Trump and Xi play up stability

President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping emphasized stability on Friday as they met for a second day in Beijing, albeit without clearly resolving any major points of contention on trade, the war in Iran, or other issues.

Sitting beside Xi during a meeting at Zhongnanhai, a walled headquarters for China’s ruling Communist Party, Trump said that the Chinese leader had “become really a friend” and that they felt similarly about the war.

“We’ve settled a lot of different problems that other people wouldn’t have been able to settle,” Trump said, without elaborating.

Xi said he had chosen to receive Trump at Zhongnanhai to reciprocate for his 2017 visit to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s residence and club in Florida. But he avoided wading into specific issues, in contrast to a blunt warning over Taiwan that he issued on Thursday.

The Trump-Xi summit, the first U.S. presidential visit to China in nearly a decade, is a test of whether the detente between the two nations will continue. It has been heavy on public praise and pleasantries. At a lavish state banquet Thursday evening, Trump invited Xi to visit the White House in September.

The White House described a Trump-Xi meeting on Thursday as a “good meeting” and sought to underscore Trump’s priorities, saying that both sides agreed that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open and that “Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.” Trump also told a reporter on Friday that he and Xi had made “fantastic trade deals.”

Xi, in response, said: “To date, we have reached a new stage in bilateral relations and established a relationship with constructive, strategic stability. This can be described as a milestone visit.”

But U.S.-China tensions haven’t been far from the surface.

In formal talks behind closed doors on Thursday, Xi told Trump that the issue of Taiwan, a self-governing island that China claims as its territory, could lead to conflict and “an extremely dangerous situation” if it were handled poorly, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency.

Xi also made a reference to avoiding the “Thucydides Trap” — a concept that suggests that an established power tends to be threatened by a rising one, leading to a clash.

Trump and Xi had last met in October in South Korea, where they agreed to pause a trade war. Before that, China had threatened sweeping new export restrictions on rare earths as retaliation for heavy U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods. Xi agreed in South Korea to postpone those measures for a year. Whether China will agree to an extension remains unclear.

Hours before the Zhongnanhai meeting on Friday, Trump addressed what he described as a suggestion of American decline by Xi.

“When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, and on that score, he was 100% correct,” Trump wrote on social media.

It was not immediately clear whether he was referring to something that Xi had said in public or private. The White House did not immediately respond to questions about what had prompted the post.

The Chinese leader is well known to believe that U.S. power is waning and China’s is growing. Xi’s signature foreign policy theme is hitched to the idea that the world is undergoing “great changes unseen in a century,” meaning the demise of the post-World War II order dominated by the United States.