What the Trump-Xi summit means for everyone else

When the heads of the world’s two most powerful nations sit down together next week, the rest of the globe has reason to watch closely.

Whatever China’s Xi Jinping and America’s Donald Trump decide in Beijing could carry consequences far beyond their own borders.

The meeting comes amid intensifying debate over which country – China or the United States – will seize the commanding heights of this century’s defining technologies, especially artificial intelligence, and with them a decisive edge in global power.

Hardliners in Beijing increasingly cast the US as a fading hegemon, weighed down by surging national debt, strained alliances, deep political division and the fallout from yet another military entanglement in the Middle East.

Washington has its own hawks, and many warn that the US risks being “leapfrogged” by China.

Others in the US capital, however, see a different balance of power – one defined by American military technological superiority in theatres such as Venezuela and Iran, China’s continued reliance on advanced chips designed in the US, and mounting economic, political and demographic pressures inside China itself.

It is well established that, after years of strict enforcement of the One-Child Policy, China’s population is shrinking sharply, while the double-digit expansion that fuelled its meteoric rise has long since faded.

As the saying goes, China is growing old before it grows rich.

At the same time, sweeping purges within the Communist Party, including among top military figures, suggest turbulence at the highest levels of power.

So as China and the US compete for superpower primacy – bound together economically even as each probes for the other’s weak points – countries such as Ireland are left watching and waiting to see how events unfold.

This is a moment of profound global upheaval – alliances are being rearranged, new economic blocs are emerging and the old rules, long vital to the success of smaller states, are steadily eroding.

We are moving into an era where power increasingly dictates outcomes.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi meets with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi

A G2 carve-up?

In Europe, some fear Beijing and Washington could strike a trade understanding that leaves everyone else on the outside.

To borrow the old saying, if you are not sitting at the table, you may well be on the menu.

“I think all third countries need to watch the summit and its outcomes very, very carefully,” Wendy Cutler, former US trade negotiator told the Geoeconomic Competition podcast this week.

Before the summit, the US floated the idea of a so-called ‘Board of Trade’, designed to simplify commerce in non-critical sectors and reinforce the image of a ‘G2’ world centred on China and the US alone.

If Beijing and Washington settle on major US export targets to China in sectors such as medical technology, aircraft or chemicals, that could squeeze out suppliers from elsewhere, including Europe, Ms Cutler said.

“On the flip side, if the US continues to restrict Chinese imports further, then we could see increased Chinese exports to Europe and third countries, who are already suffering from huge inflows of Chinese imports due to overcapacity in China, and its failure to really boost domestic demand,” added Ms Cutler, now vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute in Washington DC.

If the world’s two largest economies embrace the idea of managing trade largely between themselves, the implications for other members of the World Trade Organisation would be hard to ignore.

“That sends a message to Geneva that, you know what, in this new world, the rules of the WTO are becoming more and more obsolete,” she said.

China has been explicit about its push for “self-reliance” – a state-backed drive to cut dependence on the outside world for essentials such as advanced chips, food, water and, crucially, energy.

The pressure point at the Strait of Hormuz has only sped up a strategy that was already well under way.

Yet for all the talk of self-sufficiency, China still needs overseas buyers to keep purchasing its exports.

That helps explain Beijing’s anger whenever trading partners try to copy China’s own playbook by reducing their dependence on Chinese supply chains, as RTÉ News reported here last week.

“The clunky phrase they use for it is dual circulation,” said Jonathan Czin, former director for China at the National Security Council, now with the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington DC.

“They want the rest of the world to be dependent on China and for China not to be dependent on the rest of the world,” he said.

That, he argued, is why China’s main strategic goal next week will be “to get time and space from the administration and continue to fortify themselves”.

Because while self-reliance remains the ambition, Beijing has not reached it yet.

For now, “China cannot live without Europe, the Global South or really the global system,” said Shanshan Mei, political scientist at the Rand Corporation, “because the Chinese economy remains an export-led model, which largely still relies on big consumer markets outside of China – and United States remains one of those,” she added.

That reality gives the US side a measure of confidence as President Trump heads to China, even against the chaotic backdrop of the Iran war.

Listen to Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, who said on Tuesday that “China is an export-driven economy”.

“That means they depend on other countries to buy from them,” he went on.

“Well, you can’t buy from them if you can’t ship it there, and you can’t buy from them if your economy is being destroyed by what Iran is doing… it is in China’s interest that Iran stop closing the Strait – it’s harming China as well”.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio

On that point, he is touching on a genuine vulnerability, because overcapacity remains a serious problem for China.

Factories are producing far more than domestic consumers can absorb, squeezing profits, swelling local government debt and pushing cheap subsidised goods into overseas markets, where they increasingly trigger trade disputes.

Still, Beijing appears convinced that many countries will find it difficult to loosen their dependence on Chinese products any time soon, ensuring trade relations remain tilted in China’s favour.

“I asked a well-connected Chinese academic if they were concerned about European pushback,” Mr Czin told RTÉ News, “and his verbatim response was: what are they going to do about it?”

The power of diplomacy

China, meanwhile, is also working to showcase its diplomatic reach.

Officials in Beijing are acutely aware that Washington has been pressing China to use its leverage with Tehran to help bring an end to a war the United States began.

And indeed, this week, the Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi travelled to China to meet Foreign Minister Wang Yi. He pressed Iran, who sells 90% of its crude exports to China, to negotiate an end to the war and called for a “prompt resumption of shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz”.

That meeting, however, serves two purposes at once.

China plainly wants normal shipping flows through the Middle East restored – as does every economy with a stake in global trade.

But it also helps Beijing cultivate its preferred image: a steady, deliberate peacemaker in a world that looks increasingly disorderly.

That is a useful position for Mr Xi as he prepares to receive the American president.

A screen displaying vessel movements in the Strait of Hormuz on a ship-tracking website

“The Chinese side will show it as evidence of yet another foreign leader traipsing to Beijing to see to Xi Jinping, on the heels of Friedrich Merz, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Pedro Sanchez, Michéal Martin – all of these leaders have been beating a path to see him,” said Anna Fifield, former Asia Editor at the Washington Post, now a non-resident fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies based in New Zealand.

“So, it plays very nicely into Xi Jinping’s hands and helps him portray this image that he is the reliable, stable, global statesman,” she added.

Even so, analysts caution that third countries should not romanticise the prospect of a China-led international order.

After all, Beijing continues to provide vital economic and dual-use technological backing to Russia as Moscow presses on with its war in Ukraine.

According to Michael Kovrig of the International Crisis Group – who was arbitrarily detained in China for nearly three years, in apparent retaliation for the arrest of a Huawei executive in Canada – China will seek to preserve the global institutions that give it “regularity, access and influence”, while “hollowing out the liberal and free-market rules and principles that constrain authoritarian influence and Chinese power”.

“That points toward a more state-centric, hierarchical and transactional order, with more pressure on smaller countries, more CCP (Chinese Communist Party) influence over standards and rules, and less room for human rights, independent media, civil society, democracy, and individual choices,” he wrote in a social media post.

“And forget about transparency and accountability,” he added.

A Tremendous Guy

Mr Trump has long spoken admiringly of the Chinese leader, describing him as “brilliant” and even “good-looking”.

This week he called him a “tremendous guy”.

And although the US President often takes a hard line on trade with China, he has at times sounded more muted on Beijing’s human rights record, to the frustration of some within his own cabinet.

John Bolton, who served as Mr Trump’s national security adviser during his first term and has since become a fierce critic, alleged that the president told Xi that building camps to detain hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang was “exactly the right thing to do”.

So far, this administration has also said little about China’s continued militarisation of the South China Sea and its encroachment on territory claimed by key US allies such as the Philippines, despite international law.

Like the Strait of Hormuz, the South China Sea is one of the world’s essential maritime corridors – only larger, carrying roughly a third of global seaborne trade.

Taiwan, meanwhile, still turns out about 90% of the world’s most advanced computer chips, most of them designed by American companies.

If Beijing concludes that the US is bogged down in a war it cannot easily end, analysts say it may see an opening to press Washington for concessions over Taiwan.

It would not be without precedent.

In 1971 Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser in Richard Nixon’s administration, pledged the US would not support Taiwanese independence, in exchange for China’s help in ending the Vietnam War.

The question now is whether Beijing sees a chance, with Mr Trump back in the White House, to push for a long-sought shift in US language on Taiwan – specifically, for Washington to say it “opposes” rather than merely “does not support” Taiwanese independence.

That may sound like a narrow semantic change, but it would amount to a major victory for China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory and wants the world to fall into line.

A major US arms sale to the democratic self-ruled island in December, which drew a furious response from Beijing, seemed to underscore America’s continuing readiness to help protect Taiwan from a Chinese takeover.

Philippine Marine soldiers return to the coast after patrolling, on Manila-ruled Thitu Island, in the disputed South China Sea. Recent reports have shown that China has significantly increased its People’s Liberation Army and Coast Guard presence in the contested waters

But after a February phone call with the US President, during which Mr Xi reportedly made his displeasure clear, the shipment was put on hold.

At the same time, Chinese commentators have openly questioned whether the US would be capable of helping Taiwan in any case, given the rapid drawdown of American military hardware in Iran and the diversion of supplies and logistics from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East.

“It is truly amusing that some American elites are still talking grandly about taking on the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) in the Taiwan Strait,” wrote Hu Xijin, one of China’s most outspoken nationalist commentators.

So, could Mr Trump be persuaded to embrace a position that earlier presidents resisted?

Again, it would not be unprecedented – at least if figures such as Trump supporter-turned-critic Tucker Carlson, who claims Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu convinced Mr Trump to strike Iran, are to be taken seriously.

Mr Trump rejects that account, insisting the decision was entirely his and aimed at ensuring Iran could never obtain a nuclear weapon.

Where hubris meets hubris

President Donald Trump likes to frame world politics in terms of cards and who holds them.

He memorably told Ukraine’s wartime leader Volodymyr Zelensky that he had none.

He has also repeatedly said Iran has no cards either, helping fuel an online meme that shows Iranian officials clutching oversized UNO cards.

China, though, does have leverage – and it has shown a willingness to use it, most notably through rare earth restrictions imposed at the height of last year’s trade war.

American military systems, including precision-guided missiles and F-35 fighter jets, rely on Chinese-made high-performance magnets.

That is no trivial issue for a country engaged in war.

But Washington has cards of its own as well, notably advanced semiconductors, operating system software and chip manufacturing capacity that China still cannot replace, especially as the contest over AI accelerates.

If you speak to people in Washington close to the US administration, Mr Czin told RTÉ News, and suggest to them that time is on China’s side, they will say: “We think time is on our side too”.

Who is telling the truth?

“I think they’re both telling the truth, but it’s like that old line – the most dangerous lies are the ones you tell yourself”.

In the end, this summit is largely about buying time, which suits both powers as they wrestle with serious pressures of their own.

For the rest of the world, that means watching from the sidelines and hoping some kind of workable international order still emerges.

“Small countries or middle-sized countries like Ireland and New Zealand really care about the rule of law, the international order and these rules that keep middle and smaller sized countries able to fight fairly and protect themselves on the world stage,” Ms Fifield said.

The two leaders are expected to meet again later this year, leading many experts to believe next week’s encounter will amount to little more than an opening act, with the hardest issues pushed further down the road.

That will do little to satisfy those hoping the world’s most powerful countries might produce serious answers to urgent global problems such as nuclear proliferation, artificial intelligence and climate change.

But it may at least buy other countries a little more time to decide what role they intend to play in this century’s defining contest for power.