Trump, currently in China for a summit meeting with the Chinese president Xi Jinping, is definitely in an inferior position.

Donald Trump has landed in Beijing, the first visit to China by a US president in nearly a decade, as he seeks to mend power and prestige weakened by the war in Iran.
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The war has entered its third month, with Tehran tightening its grip over the strait of Hormuz and Washington struggling to turn a fragile ceasefire into a lasting settlement.

Behind the scenes, US officials have spent weeks urging China – Iran’s biggest oil customer and one of the few powers with leverage in Tehran – to pressure the Islamic Republic into reopening the strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply ordinarily passes, while accepting US terms for peace.

The US recently sanctioned several Chinese firms accused of assisting Iranian oil shipments and supplying satellite imagery allegedly used in Iranian military operations. China condemned the measures as “illegal unilateral sanctions” and invoked a rarely used blocking statute prohibiting Chinese entities from complying with them.

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The two countries remain locked in a fragile tariff truce reached last autumn after tensions threatened to erupt into a full-scale trade war. Trump has long complained about China’s trade surplus with the US, while Beijing has bristled at American export controls and sanctions.
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Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser in Chinese business and economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies thinktank in Washington, said: “China and Xi Jinping come into this meeting in a much stronger place than the United States.

“China has goals that they would like: to extend the ceasefire, to reduce tech restrictions on the imports of semiconductors and lower tariffs. But even if they don’t get much on any of those things, as long as there’s not a blow up in the meeting and president Trump doesn’t go away and look to re-escalate, China basically comes out stronger.”

To me this seems like Trump trying to create some positive press to take people’s minds off high inflation, the Epstein files, his incompetent cabinet appointees, and other domestic problems, and at the same time try to get China’s help in getting himself out of the mess in Iran, since Iran has been cultivating good relationships with China and Russia. Iran’s foreign minister has visited China and met with their foreign minister and it is reported that Iran has let Chinese ships pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

While it is clear that Trump needs the summit, it is not clear that China does. Furthermore, any deals that Trump may agree to are not worth anything since Trump has no concept of honor and his word means nothing since he feels free to renege of any agreement on a whim. So foreign leaders meeting with Trump seem to be doing so mainly for the optics, since Trump is too lazy and ignorant to be able to discuss anything in any depth. He may digress to rant about windmills or even take a nap mid-meeting. That would not matter so much if there are competent people working behind the scenes. But he tends to appoint cronies who lack any expertise and thus are out of their depth.

This is true even with the so-again, off-again Iran negotiations. Trump’s negotiators are his son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff, both of whom have zero expertise on Iran or foreign affairs generally, with their backgrounds being in real estate, and JD Vance who has no background with Iranian affairs either. Why isn’t Marco Rubio leading the negotiations? After all, he is the secretary state, the person ostensibly in charge of dealing with other nations, and at least can call upon staff who are experts on Iran, who have in-depth knowledge of that country, unless they have already been fired. The whole thing is a shambles.

At the end of the summit there will undoubtedly be announcements of deals that have already been agreed upon, such as the sale of Boeing planes to China. But all that will demonstrate is that Chinese airlines are growing while US airlines are shutting down.