There will be plenty on the agenda as US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, meet in Beijing: AI, trade, Taiwan and the ongoing crisis in the Gulf, to start with.
The consensus is that Mr Trump, who delayed the summit in the hope that the war with Iran would be over in time for this week’s meetings, arrives with the weaker hand. His capricious behaviour has lowered trust in the US around the world, while China has made huge advances in technology and its leadership fought back against his administration’s tariff policy. Expect negotiations, smiles, but no big public battles – unless something goes badly wrong.
The Iran war weighs heavily over Mr Trump, who for some time has been evidently desperate to declare victory and move on. Some people seem to think that with the right inducements from Washington, Beijing could just order Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. That may be wrong for two reasons. First, it is not clear that China has such leverage over Iran. Second, it has been at great pains to stress that it is not, and has no desire to be, a coercive international actor, and would not want to be seen as such.
I think the misapprehension arises partly because of the way the relationship between China and Iran is often described. As the former State Department official Evan Feigenbaum wrote recently: “When analysts refer to Iran or Venezuela as a Chinese ‘ally’, the word ally is doing so much heavy lifting, since these Chinese partnerships, unlike Washington’s alliances, carry no presumption of obligation or binding security commitment.”
In any case, as The National reported this week, not only does China have a crude reserve of more than 1.4 billion barrels of oil, but there are also at least 100 million barrels of Iranian oil beyond the US blockade and in transit to China. Mr Xi and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi have both called for the return of normal maritime traffic in the Gulf. Naturally so. For their trading and economic models to succeed, “the Chinese leadership craves predictability”, says former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, who is also a Sinologist and Mandarin speaker.
At the same time, Beijing condemned the killing of Iran’s then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at the beginning of the US-Israeli war as a “grave violation” of the country’s sovereignty and security. They won’t mind that men and materiel that were supposedly crucial to US military standing in the Asia Pacific have been diverted to the Middle East, nor that stockpiles of munitions that could have been used in that theatre have been severely depleted. China is still a “close friend” of Iran, as Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi put it last week. Mr Trump may be in a hurry to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Mr Xi? Maybe not so much.
But there is a bigger picture here, one whose canvas stretches to a much further horizon. Mr Trump is not just turning up with a weakened hand. The US’s “failure” thus far in the Iranian war “has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started”, wrote the leading neo-conservative thinker Robert Kagan in an excoriating essay in The Atlantic magazine a few days ago. “That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world … America’s once-dominant position in the Gulf is just the first of many casualties.”
What this means from the perspective of Beijing and East Asia is that this is the first “post-deterrence summit”, as the China expert John Pang puts it. Mr Pang, a senior fellow at the Belt and Road Initiative Caucus for Asia Pacific in Malaysia, argues that the whole US deterrence structure of allies, forward bases and carrier presence had not been tested. Now it has – in the Gulf. “Rather than fortresses, bases are targets. You have a fleet that can’t keep the strait open,” he tells me.
US alliance partners from Europe to the Far East were asked to help open the Gulf. “One by one, they said no, each in their own way. So the alliance system won’t protect you and it won’t come to your aid, especially in a war of choice.” The result? “The US deterrence structure is wrecked.”
Mr Pang believes that the consequences haven’t fully sunk in yet. In a vivid analogy, he likens the situation to the point when a cartoon character runs off a cliff and stays miraculously in the same place, limbs flailing furiously. But the viewer knows he is about to plummet to Earth. Countries in East Asia, including US allies, are all aware, he says, that they will have to deal with military and diplomatic facts that will have to be reordered “in different, multipolar and regional ways”. The only person in the room in Beijing who may not know this, he says, may be Mr Trump.
“The Chinese will be good hosts,” says Mr Pang. “They will be happy to let him have his little victories. They will just wait for the new normality to settle.” What is that? Mr Kagan describes it as an “accelerating adjustment to a post-American world”. Mr Pang says that the US won’t go away, but it will be just another international actor. China, he believes, can “do nothing and still win”.
If that is the true context to the US-China summit as an effect of the Iran war, that may be absolutely fine for Mr Trump’s hosts in Beijing. The visiting American delegation, on the other hand, may be grateful for the hospitality they will doubtless be shown – and try to tell themselves that everything has stayed the same.
