The delegation that arrived with President Trump in Beijing last night looked less like the diplomatic corps of a superpower and more like a Fortune 500 board meeting. On Air Force One were Elon Musk, Tim Cook (“Tim Apple,” as the president calls him), and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Joining in Beijing were honchos from Wall Street and aerospace firms. The message was impossible to miss: This trip, billed as a high-stakes summit between the leaders of the world’s two most powerful nations, is about money first and geopolitics second—with differences in ideology trailing far behind.
Trump in 2017 was a China hawk, elected in part because he called out the country for the damage its economic practices had done to the U.S. workforce. But Trump in 2026 has gone full chamber-of-commerce booster, cheering on those in the top ranks of the Chinese Communist Party, including President Xi Jinping. “I will be asking President Xi, a Leader of extraordinary distinction, to ‘open up’ China so that these brilliant people can work their magic, and help bring the People’s Republic to an even higher level!” Trump wrote on Truth Social earlier this week. He added that he would make that his “very first request,” presumably in the meetings the two men held today in the Great Hall of the People. That volte-face reflects the fact that neither the first Trump administration nor the Biden administration nor the second Trump administration has figured out how to deal with the world’s most intricate trade relationship and most confounding rivalry.
Trump arrived in China this week at a moment when both Washington and Beijing are exhausted by commercial and strategic confrontation, but unwilling to retreat. The trade war has not ended. The tech war (think AI and the computer chips required to power it) is just ramping up. Yet China remains the world’s manufacturing powerhouse, and the U.S. remains China’s biggest market. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that the two sides are finding it hard to get along.
Lawmakers, national-security officials, and trade experts we spoke with said the best that could be hoped for from the summit were steps to stop the relationship from getting worse, through agreements on investments, market access, and agricultural goods. Long gone is any idea that the U.S. might fundamentally alter the way China does business. Instead, amid all the pomp and the Chinese children waving flags, the primary goal of Trump’s trip is to do business with China. At today’s post-talks state banquet, which featured crispy beef ribs and Beijing roast duck, Trump said he had held “extremely positive and productive conversations and meetings.”
Much of what is being discussed might typically fall within the remit of the secretaries of Treasury or commerce. Yet this is also a meeting of the world’s two most powerful presidents, so ever present amid the discussions of airplane and soybean purchases will be the fates of two other nations, Iran and Taiwan. Trump wants Xi’s help persuading Tehran to open the Strait of Hormuz and come back to the bargaining table. Xi wants Trump to soften decades of steadfast U.S. support, in arms and doctrine, for Taipei. The biggest risk, those we spoke with said, is that those two issues get mingled with the dealmaking in a way that benefits Beijing more than Washington.
“I am very worried about what Trump might give away,” John Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser turned critic, told us when we asked if U.S. support for Taiwan could be used as a bargaining chip. “He wants the business.”
It’s hard to imagine now, but nine years ago, Trump was nervous about his first trip to China. The stop was the centerpiece of a nearly two-week journey across Asia in November 2017. The day Trump was slated to travel to Beijing from Seoul was meant to begin with a secret stop at the DMZ, the stretch of land that separates the militarized borders of North and South Korea. But fog delayed the covert helicopter ride and angered Trump, partly because he was worried about keeping Xi waiting. Eventually, the excursion was abandoned so that Trump wouldn’t be late for his sunset welcome ceremony at the Forbidden City. The ancient site was cleared of visitors, leaving just the two presidents, a few staff members, and the press pool. Trump later remarked to aides how impressed he was by the experience. He respected Xi’s grip on power and the sheer size of the populace he governed. (Unlike most presidents who came before him, Trump did not seem bothered by China’s human-rights abuses.)
Back then, Trump viewed a grand (and still-elusive) trade deal with China as a key part of his legacy. And his fascination with Xi hasn’t ebbed. Trump’s initial downplaying of the severity of the coronavirus pandemic, in early 2020, stemmed partly from his desire not to upset the Chinese premier at a time when the virus seemed like Beijing’s problem, not the world’s. (He later added China’s pandemic failures to his 2020 election-loss grievances.) And Trump has told aides for a year now that this summit—as well as a September sequel in the U.S. that Trump today floated with Xi—would be key moments of his second term.
For Xi, the stakes are high, if painfully domestic. China’s economy is slowing in ways the Communist Party can no longer easily disguise. Youth unemployment remains politically dangerous. Foreign investment has cooled dramatically. Local governments are buried in debt. Xi, above all, needs stability. He needs global firms and investors to believe that China remains economically viable at a moment when many are actively searching for exits or alternatives.
Trump “can go to China, and he could break every single rule and still come back to the United States, and his head will not be on the platter,” Stephen Nagy, an international-relations professor at International Christian University in Tokyo, told us. “But for Xi, he can’t do this. He has to look like the emperor. He has to maintain his authority. Otherwise he loses legitimacy within the party and within the people.”
Trump arrives with pressures of his own. American manufacturers remain deeply dependent on Chinese supply chains despite years of rhetoric about decoupling the two economies. And the Trump administration is scrambling to bolster American access to crucial minerals, an industry China dominates. Markets have little appetite for another escalatory cycle. Inflation is rising and remains politically combustible, especially because of recent price hikes caused by the Iran war that Trump started. And Trump himself has always treated foreign policy less as a series of interlocking principles than a negotiation between powerful players. He prefers leverage over doctrine and optics over process.
So leaving the summit with the appearance of comity, and a message that U.S.-China relations aren’t going to make all those other problems worse, might be enough to satisfy both men. “‘Not fighting’ appears to be the new north star of the United States’ new China policy. This policy is defined, in large part, by low expectations, and the pursuit of what the Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy calls ‘a decent peace,’” Michael Froman, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote last week. The symbolism of Trump being accompanied by Musk, Cook, and Huang is not subtle. Apple still depends on China’s manufacturing ecosystem even as it shifts some production abroad. Tesla’s Shanghai factory remains one of the company’s most important assets. Nvidia sees China not as a secondary market but as central terrain in the global AI race. Trump is signaling that America is no longer pushing for economic divorce from China. He is asking for a truce, and to let the money flow more freely in both directions.
Trump has never approached Taiwan with the ideological rigidity common across much of Washington’s foreign-policy establishment, which obsesses over every word used to describe the U.S. position of strategic ambiguity. Beijing knows this. Xi has pledged to acquire the island, one way or another. He may see room to probe whether Trump would soften long-standing rhetoric about Taiwan’s status or inject a measure of conditionality into America’s commitments to defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion in exchange for economic concessions or market access. In the summit’s first hours today, Xi made his stance clear by issuing a warning to Trump that if the Taiwan issue is handled poorly, it could lead to conflict and “an extremely dangerous situation.” Trump remained uncharacteristically silent later, when reporters tried to ask him about the island.
One administration official told us there’s never been an indication either way as to whether Trump views Taiwan as a potential bargaining chip. And to date, Trump has given no sign of departing from Washington’s long-standing stance on Taiwan’s sovereignty. But, the official added, once the conference-room doors in Beijing are closed, “anything is possible.” Even a jet-lagged gaffe on Taiwan might be enough to convince Xi that U.S. resistance has softened.
On Iran, neither Washington nor Beijing wants the prolonged instability in global energy markets that the war and the subsequent wobbly cease-fire have caused. China relies heavily on Middle Eastern oil and has spent years positioning itself as a diplomatic and economic power across the region. China is also one of Iran’s most important backers, offering the regime an economic lifeline in the face of decades of U.S. sanctions.
Some of Trump’s closest allies on Capitol Hill are skeptical that China can help. On Tuesday, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sounded off on China and Pakistan, which is trying to broker a peace deal in the Iran war. He accused both countries of propping up Tehran and said Beijing cannot be viewed as an honest broker given its position as the biggest purchaser of Iranian oil exports. Trump may be desperate enough for a deal to end the war, however, that he seeks to enlist Xi’s help in pushing Iran to the negotiating table while avoiding a broader confrontation over Beijing’s relationship with the regime in Tehran.
That dynamic may capture the larger truth of the summit: The United States and China need each other enough to avoid rupture but distrust each other too deeply to build anything resembling a partnership.