When the world’s two most powerful leaders meet face to face it’s news. It’s news even when nothing much happens. As was the case this week when American President Donald Trump met in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Summits – especially between leaders of superpowers – have a mixed record. Occasionally they result in breakthroughs, as did the several meetings between American President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Both then and now was wide agreement that the two leaders got on surprisingly well and that, together, they transformed the decades-long Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union into something considerably more cordial.*
More often though summits are exercises in pomp and circumstance on the one hand and futility on the other. They do not generally lead to breakthroughs either in politics or policies. When they do, they are in consequence of extensive and extended advance planning – the sort of preparation for which Trump is not, to understate it, well known.
The summit just concluded was, then, neither a notable success nor a fearsome failure. Nor was it a surprise. But this is not to say that the meeting between Trump and Xi was meaningless, it was not. Here then three items to make meaning of.
First, the summit confirmed that the critical relationship between China and the United States is back on track. Closer at least on the surface to cordiality than animosity.
Second, Trump secured no significant gains. Certainly not on the all-important issue of the war with Iran. Or on the equally important issue of critical (or rare-earth) minerals – a singular asset on which China continues to have a chokehold. (Critical minerals are essential to making everything from munitions to renewable batteries. How China came to came to control the global supply is another story.)
Third, Xi reaffirmed his (implicit) claim to being the single most important leader – the single most powerful player – in the world. Which, as it happens, he is. History will testify that it is he not Trump who has by far the more impressive track record and that it is he not Trump who presides over a country that during his time in office has been relentlessly on the ascent. Moreover, in Beijing it was Xi not Trump who had the temerity to launch a shot across the bow. Out of the gate it was China that issued a stark warning to the American delegation not to interfere with, not to defend, Taiwan.
Xi has been in power in China since 2012. Moreover, unlike Trump, Xi has no opposition. In China Xi is in control of everyone and everything. Also, unlike Trump who will be out of power in two and a half years, in 2017 Xi arranged things so that he is leader for life.
His supreme self-confidence is, moreover, justified. He has much to be confident about. Within China Xi reigns supreme over an enormous country that has by most measures thrived beyond anyone’s imaginings. And without China he is a force that every other national leader in the world has no choice but to reckon with.
Xi casts himself as a Confucian and a custodian of Chinese civilization. Which, I might add, goes back not a mere, measly, hundreds of years but thousands. Xi with boundless assurance governs a country with over a billion people who from kindergarten through graduate school are taught “Xi Jinping’s Thought.” This thought is, make no mistake, communist. Unlike say, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin who is a not-so-secret capitalist, Xi is a deeply committed socialist. He is also, in keeping with previously prominent communists, including his revolutionary predecessor, Mao Zedong, an authoritarian leader to the point of being a totalitarian leader.
So, if the summit favored China President Xi Jinping over American President Donald Trump no wonder. The former is a strongman who looks in the mirror and sees Superman. The latter in contrast is a strongman who looks in the mirror and thinks he sees Superman.
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*The fact that Gorbachev’s tenure finally succumbed to the collapse of the Soviet Union is another, arguably related, matter.