Trade, Iran, Taiwan in focus

President Donald Trump’s face-to-face meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping is a high-stakes meeting full of risk along with reward.

The meetings in Beijing, set for Thursday and Friday, could be a watershed moment for the adversarial superpowers, whose fragile relationship has been snarled up by a flurry of economic and political conflicts in the past year alone.

The lingering Iran war and a longstanding dispute over Taiwan are also expected to loom large over Trump and Xi’s discussions. Each of those thorny issues affects not just Washington and Beijing, but the rest of the world.

“The stakes are extraordinarily high,” said Professor Arthur Dong, a China expert and professor of strategy and economics at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.

Trump is leaning into the hype. “Great things will happen for both Countries!” he wrote in a Truth Social post Monday.

For China, however, Trump’s visit is just the latest in a series of high-profile meetings with implications for geopolitics. An Iranian official met with his Chinese counterparts in Beijing last week, and Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to visit the city days after Trump leaves.

Analysts of U.S.-China relations say they are keeping their expectations for deliverables out of the meeting low, as each side has incentives to try to thaw tensions and avoid international incidents.

Trump and Xi want to “reconfirm their relationship and have that kind of stability,” said Kyle Chan, an expert on U.S.-China relations at the Brookings Institution. “All the other stuff is gravy.”

The White House is framing the meeting in terms of trade and the U.S. economy.

Trump’s chief goal is to continue “rebalancing the relationship with China and prioritizing reciprocity and fairness to restore American economic independence,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told reporters Sunday.

The stakes will be high for the summit, and every word out of each leader’s mouth will be parsed. Here’s what to watch out for:

In the days after the U.S. and Israel first attacked Iran on Feb. 28, some experts thought the offensive might boost Trump in his meeting with Xi, which at the time was scheduled to take place in late March and early April.

Less than two weeks later, Trump said the U.S. had asked China to delay the summit in light of the Iran war.

Now, with the war dragging on far longer than the Trump administration’s previous prediction of a four-to-six-week endeavor, some see China gaining a positional advantage.

“It provides China a degree of leverage,” Dong said, noting that Beijing is Iran’s largest trade partner and the top buyer of its oil.

“China has a significant amount of influence over Iran,” he said. Should Trump seek to end the conflict as it currently stands, “China is definitely going to have a role to play.”

China has steered clear of directly involving itself in the war, though it engaged in diplomacy last week, hosting Iran’s foreign minister for the first time since the war began.

Trump’s political standing, however, appears increasingly linked to the conflict.

The war has triggered a historic global energy supply shock, spiking prices for oil and gas, fertilizer and other products in the U.S. and around the world. As U.S. gas prices have swelled, Trump’s approval ratings have fallen among Americans for whom high prices are a top concern. Numerous polls show Americans also oppose the war itself, potentially tightening Trump’s political flexibility.

Dong also said the U.S.’s efforts in Iran have drawn its focus away from the Pacific, potentially creating vulnerabilities for Taiwan, a U.S. ally and major semiconductor manufacturer, that China may soon seek to exploit.

“If China were to contemplate an attack, this might be the opportune moment to do it,” the professor said.

Even if China doesn’t take that action, there are other Taiwan-related trip wires that Trump will have to avoid during his time with Xi.

The Chinese are “super focused” on “any kind of language shift on Taiwan from Trump,” Chan said.

The U.S. has a nuanced position on Taiwan: It acknowledges that Beijing believes Taiwan is a part of China, and it asserts that there is only one Chinese government. But it also maintains a strong, though unofficial, commercial and cultural relationship with Taipei, and it has kept vague about whether it would defend Taiwan if it is attacked.

Trump, who frequently speaks off the cuff in official remarks and is known for going on long, extemporaneous tangents, could risk falling off that diplomatic tightrope if he treads too far afield.

“There’s been some fears in Washington that Trump would make some kind of comment, [or] agree to a language change on how the U.S. views Taiwan’s status, that would be in line with what Beijing is hoping for,” Chan said.

China could seize on any such deviation to bolster its position toward Taiwan, he said.

Trump on Monday gave an example of how that situation could play out, when he was asked at the White House if he expects Taiwan to come up in his talks with Xi.

“Yeah, it always comes up,” he said, before immediately pivoting to Russia’s war in Ukraine, which he frequently claims would never have started if he were president at the time.

“Taiwan, I equate it a little bit to that,” he said. “You have the right president, I don’t think it’ll happen, I think we’ll be fine. I have a very good relationship with President Xi, [who] knows I don’t want that to happen.”

Trump then noted that China is geographically far closer to Taiwan than the U.S. is, adding, “there’s a lot of support for Taiwan, from Japan and from countries from that area.”

Asked if the U.S. should keep selling weapons to Taiwan, Trump said, “President Xi would like us not to, and I’ll have that discussion. That’s one of the many things I’ll be talking about.”

Trump added that he and Xi have gotten along well, calling him an “amazing man.”

A senior U.S. official told reporters Sunday in a call previewing the trip that the U.S. does not foresee any changes in U.S. policy toward Taiwan.

While geopolitical turmoil may be hogging the spotlight, the fraught U.S.-China economic relationship is set to be the dominant theme of the summit.

Washington and Beijing were locked in an acrimonious trade war last year, with much of the strife centered on Trump’s aggressive, shapeshifting tariff policies and China’s retaliations.

Tensions cooled in the fall following talks with U.S. trade negotiators and their Chinese counterparts. Trump’s liberal use of tariffs was curtailed in February, when the Supreme Court struck down his global “reciprocal” tariffs as unconstitutional.

Now, some U.S. companies are hoping to parlay the Trump-Xi summit into new purchasing agreements.

The White House said Monday that top executives — including Tesla chief Elon Musk, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Larry Fink of BlackRock and Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg — will head to China this week as part of a U.S. delegation.

That entourage of more than a dozen business leaders is smaller than the one that accompanied Trump during last year’s trip to Saudi Arabia, when more than 30 U.S. executives tagged along.

Ortberg said in an earnings call late last month that China could soon place an order for a “big number” of planes, breaking a yearslong drought for the U.S. aircraft giant after Chinese purchases from rival Airbus.

Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser, who is also attending, told Bloomberg in November that her company is seeing renewed interest from Chinese investors.

Experts also anticipate that Trump and Xi may announce a Chinese purchase of U.S. soybeans or other agricultural products that Beijing had boycotted during the trade war, inflicting pain on U.S. farmers.

“The American people can expect the president to deliver more good deals on behalf of our country,” the White House’s Kelly said Sunday.

Expected topics of discussion include the creation of a bilateral board tasked with managing trade between the two countries, and another group intended to “provide a government-to-government forum for discussing investment-related issues,” she said.

“The two sides will also discuss additional agreements on industry, spanning aerospace, agriculture and energy,” Kelly said.

Aside from making progress on trade deals with China, one of the Trump administration’s top hopes for the summit could be to clinch agreements on rare earths used in the burgeoning semiconductor industry.

China’s tight export controls on the valuable materials inflamed tensions with the U.S. last year.

“I think it’s ultimately what is driving the Trump administration’s eagerness to have this good relationship with China,” Chan said.