Once Upon a Time in the Middle East, a movie that premiered in China last month and is coming to the United States in October, is about a Chinese chef who moves to the Middle East to find work, only to become a savior for the locals amid the chaos of an American invasion. This box-office hit has earned rave reviews in China—especially from China’s government, which has promoted the film’s themes of Chinese peacefulness versus American warmongering. The film “casts US as invader, outperforms Hollywood,” according to a headline from the Global Times, a news outlet run by the Communist Party. The message: America is the bad guy, and China’s job is to clean up.
Donald Trump should keep that in mind as Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Washington for his first state visit since 2015. Trump may laud Xi as a respected friend, as he did when the two men met in Beijing in May. Yet Xi is no friend of Trump’s. Throughout his 14 years in power, China’s president has acted deliberately and consistently to undermine the United States. His two-day trip to Washington now seems perfectly timed to exploit the weakness of his host and main strategic rival, lately enfeebled by rising domestic prices, plummeting approval ratings, and a costly ongoing war in Iran. This timing makes the spectacle of the purported leader of the free world fawning over a Communist dictator more than just embarrassing.
Trump’s soft touch on China is widely unpopular in Washington. In advance of a summit that is expected to cover AI safety, trade, and Taiwan, John Moolenaar, the chair of the House Select Committee on China and a member of the U.S. president’s own Republican Party, called for a tougher line. Xi, mindful that American foreign policy can change dramatically with elections, seems to see the Trump administration as a potentially brief window of opportunity to expand Chinese influence. While Trump has been distracted by the Iran war and White House redecorations, Xi has remained focused on enhancing China’s technological and industrial might and diplomatically asserting Beijing’s global leadership.
In the weeks before this visit, Xi met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at two major forums for developing countries, where he pitched China as a more stable and reliable great power than the United States. Although Xi avoids mentioning the U.S. by name, he leaves little doubt which country he is describing as a rogue state that threatens global peace. “Unilateralism and power politics are surging against the tide,” Xi told the BRICS group of emerging economies, which includes Brazil, Russia, India, and China, earlier this month, “lashing at multilateralism and the international order.”
Xi seems to perceive himself as a man of destiny, ruling China at a pivotal moment when he can build and lead a new world order. “Today, changes unseen in a century are accelerating across the world,” he said in that BRICS speech, repeating a phrase he often uses to describe global shifts in the balance of power. “The global South is gaining strength, and the trend toward a multipolar world is unstoppable,” he declared.
Xi’s “whole worldview is to see a new international order arise where China and authoritarian states play a bigger role,” Nicholas Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to China who is now a professor of diplomacy at Harvard University, told me. Xi’s “short- and long-term view is that we’re standing in China’s way as China seeks to become more influential, more powerful in the world,” he added, referring to the United States.
But, if Beijing is right, it won’t be for much longer. Xi and others in China’s elite believe that the U.S. is in decline. Wang Huning, the Communist Party’s chief theorist and a close adviser to Xi, helped shape this assumption with America Against America, a 1991 book about his travels in the U.S., in which he portrayed the country as rich and technologically advanced but rotting from within due to its eroding public institutions and decaying cultural values.
Rather than waiting patiently for the U.S. to fall apart on its own, Xi has spent his entire reign testing the pillars of American power. In 2013, he launched the Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure-building program to expand China’s influence in the developing world. In 2015, he introduced the “Made in China 2025” program, a plan to dominate various manufacturing industries, such as electric vehicles, through massive state support. Against Washington’s objections, Xi has asserted China’s claims to the South China Sea by building military installations in the vital waterway. Since 2021, he has promoted a series of “global initiatives” to spread his vision of a reformed world order based on Chinese political principles. In 2022, he deepened his partnership with Putin days before the Russian leader invaded Ukraine.
Yet even though Xi has worked hard to reduce China’s reliance on the United States by developing homegrown technology, promoting the Chinese currency in global business, and expanding trade with the developing world, China’s economy still exchanged more than $410 billion in goods with America last year—and depends on the economic stability of the U.S. for its own growth. Rather than take the United States head-on, as the Soviet Union tried to do during the Cold War, Xi has worked to carefully undermine American power without provoking a costly confrontation. During Trump’s visit to Beijing in May, Xi asked whether the two countries could avoid the Thucydides Trap—the theory that an established power will invariably clash with a rising one, owing to the threat of being displaced. Trump seemed to miss the point. In a post on Truth Social a day later, he implied that his America was under no such threat: “When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, and on that score, he was 100% correct.”
But in posing his question, Xi was signaling why he bothers meeting with Trump. Xi “believes that the United States, despite its descent in global politics, still is enormously potentially dangerous,” Kurt Campbell, a former U.S. deputy secretary of state and now the chair of the Asia Group, a consulting firm, told me. “Xi is animated by the idea of how to avoid a great-power war and to help ease the United States into a more orderly decline. He believes that this kind of personal diplomacy with Trump is an important ingredient” in that strategy.
So far, Xi’s approach has paid off. In return for spending a few hours with Trump, he has effectively neutralized his supposedly more powerful opponent. Trump appears to have little interest in pressuring Xi to step back from his partnership with Putin, even as it has likely sustained Moscow’s war in Ukraine. Despite threats to sanction countries that support Iran, the Trump administration has not taken meaningful action against China, Tehran’s largest oil customer. Trump has also softened American support for Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own, including by delaying approval for a $14 billion arms sale to the democratically governed island.
From Beijing’s perspective, Trump is simply bowing to the global shift in power. “It’s the reality of the world that China is rising, and the U.S. has to accept that,” Wang Huiyao, the president of the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based think tank, told me. “We have to coexist, compromise, accommodate each other. That’s what Trump is doing.”
In the United States, however, Trump’s dalliances with Xi look more like appeasement. Engaging in constructive dialogue to stabilize relations between the two great powers makes perfect sense, but Trump’s efforts seem to involve conceding to Xi’s wishes while avoiding the issues that matter most to American industry and security. Perhaps the midterm elections, now only weeks away, will deliver a new Congress capable of checking Trump’s behavior. But given the president’s personalized approach to China, anyone hoping for a smarter, tougher line on Beijing may have to wait for a new president—one who understands who the bad guy really is.