5 takeaways from Trump’s trip to China

The most important foreign trip of President Trump’s second term to date concluded on Friday as he flew back to Washington from China.

Trump had been met with great pageantry as he arrived for his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, but the warmth of the welcome was offset by obvious tensions — over the war in Iran, the fate of Taiwan and the terms of trade between the two economic superpowers.

The president was also treading something of a fine line, visibly enjoying such a high-profile foreign visit while his approval ratings sag at home, in part because of the Iran conflict. 

The visit to China had previously been scheduled for six weeks prior but had been postponed owing to the war launched against Iran by the U.S. and Israel on Feb. 28.

Here are the big takeaways from Trump’s visit.

No big breakthrough on Iran — or anything else

There was little tangible progress on the central issue of the war.

The imperative from Washington’s side is to get Beijing to lean more heavily on Iran, both to reopen the vital Strait of Hormuz and to take a more conciliatory approach in the negotiations that could end the conflict.

But China experts argued, even in advance of the Trump-Xi meeting, that Beijing was highly unlikely to do this out of some nebulous spirit of cooperation. The best that could be hoped for, according to this consensus, was that China might be open to a bargaining process, teasing out what it might get from Trump in return for helping on Iran. 

There doesn’t appear to have been much bargaining — or any agreement.

The Chinese side barely mentioned Iran at all in its official readouts of the meetings, while Trump confined himself mostly to generalities about how both sides would like to see the strait open. 

That may be true, but the question of what China was going to do — if anything — to accomplish this objective remained unclear.

Asked about the issue on Air Force One during his return........

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