Why Trump Came Calling On Xi

For any regular observer, it was not a difficulty in anticipating last week’s meeting between American President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, ending up more with rhetoric than producing something dramatic. Their superpower rivalries are too wide and deep to achieve any breakthrough on some of the myriad issues that afflict the two. 

Trump’s trait of habitually changing the goalpost creates intense caution. Starting a unilateral tariff war, making aggressive threats to annex territories not belonging to the United States, rebuking foreign leaders as “stupid” publicly, underrating fellow NATO members and threatening to pull out from the military alliance, and engaging in a foreign policy of basically commercial and profiting, if not profiteering, nature, have sent negative signals to both traditional allies and adversaries.  

Trump often changes his stance because of the predictability of a few voices opposing it. That has gradually changed in recent months. Sense of national pride and fair approaches demand retaliatory measures against such aggrandisement. 

Wallowing in the sycophancy of his core support base, Trump calls the media that don’t agree with him or expose his missteps as fake news. Pakistan publicly nominated his name for the Nobel Peace Prize, which he appealed for globally as soon as he stepped into the White House in January 2025. He was elated.

Trump trait

Trump’s hate for his two immediate predecessors, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, both from the Democratic Party, oozes whenever he has an opportunity to cite their names. Obama was his immediate predecessor when he first made it to the White House in 2017. After he failed to obtain a second term, thanks to Biden, former Vice-President to Obama, Trump seethed with fury.  

In a glaring irony, the man who openly and unabashedly claimed he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize months after stepping into the White House in 2025 started the US-Israeli war with Iran in February. Instead of the prize he craves for, he is attracting American ire. “No King” protests were held in more than 3,200 cities across the US and Europe in late March.

Deep memory had not died down in Trump, who took on the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer within weeks after being sworn into the White House. Starmer was one of the foreign leaders who had to bear the brunt of openly underrating the maverick former president’s electoral prospects in 2024. Starmer’s diplomatic misjudgement extracts a heavy price.

The British prime minister learnt the lesson the hard way, but provides valuable narratives to others on why not to open their mouths prematurely against big power leaders or strategically placed governments. Trump happens to be a man who does not know how to forget, let alone forgive. Starmer was ticked off his invite list to the January 2025 presidential inauguration. 

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, too, suffered a humiliating snub. His Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar cooled his heels for three days in the US in vain with the hope of extracting an invite to Modi at Trump’s inaugural function. During his election campaign trail, the Trump team had made strong overtures to Modi for a meeting, in the hope of gaining some points with voters in 2024. Like Starmer, Modi saw dim prospects of the former president staging a comeback in power. His “busy” schedule could not accommodate the Trump camp’s plea.   

The Trump-Xi visit is to be seen against that background. Official trappings do not conceal superpowers’ inherently substantive differences. Trade, Taiwan and Iran were the key agenda items. No major decisions came. Xi seems to have assured buying a fleet of 200 US-made aircraft as against Trump’s desire for more than twice that number. Xi had suspended an earlier booking for a fleet of 500 passenger aircraft after Trump tried weaponising tariff hikes. 

Taiwan was a topic that Washington uses only to pat Taipei patronisingly and irritate Beijing. Xi knows that Trump, as did his predecessors, very well knows that Beijing’s steel-like position on this score will never waver. Trump made a positive gesture to Xi by warning Taiwan not to declare independence—a move that sure does please Xi.

A desperate Trump has his eyes set on the November elections in six months, which most opinion polls suggest that the Republican Party will lose its majority in both chambers of Congress. In which case, much of Trump’s existing aggressive posture and actions would suffer a crisis of credibility as well as a big setback for initiatives that the Democrats disagree with. 

Parting gesture

Xi gave a concession as a parting gift to his American guest last week when he agreed to pay a return visit to Washington next autumn on the eve of the November election. Trump hopes the event will bear positive effects on voters. His opponents might label it as a desperate man catching at a communist relief visit.

It has been more than two months since Trump declared complete victory over Iran, whose regime “faced complete collapse”. Iran is far from defeated. Contrary to his victory claim, Trump sounds desperate to arrive at a truce, if not a peace treaty. Trump believes Xi’s role could contribute to this effort. That led “leader of the free world” Trump to exhibit a posture of bonhomie that neither the host nor the guest believed to be genuine. 

The US president contradicts himself when sounding tough against China at home and yet is seen as deferential to the cool and calculated communist leader in Beijing. He should either change tactics or suffer failure in salvaging the situation.

Trump eyes a place of pride in history. If he translates what he uttered in the past couple of months, history might not treat him kindly. Trying to ramrod issues through and force-feeding unilateral agendas on opposing voices invites a rib-rattling ride in the changing world order. This will hurt his international credibility and divert global attention toward the more stable and predictable Beijing. 

(Kharel writes on int'l affairs & media.)