Trump’s trade war puts bromance with Xi beyond reach

The global economy hinges on a phone call that has not 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 Mr Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, to call.

“I have great respect for President Xi,” US President Donald 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 South-east Asia this week

to meet leaders there to try to persuade them to stand with China in the trade war.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson earlier in April posted a video of foundational Chinese leader Mao Zedong speaking in 1953 during the Korean War, in which China fought the US: “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 US economy closer to a recession

and vaporising trillions of dollars from the US stock market since he took office 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 US 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 fuelling those sentiments among Chinese citizens, whether it is on issues of international trade, Taiwan or US-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 Brookings Institution scholar Ryan Hass, 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.”

Mr Xi would be reluctant to speak to 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 J.D. Vance exploded at Ukrainian 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 Ms Yun Sun, a China analyst at the Stimson Centre. 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 Trump’s aides to get the President to budge on the tariffs. Former ambassador to the US Cui Tiankai tried to do that earlier in April.

“My understanding is that Cui didn’t get through to the administration,” Ms Sun said.

The Chinese government announced a new trade envoy on April 16: Mr Li Chenggang, a former representative to the World Trade Organisation 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, Mr 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 in 2024 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.

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” so that “they can work it out together”.

In his first administration, Mr Trump tried this approach with Mr 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 programme.

They met again in Hanoi, Vietnam, 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 personalised approach to diplomacy.

Yet, Mr Trump persists in trying that route. He talks about building a partnership with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and meeting the Russian leader, even as Mr Putin rejects a full ceasefire 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. NYTIMES