Don’t Expect Fireworks From the Trump-Xi Summit

Trump-Xi Summit: What to Expect on AI, Trade, Critical Minerals

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China Brief: Don’t Expect Fireworks From the Trump-Xi Summit

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China Brief

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Don’t Expect Fireworks From the Trump-Xi Summit

Trade, minerals, and AI are on the agenda, but breakthroughs are unlikely.

!Palmer-James-foreign-policy-columnist20

*Palmer-James-foreign-policy-columnist20*

*James Palmer*

By **James Palmer**, a deputy editor at *Foreign Policy*.

!About a dozen members of a U.S. military honor guard stand outside the White House, which looms at a slightly skewed angle in the background. The service members wear formal dress uniforms, including brimmed hats, and carry Chinese and U.S. flags.

*About a dozen members of a U.S. military honor guard stand outside the White House, which looms at a slightly skewed angle in the background. The service members wear formal dress uniforms, including brimmed hats, and carry Chinese and U.S. flags.*

Members of a U.S. military honor guard gather near the White House during rehearsals ahead of a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington on Sept. 19. Graeme Sloan/Getty Images

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September 22, 2026, 4:20 PM

Trump-Xi Summit

FP’s analysis and reporting

Welcome to *Foreign Policy*’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: Chinese President **Xi Jinping** and U.S. President **Donald Trump** prepare to meet in Washington, **purged Chinese military leaders** are officially expelled, and the United States dismantles some of its **top China-focused think tanks**.

Welcome to *Foreign Policy*’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: Chinese President **Xi Jinping** and U.S. President **Donald Trump** prepare to meet in Washington, **purged Chinese military leaders** are officially expelled, and the United States dismantles some of its **top China-focused think tanks**.

Sign up to receive China Brief in your inbox every Tuesday.

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Trump-Xi Summit Preview

This week, U.S. President Donald Trump sat down with the socialist leader of a major economy who he desperately wishes to impress. Oh, and on Thursday, he will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Jokes aside, I don’t expect much to come of the summit. For one, the White House’s preparation for the trip has been unsurprisingly chaotic and incompetent.

More fundamentally, neither side is in a position to try anything dramatic. Trump is increasingly weak on the home front, chastened by Beijing’s decision last year to tighten the screws on critical mineral exports. Meanwhile, China is still reeling from its property crisis and has no appetite for a bigger economic fight, having just staved off Trump’s trade war.

Xi’s task is simply to signal business as usual and avoid setting off a Trump outburst. He has never had much trouble managing the U.S. president, and there is no reason to expect that to change now. There is no official agenda for the meeting yet, but the top priorities are likely to include managing the trade relationship and securing the supply of Chinese critical minerals.

Artificial intelligence is also expected to be on the table, especially after the United States almost seized a Chinese ship last week based on a mistaken intelligence report produced with AI. I’ve already laid out why I don’t think agreement between China and the United States on AI safety is possible, although narrower cooperation might be doable.

One point worth adding—the U.S. tech industry is pushing for a safety framework based on alignment, getting hypothetical superintelligent AI systems to internalize human values. But China favors an approach that is anathema to Silicon Valley: holding companies and executives directly responsible for what they create. That makes agreeing on shared regulatory standards difficult.

I don’t expect the Iran war to be on the agenda. Trump has pulled back from confronting China over its alleged support for Iran, and Xi has no incentive to bring it up. If he intended to use his U.S. trip to position Beijing as a peacemaker, then Xi would presumably be speaking at the United Nations General Assembly—not skipping the in-person convening yet again, as he has since 2015.

Xi will probably press Trump on Taiwan. I would not be surprised if, coming out of the summit, Trump parrots the language of the last impressive person he spoke to, brushes past the United States’ careful ambiguity on Taiwan, and says something he shouldn’t. This would trigger another wave of panic in Taiwan over the potential of U.S. abandonment.

That fear isn’t unfounded, but it cuts both ways politically. Taiwan’s reliance on the promise of U.S. protection has often kept it from taking its own defense seriously and carrying out reforms. It is also worth noting that 2027—which U.S. officials once cited as Xi’s deadline for the Chinese military to be ready to invade Taiwan—is now less commonly mentioned in U.S. security discourse.

That could reflect growing uncertainty about Trump’s commitment to Taiwan—or it may simply mean that the claim, which roughly 83 percent of China experts surveyed in 2022 disagreed with, was never well-founded in the first place.

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What We’re Following

**Purged generals expelled.** One reason for the pullback on the 2027 prediction is the sheer scale of China’s ongoing military purges. Xi has carved holes into the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) leadership, leaving the military unfit for any serious campaign in the