How the Trump-Xi meeting became ‘the shrinking summit’

President Donald Trump is arriving in Beijing in a role that he isn’t used to — a supplicant asking for favors.

The White House has said the meeting between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Thursday and Friday will focus on trade, fentanyl and the war in Iran — all areas where the Trump administration has had little luck getting deals or concessions from China.

That means Trump will be hard-pressed to deliver the big outcomes he has promised for weeks. Trump pitched the meeting as “a Monumental Event” in March and announced on Truth Social last month that he expects nothing less than a “big fat hug” from Xi.

Beijing hasn’t provided any summit agenda details. Trump and Xi will discuss “major issues concerning China-U.S. relations and world peace and development,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said Monday. Trump himself has given a variety of answers as to what will be on the agenda. On Monday, he said that Iran and energy were both on the list, while on Tuesday, he walked back those comments before leaving the White House: “We have a lot of things to discuss. I wouldn’t say Iran is one of them, to be honest with you, because we have Iran very much under control.” Instead, he said trade would be the main topic.

“It’s the shrinking summit,” said Zack Cooper, a former assistant to the deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration, who regularly meets with administration and Chinese officials. “It’s pretty clear the Trump team is in a very difficult position and it’s very possible Trump goes to Beijing preoccupied and weakened.”

The Iran conflict and the Supreme Court’s decision in February blocking Trump’s main avenue for imposing tariffs have upended the power dynamic between the two leaders. Trump has less leverage to get Xi to agree to tangible returns from their meeting that the president can peddle as wins when he returns to the United States. And China knows it.

“The confidence that you see from Beijing in recent months that they are negotiating with the United States as equals, if not as the stronger player in the negotiation, is striking,” said Henrietta Levin, former deputy China director at the State Department during the Biden administration. Xi goes into his meeting with Trump empowered by “a perception of U.S. distraction in Iran, and the prospect of the U.S. getting bogged down again in the Middle East,” added Levin, who is in contact with Chinese officials.

That will likely relegate hot button issues that vex the U.S.-China relationship — Beijing’s state subsidies to its industrial sector, its increasingly aggressive military footprint in the Indo-Pacific and the dramatic expansion in its strategic nuclear arsenal — to recitation of existing positions. Instead, the two leaders are expected to focus on extending the trade truce they struck in South Korea in October that suspended retaliatory tariff increases, export restrictions on materials such as critical minerals and a resumption of Chinese purchases of U.S. agricultural products like soybeans.

“We had a certain level of tariff on China. We’re looking for continuity with respect to that,” U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said in an interview. “We want stability.”

Trump is likely to face similar hurdles on Iran. He wants Xi to use his influence with Tehran — China has supplied Tehran with military gear and been a major buyer of Iran’s oil — to push the regime into ending its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz.

“I would expect the president to apply pressure” on Xi regarding Iran during their meeting, a senior administration official told reporters Sunday in a briefing provided on condition that they’d be granted anonymity.

A senior White House official said separately that, already, “China has pressed Iran on coming to a deal.” The official was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

But Beijing’s geostrategic gains from the conflict — diverting U.S. attention from the Indo-Pacific and the shifting of Pentagon assets from Asia to the Middle East — give Xi little incentive to hasten its end. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi bracketed his vague call last week for a “comprehensive ceasefire” with a reminder that Beijing remains Tehran’s “trustworthy strategic partner.”

“China is just going to keep calling for calm and broader descalation,” said Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “I don’t think Beijing is going to stick its neck out to solve a war it didn’t start and it doesn’t control.”

In recent months, senior officials have been focused on avoiding another rupture in ties that spiraled into last year’s tit-for-tat slugfest of sky-high tariffs and export restrictions. In February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the goal is to avoid another trade conflict with Beijing, while Greer spoke of the need for “pragmatic” ties that avoid economic decoupling in April.

“A year ago, there was all the talk about the prospect for some kind of grand bargain between the U.S. and China,” said Jonathan Czin, a former senior China analyst at the CIA who frequently meets with Chinese and U.S. officials. “What I’ve heard over and over again is that maybe little bargains are possible.”

For administration allies, a stable, not-so-splashy summit is a sign that the trip was a success, not a failure.

“It’ll be less about big, flashy announcements and more about establishing a continuity in a relationship that these last 10 years — it’s been these big gyrations, ups and downs,” said Alex Gray, who served in a senior role at the National Security Council in Trump’s first term. “I think the goal is to put it on a more sustainable footing again, while we do some of the hard domestic work to become more resilient over the long term.”

The two leaders will iron out details for two new mechanisms to manage trade in “non-sensitive goods” and to discuss “investment-related issues,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told reporters Sunday. “The two sides will also discuss additional agreements on industry spanning aerospace, agriculture and energy,” Kelly added.

An administration official told reporters at the briefing that Xi and Trump will also discuss aircraft purchases. That suggests the meeting could result in a deal for Chinese purchases of Boeing planes that U.S. ambassador to China David Perdue said was near final in September, per Reuters. (Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg is one of more than a dozen CEOs traveling to China with the U.S. delegation, according to a White House official.)

The two leaders are also expected to discuss extending an agreement they brokered at their most recent meeting in South Korea that lifted Chinese export controls on rare earths essential to U.S. civilian and defense manufacturing. The administration has said it sees this as a way to underscore that what both sides want is stability.

Trump and Xi will also discuss a new U.S.-China dialogue on artificial intelligence, the official said. Washington and Beijing share concerns about security risks posed by the deployment of AI tools in autonomous weapon systems, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month. Discussions that lead to agreements on whether and how AI systems are deployed in combat would align with the agreement that then-President Joe Biden reached with Xi in 2024, which barred the use of AI in the operation of nuclear weapons. The Chinese embassy declined to comment on whether AI will be on the summit agenda.

Such announcements will be difficult to turn into meaningful initiatives that will continue post-summit, argued Liza Tobin, who served as National Security Council director for China during the first Trump administration and the start of the Biden administration.

“I’m expecting more optics than substance out of the summit,” said Tobin, who’s now a fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “I think some of it will be real and most of it will be fake.”

Hanging over any AI discussions will be the race between the U.S. and China to create ever-more sophisticated AI systems, only more acute now that U.S. company Anthropic has developed its highly advanced Mythos model.

Both countries have continued to flex their leverage in multiple areas ahead of the summit. Beijing has imposed new measures targeting supply chains and sanctions compliance, while the administration has taken aim at Chinese refineries that process sanctioned Chinese oil and companies implicated in providing satellite data to the Iranian military. Yet Washington has largely avoided public escalation ahead of the meeting between Trump and Xi and has left tariffs at a comparatively lower level after the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s emergency powers.

“The U.S. has tried very hard to make sure that no announcements are made that could be interpreted by China as adversarial,” said Wendy Cutler, a former U.S. trade negotiator.

A summit that ends with smiles, handshakes and a smattering of trade and economic incentives will likely count as progress by both Beijing and Washington compared to the economic hostility that beset the U.S.-China relationship last year.

“Both leaders have come to the conclusion that they each are better off with a cold peace in the relationship or an unsteady calm than they are by just sort of moving from crisis to crisis,” said Ryan Hass, former director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia at the National Security Council during the Obama administration.

Daniel Desrochers contributed to this report.