Why Trump’s China Trip Is Set Up to Fail

This is how things will go down. U.S. President Donald Trump will arrive in Beijing next Thursday to be serenaded with gushing pageantry. There’s the obligatory photo op at the Great Hall of the People before closed-door talks with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. Both leaders will emerge to a fanfare of superficial deals that each can claim as a win: the sale of American soybeans and perhaps jet engines that China desperately needs. They release statements pledging cooperation. Wheels up. 

Of course, with Trump’s fragile cease-fire with Iran already cracking in the Strait of Hormuz, significant uncertainty clouds whether his China trip will happen at all. U.S. commanders-in-chief don’t typically gladhand their chief adversary while ensnared in a costly and floundering war. Trump is, however, no slave to convention, especially considering the ugly optics of postponing the trip a second time. What is much more certain is that nothing substantive will materialize from the summit.

“I’m skeptical that you’ll get any outcomes,” says Drew Thompson, a former director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and currently a scholar at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Allen Carlson, a China expert at Cornell University, agrees: “The chance of anything of substance emerging from these talks is little more than zero.” 

That might be surprising given the world finds itself beset by serious problems, not least oil shortages caused by the double-blockaded Strait of Hormuz portending a global recession, warns the IMF. But despite half of China’s oil and almost a third of its liquefied natural gas imports transiting the Strait, and some 13% of pre-war oil imports coming from Iran directly, Beijing has so far weathered the disruption surprisingly well. This is due largely to its gigantic reserves, a strategy of developing fossil and non-fossil energy sources in tandem, and building out overland oil and gas pipelines. As such, Xi can feel rightly smug, especially in comparison to beleaguered U.S. allies, and is unlikely to exert himself trying to solve the crisis.

“China is in a pretty comfortable position,” says Jonathan Sullivan, director of China programs at the Asia Research Institute of U.K.’s Nottingham University. “It has weathered the energy crisis better than I imagine people expected and is watching the U.S. get embroiled in a mess of its own making.”

Of course, despite the high stakes, inertia is to be expected. The usual pattern for U.S. Presidents is that they arrive in the White House confident they can strike a grand bargain with China over persistent bugbears, such as state subsidies, dumping goods, and market access in areas like financial services. However, despite endless talks, Beijing never budges, and eventually domestic concerns take precedence as midterms loom.

Take China’s export of fentanyl precursors, which the Drug Enforcement Agency first flagged as a serious problem back in 2015. Despite a decade of dialogue and countless handshakes the fact is progress has been minimal, with both sides continuing to exchange barbs on the issue at the U.N.’s annual Commission on Narcotic Drugs in early March. But there are countless other examples: religious rights, the crackdown on Tibetans and Uyghur Muslims, IP theft, an undervalued renminbi, eroding freedoms in semiautonomous Hong Kong, military assistance to Russia, support for North Korea, aggression toward self-ruling Taiwan, and cyber espionage. It’s hard to point to meaningful progress on any of them.

“You can make the case that it’s really important for the two most important countries in the world to get together and talk about high matters of state,” says Nick Bisley, a professor of international relations at Australia’s La Trobe University. “But if the past is any evidence, the Chinese will not follow through to any great degree.”

Admittedly, Trump has made plain he has zero interest in human-rights issues, which would appear to remove a swathe of the usual contentions, and will instead be laser-focused on economic matters. However, Xi won’t give ground there either. After all, it is baked into the system. All of China’s sacrosanct Five-Year Plans—including the latest published in March—make plain the Chinese Communist Party’s dogged determination toward self-reliance, while flashy state economic strategies such as Made in China 2025, China Standards 2035, and Dual Circulation underscore the primacy of growth over reciprocity. Even when progress is made—like 2017’s commitment to allow American credit cards into China—Beijing is dilatory on execution. (They still haven’t been.)

“When you get down to real, serious issues, whatever concessions China makes will be nominal and not necessarily implemented,” says Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London. “But does Donald Trump care? Winning for him is just something he can post on Truth Social.”

Indeed, a critical eye is especially important when appraising any deal announced. Take soybeans as another example. It was just in October that China agreed to purchase 12 million metric tons of American soybeans in the last two months of 2025, as well as at least 25 million metric tons annually through 2028. The first part of that deal was (belatedly) honored, though China is falling far short on this year’s commitment, instead hoovering up much cheaper Brazilian alternatives. But even were those terms met, that would still be 14% lower than the five-year average of 29 million tons of soybean American farmers sent to China from 2020 to 2024.

The futility of negotiations is now an open secret. In 2006, President George W. Bush started the U.S.–China Strategic Economic Dialogue with grandiose goals of being a “G2,” as one former official put it. It was expanded by Obama three years later into the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, but it was discontinued in 2017. Likewise, the Joint Committee on Commerce and Trade was established back in 1983 but had its last meeting in 2016. “It was never formally disbanded, but the two sides simply gave up,” says Thompson. “There’s real dialogue fatigue.”

Of course, observers may point to the fact that these fora received their last rites under the first Trump Administration. But more telling is that neither were revived under Joe Biden, who continued Trump’s hawkish posture albeit more strategic and polished. While Trump broke protocol by coming into office in 2016 brandishing tariffs and threats from the getgo, Biden also took a singular path by barely engaging at all, becoming the first sitting U.S. President since the normalization of relations not to visit the People’s Republic.

But while the foreign policy of Trump’s first term was very focused at bashing China, his second has been scattergun, with military strikes on at least nine countries, threats to invade Greenland, Canada, and Panama, as well as economic and diplomatic spats with the U.K., E.U., and many others. While Beijing has not been immune to these broadsides, it has been far from a primary target, which has surprised many since there’s no shortage of China hawks in Trump’s inner circle. That anti-Beijing sentiment, however, isn’t matched by actual China expertise, which has been gutted from the State Department.

It hasn’t helped that Trump’s favorite diplomatic cudgel—tariffs—was blunted by February’s U.S. Supreme Court decision against his overzealous wielding of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. But in recent months Trump has also made significant concessions to Beijing, agreeing to sell Nvidia’s advanced AI-powered semiconductor chips to China, while suspending a $13 billion arms sale to self-ruling Taiwan. “It’s a real headscratcher,” says Bisley. “The world’s most powerful country is run by a government that cannot do strategy. That’s the only conclusion you can reach at this stage.”

Still, Taiwan is where curveballs may appear. There have been murmurs that Beijing will attempt to cajole Trump into saying that the U.S. “opposes” Taiwan independence to demonstrate Washington is still committed to dual deterrence of any change to the status quo. “But I don’t think there is much optimism,” says Sullivan. “More likely the Chinese will state their position regarding Taiwan and maybe the Americans don’t explicitly challenge it.”

Regarding AI, there is objectively an imperative for collaboration on guardrails between the two countries that propagate nearly all leading foundation models. Indeed, one of the few agreements between Xi and Biden—other than restoring military-to-military communications and climate talks—came in November 2023 on the sidelines of the APEC summit in San Francisco, where they agreed to keep AI out of nuclear weapons systems.

But given the Trump Administration’s more cavalier approach to AI—framing the technology as a strategic advantage to lean into rather than peril to guard against—it remains unlikely the two sides can advance substantive cooperation on risk mitigation. Indeed, AI is already becoming yet another source of entrenched tension, with the White House just this week accusing China of “industrial-scale” theft of American AI models, and Beijing blocking Meta’s acquisition of Chinese-founded AI firm Manus.

Fortunately, perhaps, next week is far from a crunch, all-or-nothing gathering, with Trump and Xi due to meet several more times this year. These include a possible state visit by Xi and his wife to Washington in September, Trump traveling to Shenzhen for November’s APEC, and Xi returning to the U.S. the following month for the G20 in Miami. Expect each of these to be swathed in pageantry—but not much more than that.

“It is precisely this lack of substance that defines the summit’s purpose,” adds Carlson. “Absent any real content, both men can declare victory without sacrificing much of anything. The summit itself is then the thing.”