Imagine the scene, at noon on January 20, on the west front of the US Capitol.
As Donald Trump swears to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution on the same spot where his supporters rioted four years ago, an extraordinary VIP guest looks on, overshadowing ex-presidents, military brass and members of Congress.
Bundled up to ward off the winter chill is Xi Jinping, the hardline leader of China — the country almost everyone on the inaugural platform sees as an existential threat to US superpower dominance as a 21st century cold war accelerates.
It’s a fantastical picture, because even before sources on Thursday confirmed Xi wouldn’t attend, it was obvious it could not happen, despite Trump’s stunning invitation to the leader of the Chinese Communist Party for a second inauguration he hopes to turn into a striking global statement.
Getting Xi to fly across the world would be an enormous coup for the president-elect — a fact that would make it politically unfeasible for the Chinese leader. Such a visit would put the Chinese president in the position of paying homage to Trump and American might — which would conflict with his vision for China’s assumption of a rightful role as a preeminent global power. At the inaugural ceremony, Xi would be forced to sit and listen to Trump without having any control over what the new president might say while lacking a right of reply. Xi’s presence would also be seen as endorsing a democratic transfer of power — anathema for an autocrat in a one-party state obsessed with crushing individual expression.
Still, even without a favorable response, Trump’s invitation to Xi marks a significant development that sheds light on the president-elect’s confidence and ambition as he wields power ahead of his second term. CNN’s team covering Trump reported that he’s also been asking other world leaders if they want to come to the inauguration — in a break with convention.
This is a reminder of Trump’s fondness for foreign policy by grand gesture and his willingness to trample diplomatic codes with his unpredictable approach. The Xi invitation also shows that Trump believes that the force of his personality alone can be a decisive factor in forging diplomatic breakthroughs. He’s far from the only president to pursue this approach — which rarely works since hostile US adversaries make hardnosed choices on national interest rather than vibes.
The president-elect’s invitation to Xi is all the more interesting because he’s spent the last few weeks shaping a foreign policy team that is deeply hawkish on China, including his pick for secretary of state, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and for national security adviser, Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, who see China as a multi-front threat to the United States, economically, on the high seas and even in space.
“This is a very interesting move by Trump that fits very well with his practice of unpredictability. I don’t think anyone expected this,” said Lily McElwee, deputy director and fellow in the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). McElwee said the invitation should be seen in the context of sticks and carrots that the president-elect is wielding as he gets ready to take over the world’s most critical diplomatic relationship. “This is a very, very cheap carrot. It’s a symbolic carrot — it disrupts the tone of the relationship a little bit in a way that certainly doesn’t undermine US interests.”
Trump’s outreach to Xi comes as expectations mount that tense US-China relations will get even worse in the coming administration with officials determined to build on an already tough line adopted by the Biden administration, which built on a stiffening of policy during the first Trump term.
The rivals are at odds over Taiwan, an island democracy that China regards as part of its territory and that the United States might or might not defend if Xi orders an invasion. China is increasing its cooperation with other US foes in an informal anti-Western axis alongside Russia, North Korea and Iran. Air and naval forces of the two main Pacific powers often come dangerously close to clashes in the South and East China seas. And lawmakers in both parties accuse China of stealing US economic and military secrets and of failing to live up to international law and trading rules.
Since Trump has already threatened to impose crushing tariffs on China, his attempt to coax Xi to Washington seems like a massive contradiction. And it begs the following question as foreign governments puzzle over how to handle the new US president: How seriously should US allies and adversaries take his bullying tone and volatile policy shifts? Is the true American approach characterized by his hardline officials and policies or is it more accurately represented by the president-elect’s head-spinning moves, which reveal a zeal for deals and sitting at the negotiating table with the world’s tough-guy leaders?
Trump’s first big move in China relations
Trump’s latest gambit might feel chaotic — but that doesn’t mean it can’t work.
While Trump’s critics often condemn his unpredictability, his off-the-cuff moves can tip rivals off balance and open potential advantages for the US. For instance, any success that he has in peeling Xi away from Iran, Russia and North Korea would be a huge foreign policy win notwithstanding other US differences with China.
But at the same time, it’s fair to question whether the fire and fury of his first-term foreign policy delivered durable results.
Trump’s views of China are especially confusing — since he seems to believe that Beijing’s mercantilist policies are a direct threat to the US and that it’s been ripping America off for decades. But he still wants to be buddies with Xi. On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly stressed that Xi was tough and smart and that they were friends — seemingly believing that their cordiality means that the Chinese leader may hold a similar opinion of him.
Trump expressed this contradiction within a single sentence in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC on Thursday. “We’ve been talking and discussing with President Xi, some things and others, other world leaders, and I think we’re going to do very well all around,” Trump said. But he added: “We’ve been abused as a country. We’ve been badly abused from an economic standpoint.”
Trump’s habit of undermining his administration’s tough policy was repeatedly evident in his first term, especially with strongmen like Xi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Sometimes it seemed he took positions simply because everyone was telling him not to.
One of Trump’s former national security advisers, H.R. McMaster, noted in his book “At War with Ourselves” that this was especially pronounced with Putin. “Like his predecessors George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Trump was overconfident in his ability to improve relations with the dictator in the Kremlin,” McMaster wrote. “Trump, the self-described ‘expert dealmaker,’ believed he could build a personal rapport with Putin. Trump’s tendency to be reflexively contrarian only added to his determination. The fact that most foreign policy experts in Washington advocated for a tough approach to the Kremlin seemed only to drive the president to the opposite approach.”
Such contrarianism might be motivating Trump in his early olive branch to Xi. And the president-elect may also forsee a new trade deal with Beijing even if a first-term bilateral pact was largely a bust. The Phase One trade deal he concluded in late 2019 and hailed as “historic” never came to fruition. While Trump turned sharply against Xi months later because of the Covid-19 pandemic that started in the Chinese city of Wuhan, it was never clear that Xi ever intended to fully implement what Trump claimed was large-scale economic structural change and massive purchases of US agricultural, energy and manufactured goods. There’s no evidence Xi has changed his mind.
Trump’s tariff strategy is also in question because no one knows whether a president reluctant to hurt his base is ready to pay a political price that such an approach would entail. Despite his insistence that tariffs would end up costing Beijing billions, higher prices for imports would be passed by US retailers onto consumers — including voters who saw Trump as the best hope of easing high prices for groceries.
Another question: Does Trump see tariffs as a negotiating tactic or a genuine act of economic warfare? Many analysts think his threats against allies like Canada or the European Union are simply meant to improve his negotiating position. But such is the antipathy to China in Washington that trade wars with Beijing could be more enduring and an end in themselves.
“With China, we still have a question mark about whether tariff threats are aimed as negotiating leverage towards a deal, or they are aimed at some sort of unilateral decoupling of the US and Chinese economies?” McElwee said.
Beijing seems to be taking Trump seriously. It’s spent the weeks since Trump’s election readying retaliatory tools. On Wednesday, it announced an anti-trust investigation against US-based chip maker Nvidia. On another front of the tech war, China banned the export of several rare minerals to the United States. And on Thursday, it pledged to increase the budget deficit, borrow more money and loosen monetary policy to safeguard economic growth as a shield against new tensions with Trump.
This shows that a trade war could be disastrous for China as well as America. While tariffs could send prices higher in the US, they could dry up profits and exacerbate some of China’s biggest economic vulnerabilities, including industrial overcapacity and low household demand.
So, Trump’s unorthodox approach may be starting to concentrate minds in Beijing.
Seen from this perspective, Trump’s inaugural invitation looks like an opening chess move in a pan-Pacific great game that will help define his second term.
