President Donald Trump was waiting, military honor guard and all, when Xi Jinping stepped off his plane. It was the first time in his presidency that he personally received a visiting foreign leader on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews.
So what did Xi do to deserve this unusual honor?
Or, better said, why did Trump flatter Xi’s ego by treating him as the world’s most important visiting dignitary?
Ten years ago, such pomp and ceremony might have been taken as a sign of American weakness and Chinese strength. Today, however, it is clearly the opposite.
China’s initiative to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency is failing. Xi himself was basically sidelined at the recent BRICS summit in India, ultimately skipping the obligatory banquet and leaving a day early.
Xi was said to be tired but I think it more likely that he was tired of being ignored.
The American President giving him this kind of “face” on his arrival in the U.S. not only massaged his ego, but also provided him with useful propaganda fodder for his captive audience back in China. And it costs America nothing.
Trump, on the other hand, has cost China dearly. He has radically reduced China’s inroads into the Western Hemisphere, ousting its agents from Venezuela and the Panama Canal. With the Cuban dictatorship apparently unable to keep the lights on, and China now permanently shut out of Greenland, its losses in the Americas appear certain to keep piling up.
Add to this Treasury Secretary Bessent’s “Economic D-Day” sanctions on Iran. These are disrupting China’s financial ties with the Islamist regime, already strained by its attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, the threat of tolls, and the rising cost of oil. China already pays $25 a barrel more than the rest of the world.
China’s leader also has major headaches back home—anemic consumer spending, a collapsing real estate market, rising unemployment levels, an aging population, and a national debt three times larger than our own.
Some of these problems are of his own making, such as his ongoing purge of senior admirals and generals. Whatever the cause—both corruption and coup attempts come to mind—Xi is effectively decapitating and degrading his own military command and control system.
That’s good for us but very bad for his planned future conquest of Taiwan. It’s hard to see how the Communist leader successfully pulls off an invasion of the democratic island if he has no one qualified to command it.
Increasingly unpopular, he is locking up anyone who questions his rule, from Catholics, Christians, and Falungong to political dissidents and ethnic minorities.
It’s obvious what Xi and his fellow Communist leaders want from the U.S. Between their strident public demands and covert influence operations they have practically given us a list.
They want us to stop the tariffs, stop drilling for oil, stop deploying weapons in space, stop building data centers, stop developing AI, and stop selling defensive weapons to Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines.
Ultimately, they want to stop America’s reindustrialization so that China, not America, dominates the future.
The fact that China is ginning up anger against AI and data centers in the U.S., while moving at breakneck speed to develop and power its own AI systems, proves the case.
A lot of politicians are running to the microphones now and warning us about AI, but this fearmongering is being done for political—and in China’s case, strategic—gain. The bottom line is that our AI has to be able to outsmart China’s in order to keep us safe.
An agreement with China placing limits on AI development is an even worse idea. It would hamstring us and give Beijing an open field to dominate—for the simple reason that they would violate it.
Having been burned by China over trade during his first term, I don’t see Trump making any significant concessions to Xi on AI, or on anything else for that matter.
In fact, the administration’s stated goal for this summit is “strategic stability,” which is to say a continuation of the status quo.
This is the right approach. With the trade and economic policies now in place—short of some dramatic shift—America is now positioned to win the competition with China over time.
This is why Trump was gladhanding the Communist dictator, smiling and calling him his “old friend.” (Calling him America’s “Most Dangerous Adversary” would be more accurate but the president can be very diplomatic when he needs to be.)
Trump understands that, as the saying goes, “you keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”
But after all the feel-good rhetoric and handshakes, Xi is going to leave the same way he came—empty-handed.
Empty-handed, that is, except for the giant sculpture that Trump gifted him with, which depicts the American eagle killing a snake. For China’s Communist dictator the symbolism would have been unmistakable.
Xi Jinping, you see, was born in the Chinese Year of the Snake. And the snake, in Chinese lore, is viewed as a “little dragon,” the dragon being the symbol of China.
Trump gave Xi a statue which says “We will crush you.” And he was smiling the entire time.
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An earlier version of this article appeared in the New York Post and the California Post.
