Trump burnt Xi last time. Today, he needs the Chinese president to save him

May 14, 2026 — 5:00am

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

When Donald Trump meets China’s President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Thursday, the most urgent item on their agenda will be ending the Iran war and letting ships pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump needs Xi’s help. Whether he gets it is an open question.

Put simply, China has leverage over Iran because it is the main buyer of Iranian energy exports. If China uses that leverage to press for normalisation of the strategic waterway, it will let Trump off the hook at a critical time in the US election cycle. Trump’s big tech donors want the Republican Party to win the November midterm elections so that he can push aside restrictions on artificial intelligence, data centres, and the hydrocarbons needed to power them. A win now, at the start of the data centre construction boom, would entrench their economic models and set them on a trajectory to long-term power. But the war in Iran is as unpopular today as the Iraq War in 2006, when violence soared, and the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, when public opposition was strongest.

The price of petrol in the US has soared by over 50 per cent since the war started........

© The Age