The global economy hinges on a phone call that hasn’t even been scheduled.
As the Trump administration escalates its trade war, and as China retaliates, the American president and his aides say they are expecting Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, to call.
“I have great respect for President Xi,” Mr. Trump said at a cabinet meeting last week. “He’s been a friend of mine for a long period of time, and I think that we’ll end up working out something that’s very good for both countries.”
But Mr. Xi is ghosting Mr. Trump. He has flown instead to Southeast Asia this week to meet with leaders there to try to persuade them to stand with China in the trade war.
A Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman earlier this month posted a video of Mao Zedong speaking in 1953, during the Korean War, in which China fought the United States: “No matter how long this war is going to last, we will never yield. We’ll fight until we completely triumph.”
A bromance with Mr. Xi that Mr. Trump has desired for years is slipping out of his reach.
With that goes a quick resolution to Mr. Trump’s trade war, tipping the American economy closer to a recession and vaporizing trillions of dollars from the U.S. stock market since he took office on Jan. 20. The trade conflict also threatens to inflame military and diplomatic tensions between the two superpowers.
With Mr. Xi, Mr. Trump’s standard playbook of escalating conflict between two nations to get to a leader-to-leader summit has not worked so far.
Mr. Trump asserts that China has cheated on trade with the United States for decades, but that the world’s two most powerful men can reset relations once they talk on the phone and meet.
It is the kind of high-stakes, man-to-man, prime-time moment that Mr. Trump craves. In his view, the end goal of diplomacy is to have leaders parley to reach deals and secure splashy headlines. Mr. Trump is especially drawn to the idea of becoming partners with Mr. Xi and other autocrats.
But in Mr. Xi, he has encountered an authoritarian leader who steered his nation in a much more nationalistic direction years before Mr. Trump ever took office, and who sees an advantage in fueling those sentiments among Chinese citizens, whether it is on issues of international trade or Taiwan or U.S.-China relations.
Well before the new trade dispute, Mr. Xi, the son of Communist Party royalty, had stressed the need to hit back against what he called America’s growing efforts to undermine party rule. He has even stoked anti-American nationalism by using propaganda around the Korean War.
“Xi has devoted a large part of his presidency to building an image as a defender of national honor and a deliverer of China’s national rise,” said Ryan Hass, a Brookings Institution scholar who was China director on the National Security Council in the Obama administration. “He will go to great lengths to avoid any appearance of being bullied into negotiating with Trump on America’s terms.”
“The Trump administration has appeared confounded by Beijing’s entirely anticipable reaction to Trump’s tariff escalation,” added Mr. Hass, who met with officials and analysts in China this month as Mr. Trump escalated the tariffs. “China’s leaders do not view tit-for-tat tariffs as an isolated trade issue that lends itself to a negotiated resolution.”
Mr. Xi would be reluctant to speak with Mr. Trump unless teams from the two nations first laid a foundation for top-level discussions. That would help ensure the outcome of a conversation is predictable, which is how diplomacy traditionally works.
Mr. Trump is amenable to advance talks by envoys. But even when that takes place, the eventual summit can blow up, as was the case when Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance exploded at Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky at a White House news conference in February.
“Xi fears being treated like Zelensky, plus he doesn’t know what good will come out for him from a call,” said Yun Sun, a China analyst at the Stimson Center. She added that “the mess about the call is a total contest of egos.”
Because Mr. Xi is cautious, she said, Chinese officials prefer sending envoys to Washington to try to persuade Mr. Trump’s aides to get the president to budge on the tariffs. Cui Tiankai, the former ambassador to the United States, tried to do that earlier this month.
“My understanding is that Cui didn’t get through to the administration,” Ms. Sun said.
The Chinese government announced a new trade envoy on Wednesday: Li Chenggang, a former representative to the World Trade Organization and Commerce Ministry official, who took part in trade talks during the first Trump administration.
But the Trump administration is divided over whether having conversations with Chinese counterparts is worthwhile.
One of the loudest voices on trade, Peter Navarro, a White House adviser who shaped China policy in the first Trump administration, is content with a freeze in talks between the two countries. Mr. Navarro, co-author of a book called “Death by China,” has long advocated decoupling the world’s two largest economies. (He served a four-month prison sentence last year for defying a congressional subpoena in a House investigation of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.)
By contrast, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a former hedge fund manager who is sensitive to market turmoil, has said that the two sides should be talking, and that he has “a lot of confidence” in the relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi.
Others in the finance world also urge negotiations: Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, suggested the same in an interview with The Financial Times this week.
“It doesn’t have to wait a year,” he said. “It could start tomorrow.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick insists that the only talk Mr. Trump wants for now is a one-on-one chat with Mr. Xi.
“If we get a contact, we will just pass it to the president, and this is really about him,” he told reporters. “He has said publicly that maybe they don’t really know the best way to go through, but the answer really is, it’s a phone call between the two leaders of these giant countries that they can work it out together.”
In his first administration, Mr. Trump tried this approach with Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea. Initially, Mr. Trump escalated tensions, even threatening military action against North Korea with “fire and fury.” Then the leaders traded what Mr. Trump called “beautiful letters” before eventually meeting at a summit in Singapore in 2018 to discuss a potential halt to Mr. Kim’s nuclear weapons program.
They met again in Hanoi the next year, but failed to reach a deal. Mr. Kim has since continued to build up his nuclear stockpile. The episode revealed the limits in Mr. Trump’s personalized approach to diplomacy.
Yet, Mr. Trump persists in trying that route. He talks about building a partnership with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and meeting with the Russian leader, even as Mr. Putin rejects a full cease-fire deal that Mr. Trump has proposed to bring a 30-day halt to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
And for a few weeks this winter, it looked like Mr. Trump wanted to extend a hand to Mr. Xi, after having talked repeatedly about their so-called friendship on the campaign trail.
In late January, just three days before his inauguration, Mr. Trump called Mr. Xi, who congratulated him on his return to power. Mr. Xi’s vice president attended the inauguration.
But if imposing punishing tariffs was Mr. Trump’s way of getting Mr. Xi to the table with him, it has backfired for now. Mr. Hass said he thought the only way such a meeting could happen was “if it is hosted by a third party with a vested interest in encouraging both leaders to find a face-saving way to climb down from their current confrontation.”
A European nation could play that mediator role. So could Singapore or Vietnam, which hosted the talks between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim and happen to be strong advocates of free trade. Mr. Xi discussed trade with the leader of Vietnam during his visit this week.
But Vietnamese officials still have distinct memories of how the Trump-Kim talks ended: in disappointment at the historic Metropole Hotel in Hanoi.
After the two leaders left without an agreement, all that remained was a desolate conference room with a wooden table and two chairs flanked by the American and North Korean flags. Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump had planned to hold a signing ceremony there.
Mr. Xi, an ally of Mr. Kim, no doubt recalls that history well.
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department.
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