Air Force One departs for Beijing on May 14. Between now and then, President Trump must decide whether he lands in the Forbidden City under a sustained ceasefire or with a war reopened and closed. No third option would serve him at the table with President Xi.

The summit with Xi Jinping is fixed for May 14 and 15. The trip was originally scheduled for late March and pushed back as the Iran war absorbed the administration’s bandwidth. It cannot be delayed again. The Chinese have prepared the protocol. The cabinet has cleared the calendar. The news cycle has been positioned around it.

Diplomatic activity continues without convergence. The Islamabad talks collapsed in April. Iran passed a fresh proposal through Pakistani mediators in early May. On May 5, President Trump announced “great progress” and ordered a pause to US naval escorts in Hormuz, while the Iranian foreign minister landed in Beijing. On May 6, Trump posted on Truth Social that if Iran agrees to terms, Operation Epic Fury ends and the strait reopens. He paired the offer with a threat: “If they don’t agree, the bombing starts, and it will be, sadly, at a much higher level and intensity than it was before.”

Diplomacy without convergence becomes delay. Delay is never neutral when the deadline is Beijing.

The American military posture, however, has consolidated rather than relaxed. The US Navy has imposed a blockade on Iranian ports since April 13. Project Freedom deployed guided-missile destroyers, more than 100 aircraft, and unmanned platforms to escort commercial shipping through Hormuz. On May 4, two US destroyers transited under coordinated Iranian fire, defended by Apache helicopter air support.

The words have de-escalated. The force has remained.

The asymmetry of arrival

Trump arriving with the war still open arrives as a supplicant. He needs Xi to press Tehran, restrain Chinese military exports to Iran, contain the energy shock squeezing the global economy. China’s leverage is structural. Beijing imports roughly one-third of its oil and gas through Hormuz, and has spent the war pricing that leverage rather than spending it.

David Shambaugh has warned that Xi will use the meeting to seek shifts in declaratory US policy on Taiwan, including changes to the precise vocabulary that has anchored American strategic ambiguity for decades. A weak arrival makes those concessions cheaper. Concessions on Taiwan tend to last beyond the administration that grants them.

Trump arriving with three deliverables in hand inverts the dynamic: a regime in Tehran further weakened, the strait under American........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)