Rapport is key when Trump and Xi sit down
• US will bring a lot of demands and high expectations to world’s most important relationship
US President Donald Trump got his chance on Thursday to confront the leader of the nation he blames for stealing millions of US jobs and helping North Korea’s march towards a nuclear missile.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Mar-a-Lago in Florida is the first real test of Trump’s campaign promises to win negotiations with the US’s chief economic and military rival. After defeats on his travel ban and Obamacare repeal, Trump wants to show progress in countering North Korea’s threat and opening Chinese markets to more US goods.
“We have not been treated fairly on trade for many, many years,” Trump reiterated on Thursday morning in a Fox News interview. “We have a big problem with North Korea.”
Asked if he would have leverage with his Chinese counterpart, Trump replied: “We’ll be in there pitching and I think we’re going to do very well.”
Yet the world’s most important international relationship could hinge above all on what kind of rapport Trump and Xi can build.
“They should be happy if they get something fairly symbolic,” said Jacques deLisle, who teaches Chinese law and politics at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “Now, is that a real big victory? No. But I think the victory for everybody is to keep the relationship from going off the rails.”
TOUGH TALK
Trump enters the meeting talking tough. He said on Twitter last week that talks would be “difficult” due to US manufacturing job losses he blames on the world’s second-largest economy and the yawning trade deficit between the countries.
He signalled he was out of patience on North Korea, saying in a Financial Times interview published on April 2 that the US could act on its own to resolve the crisis over North Korea’s nuclear programme.
His administration is also trying to prevent Chinese investors from obtaining the nuclear reactor construction business of Westinghouse, the Toshiba unit that declared bankruptcy on March 29.
“I think we’re going to have a very interesting talk,” Trump told US business leaders on Tuesday. “We have to do better,” he said, calling the more than $300bn annual US-China trade deficit “enough for a lifetime”.
But the summit comes at a low ebb in the Trump administration, after House Republicans could not gather enough support for a vote on legislation to scale back Obamacare and Trump’s ban on travel by six predominantly Muslim nations was again blocked by courts.
Trump’s approval rating was at 38% for the week to April 2, the lowest of his presidency, according to Gallup.
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort offers a setting for low-pressure conversation. After dining at Trump’s club on Thursday with their wives, the two leaders are likely to spend Friday in a series of working sessions. There may also be a stroll around the grounds of the resort.
NUCLEAR TEST
The summit could be upended, however, by a literal explosion. South Korean intelligence has warned that North Korea could conduct its sixth nuclear bomb test in the first week of April to “overshadow” the meeting.
That would reprise a tactic North Korean leader Kim Jongun employed in February, when a Trump summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Mar-a-Lago was disrupted by reports of a missile test.
“It’s possible that Kim has plans to interrupt another dinner,” said David Dollar, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a former US treasury attache in Beijing.
North Korea’s pursuit of a nuclear missile capable of striking the US is the most pressing issue in the relationship. Administration officials briefing reporters said the clock had almost expired.
Trump has repeatedly placed blame on China, which provides crucial economic support to the Kim Jong-un regime, saying Xi could curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions but had refused.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Japan and South Korea in March and said the US would consider all options, including pre-emptive military action, to prevent North Korea from attacking the US or its allies with nuclear weapons.
China has called for the resumption of diplomatic talks over the nuclear threat and has objected to the US deployment of a missile defence system in South Korea.
Doug Paal, vice-president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said Xi might offer to take some limited action against North Korea.
“I’ve heard from inside China that after Tillerson’s visit, they really did scratch their heads on how they can do more on North Korea,” said Paal, who served as White House director of Asian affairs in the Reagan and George HW Bush administrations.
“They’re not going to deliver Kim Jong-un’s head on a platter. But they are looking to see if there are areas where they can do more.”
Paal, who was briefed by Trump administration officials in advance of the trip, said the White House might have set its expectations too high.
“They are talking about setting deadlines for fixing the problem. Well, good luck with that at this kind of meeting,” he said. “It sounds to me like they have a very undeveloped, or you might say immature, sense of what you can do in meetings like this and how you work a relationship with China.”
TRADE DEFICITS
On March 31, Trump signed an executive order requiring a comprehensive study to identify every form of “trade abuse” that contributes to US deficits with other countries.
The $347bn deficit with China in 2016 accounted for almost half of the total US trade deficit. At the same time, China is among the top three export markets for 33 US states.
The Chinese will try to deter Trump from following through on campaign promises to impose tariffs against China and label the country a currency manipulator.