by Ken Timmerman
By all appearances, Chinese President Xi Jinping took the deal President Trump offered him in Beijing.
At their joint press conference on Thursday, President Trump said that he and Xi were “united” when it came to Iran: no nukes, open the Strait of Hormuz without Iranian blackmail, and no Chinese weapons sales.
And while President Trump said before the summit he didn’t need Chinese help with Iran, after their initial meeting, he told Sean Hannity that China will help “in any way it can.”
If all of this comes true, it is very bad news for Tehran.
Trump offered China a choice: enjoy your new status as the G2 with the United States, along with a $400 billion trade relationship that will continue to expand, or enjoy your missile sales to Iran and your dependence on Iranian oil.
The Iranians just watched as their biggest ally went over to the enemy.
The United States has a long history of playing China against Russia, starting with Nixon’s famous trip to China in 1972. And surely, there is some of that here.
But there are big differences, too: structural differences having to do with disparate Chinese and Russian capabilities.
Trump never made the same type of effusive statements to Putin during his first term, before the Ukraine war. Nor did he travel to meet Putin with a plane full of US corporate CEOs.
A $400 billion trade relationship with Russia? Russian corporate investment in the United States? Are you kidding? All they have to sell are weapons and oil. And while they would love to get their hands on our high-tech, why in the world would we sell it to them or allow them to invest in our companies?
Trump is not a China hawk. But neither is he a China appeaser.
On Taiwan, he was extremely cautious. He said he understood how strongly Xi felt about Taiwan and how much China wanted it back, but he felt Xi didn’t want to go to war to achieve that. He also told reporters on Air Force One that America didn’t need a war “9,500 miles” from home.
When asked whether he had discussed a pending arms sale to Taiwan with Xi, Trump said Xi had raised the subject, and yes, they had discussed it.
That prompted New York Times reporter David Sanger, whom Trump called the “fake news” and even “treasonous” for his false reporting on Iran’s surviving missile capabilities, to ask if that meant he was revoking President Reagan’s 1982 pledge not to consult with the PRC on arms sales to Taiwan.
“1982?” Trump said. “That’s a long time ago.”
The 1982 pledge was part of the so-called “Six Assurances” that allowed the Reagan administration to expand relations with China and keep the squeeze on the Soviet Union, while not throwing Taiwan under the bus.
All six were expressed as negatives. “We have not agreed to prior consultations on arms sales to Taiwan,” reads one. “We have not agreed to take any position regarding sovereignty over Taiwan,” reads another.
President Trump made clear he was not taking any position over Taiwan’s sovereignty and pointedly would not tell Xi, when asked, whether the United States would defend Taiwan if China invaded.
But I can just about guarantee you that The New York Times will blast him for throwing Taiwan under the bus because he discussed the pending arms sale to Taiwan with President Xi.
Let’s recall that Bill Clinton was a China hawk when he ran for president against George H. W. Bush in 1992. Indeed, I helped draft a speech for the campaign that blasted the elder Bush for “cozying up to dictators from Baghdad to Beijing.”
But Clinton soon turned into a China appeaser once emissaries from Chinese military intelligence, working through the Lippo Group in Indonesia, bailed out his bankrupt campaign in October 1992 by handing over a briefcase containing $3 million in cash during a famous limo ride.
In the early months of his first term, Clinton put into motion the “China Plan” drafted by three relatively obscure academics in a 1992 National Academy of Sciences study. (The authors were William Perry, who went on to become Clinton’s defense secretary, Ashton Carter, who succeeded Perry as secretary of defense, and Mitchel Wallerstein, who was put in charge of the Pentagon’s export control office.)
The plan called export controls a “wasting asset” and called for removing them from China. Bill Clinton added the secret sauce: millions in campaign cash for Democrats from Communist China and their cutouts. (I wrote about this extensively in The American Spectator in the 1990s and in a 2000 book, Selling Out America).
Among the sales that allowed China to leapfrog its way to building fifth-generation stealth fighter jets were the advanced machine tools used in the B-1 bomber plant in Columbus, Ohio. I was fired from Time magazine in July 1994 for reporting on that.
But President Trump is no China appeaser as Clinton was. He gave the Chinese very little during this trip. For example, he made no commitment to Xi that he would remove Chinese companies from US sanctions for buying Iranian oil or that he would allow Chinese ships to transit the Strait of Hormuz.
The proof of the pudding will be if the Chinese stop supplying Iran with drone parts and sodium perchlorate, an oxidizer used to make solid rocket fuel.
During Epic Fury, four cargo loads of Chinese sodium perchlorate reached Iran, while China airlifted other weapons to Tehran once the ceasefire kicked in.
If they stop these sales, Trump will be pleased, and good things will happen. If they don’t, you can expect Chinese ships to remain blocked in the Persian Gulf or intercepted by the US blockade.
Your move, Mr. Xi.
Photo: BEIJING, CHINA - MAY 14: U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping attend a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People on May 14, 2026 in Beijing, China. President Trump is meeting with President Xi Jinping in Beijing to address the Iran conflict, trade imbalances, and the Taiwan situation while establishing new bilateral boards for economic and AI oversight. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Ken Timmerman
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/05/16/did-china-take-the-deal/
No comments:
Post a Comment