Trump to China: strategic rivalry and political necessity
In June 1997, then-United States Senator Joe Biden, returning from a trip to Moscow where he had gone to reassure the Kremlin about the expansion of the Atlantic Alliance, told reporters that the Russians did not want “to even hear about this NATO expansion”, and admitted that Moscow had warned him that, if it happened, Russia's response would be to “turn to China”. Biden, taking for granted that a Sino-Russian rapprochement was unthinkable, boasted of having replied: “You know what? Good luck with that! And then, if it doesn't work out, you try Iran!” Biden's words made an audience laugh, unable to imagine, from Washington, a world in which Beijing would become a global pole of attraction. Three decades later, the world is being reconfigured around China and Donald Trump is caught in a war in Iran, with military impact throughout the region and the capacity for global economic disruption.
The confrontation between the United States and China for world hegemony is experiencing an important face-to-face this week with Trump's trip to Beijing. It is the first visit of a US president to China in almost a decade, and it comes at a crucial moment for the world's two largest economies: with Trump pressured by the war in Iran and by internal socio-economic unrest that threatens the midterm elections next November; and with China in a strong position, having achieved record export figures thanks to the consolidation of new trade agreements in a world heading towards diversification of alliances and reducing dependence on the United States.
It is precisely because of this Chinese preeminence that the last American administrations, both Democratic and Republican, have been obsessed with the rise of a China that has managed to occupy the power vacuums left by a retreating US. Xi Jinping travels abroad less and less, but the world parades through Beijing: leaders from Canada, India, the United Kingdom, and several EU countries have visited in the last year. This Thursday morning, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping will come face-to-face at the Temple of Heaven, a 15th-century religious complex that symbolizes the relationship between Earth and Heaven. It will be the moment to gauge the willingness for understanding of two powers in full commercial, technological, and geopolitical confrontation.
Faced with Trumpist volatility, China has become the defender of a stable global order. Beijing's strong economic ties with Tehran have led the Chinese to prioritize diplomatic efforts to achieve a ceasefire, however fragile, so as not to further harm the economy of one of the main importers of Iranian crude oil. For this reason, Iran will be present on Xi's welcome agenda for the American leader who has militarily attacked two of its main hydrocarbon suppliers in recent months. The Chinese president has always been wary of the Republican's unpredictability, ever since his first visit to Trump, during his first term in 2017. Coinciding with Xi's arrival at Mar-a-Lago, the United States launched a major round of missile attacks against Syria, which left the members of the Chinese delegation uncomfortably confined to their plane as they tried to interpret the timing and significance of a military action that inevitably slipped onto the agenda of that meeting. Xi wants no surprises.
This time Trump is seeking, above all, economic headlines. That's why he is traveling accompanied by the executives of multinationals such as Boeing or Citigroup, and will seek large-scale Chinese purchase commitments of American goods, whether in agriculture, energy, transport or semiconductors. The meeting will, therefore, serve to test the fragile commercial truce between Washington and Beijing, two powers determined to decouple from each other.
The feeling in Washington, however, is that China has no incentive at the moment to make commercial concessions to the United States because, the closer the midterm elections get, the more Trump will need to be able to sell results and the easier it could be for Beijing to achieve a better deal. Time is on the side of a China that governs itself with a completely different temporal logic than that of weakened electoral democracies. For now, Trumpist rhetoric has already offered it the best recognition of all: a bipolar vision of the world that confronts China and the United States as equals. A G-2 that exercises strategic rivalry but which this week will dress up as transactional thawing.