Last week marked one of the most important events on Donald Trump’s foreign policy calendar. The president sat down in Beijing for a much-anticipated meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

All signs looked positive before the summit, with some commentators comparing it to Richard Nixon’s famous China trip in 1972.

We don’t yet have a full readout of how the meeting went, but the president himself indicated that he and Xi discussed, among other weighty subjects, Iran, Taiwan and the global economy. 

This is encouraging. Trump’s main goal in Beijing was to put America first, and that meant insisting China change its behavior on all three of those issues — forcefully if necessary.

Start with the war in Iran. China has made a point of supposedly staying on the sidelines, positioning itself as a peacemaker. The reality is that Beijing has been aiding and abetting the Iranians for months in increasingly bold and dangerous ways.

Just last week, China invoked a “blocking statute” to make known it wouldn’t respect U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil that have been imposed since the start of the war. Despite the Strait of Hormuz being closed, Iranian oil exports continue to transit through and an estimated 90% of them go to China.

When the oil reaches the Chinese mainland, small plants known........

© Independent Journal Review