The Worlds That Donald Trump and Xi Jinping Want

Whether Xi is moved by Trump’s bonhomie may be immaterial. Analysts see China working quietly in the shadow of Trump’s blustering disruption. In some sectors, it is gingerly filling the void left by Trump’s America First agenda, including buttressing parts of the global humanitarian system gutted by the Administration’s dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. More broadly, China is gaining ground simply by existing in contrast to Trump’s United States—a more predictable power that’s not launching unprovoked wars, installing puppet regimes in petro-states, or erratically lashing out at longtime friends and partners. (New polling confirms the impression of China’s growing popularity around the world, relative to the United States.) On Tuesday, at the dais of the U.N.’s General Assembly, Trump denounced the institution’s “globalist bureaucrats who nobody ever elected” and its “far-left” agendas, attacking bodies such as its human-rights council, and the International Criminal Court. He laid out possible strikes against Iran, musing, “Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?” (The King of Jordan, speaking right after Trump, bemoaned the global instability wrought by the Iran war.) Trump also celebrated his military operation, earlier this year, in Venezuela, to remove Nicolás Maduro from power, asserting that the U.S. “will use our unmatched military might to secure the vital national interests of the United States.” Here was the leader of the global hegemon, reminding the world of his hegemony.

Other world leaders at the General Assembly, including Brazil’s President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who immediately preceded Trump, took turns offering an alternate world view, extolling the virtues of “multilateralism” and invoking the need for greater coöperation and the bolstering of U.N. institutions. “Sovereignty is strengthened, not diminished, when countries work together to address shared challenges,” Lula, together with Prime Minister Mark Carney, of Canada; President William Ruto, of Kenya; and António Costa, the president of the European Council, said in an opinion piece for the Financial Times on Sunday. They added, “National interests are often best advanced through collective action on such challenges.” That’s an ethos wholly rejected by Trump, of course, but one that suits China, at least as rhetoric. Xi comes to Washington following a tour through Central Asia and South Asia, where he cast China as a driver of a revived global order that engages in multilateralism and offered his now routine critique of great power “hegemonism” —a barely veiled jab at Trump. Beijing, in standard Communist Party jargon, says that it wants to address “global governance deficits,” and for China to be a “responsible major country” that can champion the causes of nations in the so-called Global South which have been underrepresented in the post-1945 international system and hurt by decades of unfair and domineering Western economic practices.

In fact, governments in the developing world have concerns about Beijing’s designs and practices, but they can’t ignore China’s economic footprint—it is most countries’ biggest trading partner—and they are all, in various ways, trying to hedge against an increasingly unreliable Washington. At a forum in Beijing last week, Singapore’s defense minister, Chan Chun Sing, whose city-state lies at the heart of major global trade, lamented how some powers have “tried to weaponize their economic interdependence”—an implicit criticism of Trump’s tariffs, but also, perhaps, of how China often leverages its significant industrial and supply-chain advantages.

In curious ways, Trump and Xi mirror each other. They “both regard themselves as seminal, if not singular, figures whom history has appointed to fulfill a weighty mandate,” Ali Wyne, a researcher at the International Crisis Group, told me. That is, he said, they see themselves as “insuring that their respective countries regain the greatness squandered by predecessors” because of “corruption, ineptness, and timidity.” Trump has gone about pursuing this reclamation by smashing the trust of close U.S. allies with coercive, bullying tactics. “Historically, Washington saw its alliances as the starting point for international diplomacy,” Rush Doshi, a China scholar at Georgetown University and the Council on Foreign Relations, and a veteran of the Biden White House, told me. “Trump often flips the script, seeing the other great powers—particularly Beijing and Moscow—as the starting point.” That view “suits Beijing well,” Doshi added, since China is averse to treaty alliances, but is eager for the kind of great-power shoulder-rubbing that will be on show this week in Washington. “Trump’s approach, in many ways, is what they have long had in mind,” he said.