Trump heads to Beijing with fewer cards to play

When President Trump meets Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, it will look like another great-power summit. It is anything but. The balance has shifted — and not in Washington’s favor.

Trump goes with a weakened hand as the Iran war has boomeranged into a global energy shock. The visit, delayed from March to May as the conflict escalated, is less a show of strength than it is damage control.

The geopolitical landscape has shifted markedly since Trump and Xi first agreed to the Beijing summit last October.

The immediate source of weakness is the war itself. What Washington billed as a short, decisive campaign against China’s closest Middle Eastern partner has instead exposed systemic vulnerabilities in the American way of war, offering Beijing a real-time tutorial in how to exploit them.

Iranian reprisals degraded U.S. air defenses, blinded early-warning systems and left many of its 13 regional bases inoperable. Low-cost drones and missiles imposed disproportionate costs. Chokepoints became contested.

Just as consequential is the drain on U.S. munitions. Precision interceptors, missiles and other high-end systems have been consumed at a pace that has forced the Pentagon to divert stockpiles from Asia, thinning deterrence in the Indo-Pacific just as China’s coercive power expands.

Replenishment will take years, not months. And the problem is not just quantity — the war has exposed deeper weaknesses such as vulnerable forward bases, the difficulty of countering drone swarms and how quickly maritime superiority erodes in narrow seas.

These are not abstract lessons for Beijing. They are a playbook.

The Iran conflict has shown China how asymmetric tools can blunt a superior military, and how control of chokepoints can yield leverage without full-scale war. The implications are clear as Beijing plans for contingencies along the First........

© The Hill