Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

The best thing to say about the U.S.–China summit in Beijing on Thursday and Friday is that our allies’ worst fears didn’t come true. Aside from that, President Donald Trump failed to fulfill his fondest hopes for the meeting, while his host, President Xi Jinping, accomplished his own bedrock goals, though not much more.

Going into the much-ballyhooed session between the world’s two most powerful men, many Asian and European leaders worried that Trump would relax America’s security commitments to Taiwan in exchange for great trade deals that might boost the U.S. economy and his sagging poll ratings back home.

Apprehensions were heightened in the days leading up to the summit because Trump had put off signing a $14 billion arms sales package to Taiwan, explicitly to avoid angering Xi—and possibly to use the package as leverage for some U.S. advantage.

In the end, Trump made no concessions on Taiwan—though neither did Xi offer any lavish trade deals, at least as far as we now know.

Trump boasted to reporters after the summit that he and Xi had made “fantastic” deals, but the only example he cited—Xi’s agreement to buy 200 jet planes from Boeing—was less than impressive. Boeing stock plunged by 4 percent because shareholders had anticipated that China would buy 500 planes.

The American president brought along a bevy of high-tech executives from not only Boeing but Apple, Nvidia, Blackstone, Citibank, GE Aerospace, Meta, Goldman Sachs, and Visa, as well as his on-again, off-again political comrade, Elon Musk. If any of these corporate chiefs signed a deal with anyone, nobody has revealed it. (Not even the claim of a much-reduced Boeing sale has been confirmed by either Boeing or the Chinese.)

Shortly before the summit, on social media, Trump explained his........

© Slate