How Trump is blowing it with Xi

He loves strongman-to-strongman diplomacy - but he's so bad at it

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One of the big plotlines of the new administration is Trump finding out that the world’s strongmen are just not that into him.

It’s been happening with Vladimir Putin, whose refusal to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine is causing Trump to plaintively whine “Vladimir, stop!”

But it’s also been happening in a more low-key way with Xi Jinping. Since even before he began his trade war on ‘Liberation Day’, Trump has been desperate to have a phone call with Xi to iron the trade dispute out.

The White House says a call is coming today. But it’s been saying that one is coming up soon for a long time. In fact, Trump even seems to have lied about speaking to Xi a few months ago. But even if it does finally happen, it’s not likely to have the result that Trump wants.

This obsession with having a call is a product of Trump’s personalistic style of diplomacy. He likes to do things strongman to strongman. He’s also convinced he’s a master dealmaker, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

But there’s a big problem. Trump’s obsession with getting a one-on-one call with Xi misunderstands how China - and its leader - do diplomacy. In fact, I can count at least four ways in which it’s a major blunder.

The first problem is the way that Trump has been treating world leaders of late. He ambushed both Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office, trying to embarrass them in the eyes of the world. For Beijing, putting Xi on the phone with Trump risks the same sort of treatment - and perhaps having it broadcast to the world.

For a regime that tightly choreographs every single aspect of its supreme leader’s public appearances, that would be disastrous. Even when Xi speaks to U.S. presidents, he reads verbatim from pre-prepared talking points. He is acutely aware of the reputational risk of engaging with someone like Trump, and he’s only going to do it if absolutely necessary.

The second problem is that Trump doesn’t understand how decision-making and negotiation works in the Chinese regime. Xi is the center of a personality cult in a continent-spanning party-state. He’s not the sort of guy who is going to start bartering over soybean quotas.

It’s not that Xi isn’t ultimately calling the shots. He is. But unlike Trump, he also likely recognizes that this sort of negotiation is complex, time-consuming, and fraught with political risks. Even though he is unusually ignorant of policy details, Trump likes to pretend that he alone is the one cutting the “deals”. It’s unlikely Xi is going to play that game.

Indeed, in the early months of the administration, before Liberation Day, lower-level Chinese officials were apparently engaged in ceaseless outreach to the lower ranks of the Trump administration. They were trying to figure out what the administration wanted in order to ward off tariffs. The administration ignored them. That was a major mistake.

The third problem is to misunderstand the way the Chinese regime uses communication. As I wrote about during the Biden administration, Beijing has frequently used the refusal to talk as a diplomatic tactic. It seems to be a way of signalling displeasure with American policies, and leaving American presidents to stew.

In this case, Xi has plenty of incentive to use this tactic. Trump keeps backing away from tariffs that he has imposed on various industries and countries, seemingly out of fear of what they will do to the U.S. economy. So far Trump in his trade war, Trump is mainly negotiating with himself - and he’s losing.

As anyone who has seen the taco memes knows, this has shredded Trump’s credibility. The Chinese tariffs in particular are going to do a lot of damage to the U.S. economy, particularly when combined with the counter-measures that Beijing has taken. In fact, by his very desperation to get on the phone with Xi, Trump is only reinforcing this fact - he needs a deal, and badly.

On tariffs, Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO)

And this leads to the fourth problem. The China of today is not the China of 2018. In some ways, its economy is softer. It is struggling to meet its growth targets. But in other ways, it is much better prepared for a trade war than it was in Trump’s first term.

China nowadays sends fewer of its exports to the United States and other G7 countries and more to the Global South. It has a host of tools to use to retaliate against the United States, from export controls to blacklists and anti-monopoly laws. It has already put export restrictions on critical minerals and magnets, products which the West depends on China for.

At the same time, Trump is doing little to reduce that dependence. In fact, his allies in Congress are busy shredding Biden’s industrial policy, which provided subsidies and other incentives to develop some of this manufacturing capacity in the United States. So Trump isn’t signalling that he even has a plan to reduce dependence on China in the long term, which only strengthens Beijing’s hand.

Xi also has a stronger will than Trump, and it’s easier for him to control dissent. During his rule, he has taken many actions which have harmed economic growth for the sake of increasing party control or decreasing dependence on external trade. Now that a major confrontation with the United States is here, he’s unlikely to be in a mood to fold - unlike Trump.

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