Trump-Xi meeting: When America meets its match

At the Xi-Trump Summit, the body language will talk more than words. While nothing concrete will likely emerge from negotiations, the idea would be to prevent things from getting any worse. Xi can exert pressure, and Trump will have to tame his deal-making / headline-grabbing instincts.

New Delhi: Two leaders will sit across a negotiating table in Washington DC this week. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s meeting with POTUS Donald Trump will be nothing like the high-voltage dressing-downs first received by Volodymyr Zelenskyy or Cyril Ramaphosa when they visited the White House in 2025. It is also unlikely to see Trump pulling out a chair for his Chinese counterpart, as he did for India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, or the red carpet laid out for Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska.

This week, Trump meets his match in Xi Jinping. He can be neither offensive nor patronising. China has earned its status as a power that the United States must engage as an equal. And it’s not just about the tit-for-tat tariff wars of 2025. Even if the US is a decisively larger economy and arguably a superior military power, Beijing controls critical supply chains that Washington depends upon. This gives the Asian giant a peer-like negotiating position that few other countries can command with Trump.

The US-China relationship is not a conventional alliance, nor is it a contest where one side can simply dictate terms. It is a high-stakes bargain between two powers that need each other, even as they try to constrain one another.

There are a bunch of issues that will likely get discussed. And these will have as much implication on........

© News9Live