develop and manage AI for good and ensure that the development of AI is always under human control and serves the well-being of the people.” The finance ministers, meeting earlier that week, got only as far as an American proposal for a “notification mechanism” on AI incidents.
What this signals, to veteran watchers, is a summit of performance over substance. Danny Russel, who held senior State Department posts in the Obama years and is now at the Asia Society Policy Institute, noted the leaders spent more time at ceremonial events than in formal talks and dismissed the show as “diplotainment,” which he predicted would not do much to solve the serious problems between the two countries.
The guest list made the same point from another angle. Tech titans — Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk — dined in the East Room, but Chinese CEOs were conspicuously absent after planning friction over their roles. The broader stakes are unchanged: a generational contest for dominance in economics and technology, managed so far by personal rapport and mutual interest, with the crises merely paused, not resolved.
Sources
- Trump lays out the pomp for Xi but says little about the significant tensions in US-China relations
- Trump/Xi Summit: Deepening Crises and Confrontation Behind “Friendship Show” – China Worker
