After summit meetings of the kind we just had with Trump and Xi Jinping, sometimes there is a joint communique and signing ceremony outlining what the two sides agreed upon. That did not happen, leaving observers scratching their heads as to what the point of the meeting was. Immediately afterwards, Russian president Vladimir Putin also went to China and the contrast between that and the barrenness of the Xi-Trump meeting was quite stark. They not only issued a joint communique, they also had a joint signing ceremony of all the agreements arrived at.

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin issued a joint condemnation of “irresponsible” US foreign policy on Wednesday, warning of “a drift back to the law of the jungle”.
…

The exchanges between Xi and Putin were notably warm and Wednesday’s summit appeared to be more substantive than Xi’s meetings with the US president.

In their joint statement, Xi and Putin said they looked forward to further bilateral cooperation ranging from artificial intelligence to the protection of rare tigers, leopards and pandas. 
…

The spectacle of the leaders of the cold war superpowers – each weakened by conflicts of their own making – flying thousands of miles to sit down with Xi in the Great Hall of the People underlined the Chinese president’s status on the global stage.

Xi and Putin went into their summit with a long record of close cooperation. They had already met more than 40 times, and Xi has described the bilateral relation as “without limits”.

The two leaders scolded the US for undermining global stability, in particular for seeking to develop a “golden dome” missile defence system, and for allowing a nuclear arms treaty to lapse in February.
…

Xi and Putin then attended a signing ceremony for numerous documents spanning technology, trade, scientific research and intellectual property.

In its absence of joint statements, the US and Chinese sides presented their own readouts of what they took away from the meeting. Since Trump is an inveterate liar, we cannot take anything that he says at face value, especially since he claimed that Xi praised him fulsomely with language that is very unlike the understated way of Chinese statements. So we are are left with only the Chinese version which was nothing like what Trump said. Since much of the mainstream media provided largely superficial coverage of the Xi-Trump summit, focusing on optics and who ‘won’ and so forth, one has to seek out analysts who follow these things closely and thus can provide a much better understanding of what actually went down.

Michael Hudson, a professor of economics, is such a person, very knowledgeable about geopolitics, and in a lengthy interview with Ali Alizadeh, he lays out his views about the summit as well as many other important issues. My brief snippets do not do it justice so I recommend reading the whole thing.

Ali Alizadeh: The American readout of the Trump–Xi meeting claims that Xi explicitly agreed that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open, that there must be no tolls, that China opposes the militarisation of the Strait, that China will buy more American oil to reduce its dependence on Hormuz, and that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon. The Chinese readout said almost none of this. It said only that the two leaders exchanged views on the Middle East. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping spent his political capital on Taiwan.

So Iranians watching this tonight are asking: did Xi Jinping just trade Iran for Taiwan? Did our most important strategic partner sell us out at the Great Hall of the People while our cities are under blockade? What actually happened in Beijing today?

Michael Hudson:  If you have listened to Donald Trump and to the American reports of earlier negotiations with Iran and with other countries, there are always two versions. There is the American version, which always reads the same way: the other side has agreed to total surrender to everything the United States has asked for. Then there is the other side, which says, no, we did not say any of those things.

So we are dealing not only with a translation of languages, but a translation of what the words mean. What does it mean for the Strait of Hormuz to be open? From China’s point of view, it means that there will be continued trade — that all countries, the Arab OPEC countries and Iran, will be able to send their ships through the Strait and onward through the Indian Ocean, eastward to China or wherever they are going in Asia.

That is exactly what has happened in the last few days. Chinese ships have been freely going through the Strait of Hormuz. They have been paying the tolls that Iran has said are an absolute precondition for any agreement, because Iran has been attacked unjustly, in violation of the United Nations Security Council rules of war and the rules of international relations. Iran under these rules is justified in receiving reparations. But the United Nations does not have an enforcement system. It does not have any equivalent of a Nuremberg trials commission. It does not have a set of judges who can enforce reparations. So Iran has worked out a pragmatic way of extracting these reparations, and that is to impose tolls on all ships going through the Strait.

Hudson says that Iran and China seem to be in agreement on what ‘opening the Strait of Hormuz’ means.

But obviously, from Iran’s point of view, and I believe from China’s point of view, this is opening the Strait of Hormuz. It was Donald Trump who made up his wish list. And his wish list is, of course, that Iran would not charge any tolls. But that is one of Iran’s red lines. I think Iran has learned from looking at Russia’s experience in Ukraine that you do not announce a red line and then fail to enforce it. Russia has announced its red lines for what NATO countries can do in support of Ukraine, again and again and again, and NATO has simply ignored them. Iran has said: we are not going to let the United States, Israel and their allies keep pushing on us with salami tactics, a little bit at a time. A red line is a red line.

Trump must be frustrated that nations are paying the tolls to Iran in currencies other than the US dollar like the Chinese renminbi, and thus has resorted to his on-again, off-again threats to bomb Iran, much to the consternation of most other countries. Hudson says that over time the US has lost much of what constituted soft power in the world and is left with few tools other than the military. Contrary to Trump’s claim that the US is winning so much, it has actually been losing.

Every country in the world except the United States, Israel, Germany, England and France wants to reduce tensions.
…

The United States does not want stability in the world, because stability means the status quo. The United States has continually lost what used to be the American empire. It has lost its trade and balance-of-payments surplus. It has lost its industrial dominance. It has lost its dollar financial dominance. It is now a big debtor. It has been losing almost everything. That is why the U.S. National Security Strategy said, in effect: we are no longer going to support the kind of unified world of equality, multipolarity, free trade and free investment that we supported back in 1945, when we had all the power, when we had most of the world’s gold, when we had the manufacturing and industrial power to help Europe survive. We do not have that anymore.

The only asset that the United States now has to cope with a changing world dynamic is the ability to hurt other countries. It can say: we can disrupt your trade.

Hudson says that China’s interests are very different from those of the US.

I think that by talking about Taiwan, China is saying: we are not going to try to talk about problems that obviously cannot be solved. If we make the centre of our discussion U.S. relations with Taiwan, then anything we discuss dovetails into that. That is their version of a diplomatic Strait of Hormuz.

Take the issue of rare earth exports. The Americans want China to begin selling rare earth exports again to the United States. China has said: we do not want to sell rare earth exports that can be made into armaments. It would be crazy for us to sell you yttrium, gallium and other elements for your military to make into F-35 airplanes, arms and missiles, to sell to Taiwan to attack China.

So where do things stand between Iran and the US?

AA: So with your 50 years of work on the American financial system, can you tell our audience what Iran has actually accomplished? The headlines are all about missiles, ceasefire and casualties. But underneath, Iran has effectively closed the Strait, imposed tolls in Chinese renminbi, collapsed OPEC oil exports, brought Gulf monarchies to Washington asking for swap lines, sent gold flowing out of the United States at record rates, and made foreign central banks hold more gold than U.S. Treasuries for the first time since 1996. This is, in your own framework, the unwinding of the system you described in 1972. What exactly has Iran broken, and what has it achieved in these seven weeks of war?

MH: What Iran has achieved is saying: we will not surrender. It has realised that if it does not fight, the United States is going to do just what it said it would do. It is going to have regime change, as it tried to do when it recently killed Iranian leaders. It is going to take over the government. It is going to put in a client oligarchy, just like the Shah. And Iran is saying: we would rather fight than end up becoming a colony, a client dictatorship and a client oligarchy of the United States, which would take over all of our natural resources and oil for itself.

Hudson says that the long-term goal of the US has always been to take control of the world’s supply of oil. This is what drives its wars in Iraq and Iran. This is not to meet its own needs since the US is largely self-sufficient but in order to exert power over the rest of the world by threatening their access to oil.

For the last hundred years, the United States has had one paramount umbrella strategy to control the world: to control the world’s oil. I have discussed this in many of the articles I have been writing recently on my website. Every country in the world needs oil and power to run its factories, heat its homes, make chemicals, petrochemicals and plastics, make fertilizer. If we can control the oil trade, then we have the power to hurt any country that does not obey us. We can use that as a lever. We do not have to go to military war with them. We can simply cut off their supply of oil, and that will force them to follow whatever American policy we want.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the Project for the New American Century said, in effect, that the way to control oil was to prevent countries from buying oil from any country we do not control. That is why sanctions were imposed on Iran after the overthrow of the Shah and the rejection of America’s 1953 interference in Iranian politics to take control of the oil industry. That is why the United States destroyed Nord Stream and imposed sanctions to prevent people from buying oil from Russia. That is why the United States destroyed Libya, so that countries could not buy oil from Libya. That is precisely why George W. Bush waged the war against Iraq.
…

But all along, when they were outlining the countries they were going to conquer throughout the Near East and the Middle East to control Middle Eastern oil, the sequence ended with Iran. Iran was always the final objective. The United States realised it could conquer Libya, Iraq, Syria and other countries, and it could enforce support from Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and the Arab countries, because all of these countries’ oil proceeds — in their government funds — were invested in the U.S. bond market and U.S. financial markets. So all along the purpose was to control world oil and be able to control the switch: turning off the electricity, the power, the lighting. It all required conquering Iran, recapturing Iran’s oil industry and reinstalling a military dictatorship — this time more vicious and more effective than the old Shah’s. This is a plan that has been 50 years in the making, refinement and elaboration.

Hudson then goes on to discuss the global financial system and the use of the dollar as the reserve currency that enabled the US for so long to control the economies of countries, and that China and other nations are now seeking to eliminate that power.

China has created an alternative system so that countries do not need this. Back in 1971, there was not really another currency in which countries could save their oil-export earnings. Now there is. There is the Chinese currency, and there is gold. Once again, the gold is no longer being supplied by the United States, but you can buy gold in the market. Countries are buying gold because, so far, there is not an alternative artificial currency. To create that, you would need a new kind of international monetary fund, a new kind of central bank or world bank to administer it. The United States would never permit that under IMF rules, because it has veto power in the IMF.

So the only alternatives countries have are gold, Chinese currency, each other’s currencies, or a market basket of different currencies. That is what is occurring today. It means countries no longer have to denominate their oil, mineral exports or industrial exports in dollars. They can denominate them, for instance, in Chinese currency, because China is the most rapidly growing economy in the world. China’s system of socialism with Chinese characteristics — which is basically the same policy that made America rich in the nineteenth century with its industrial protectionism — enables it to be solid. Everybody needs Chinese renminbi in order to buy Chinese exports and attract Chinese investments. So the rest of the world, the BRICS countries and the Global South, are trying to develop an alternative financial and monetary system. That is in the process of being described now, and that is what most of my recent writings have been about.

There is a lot more good stuff in the interview.

Jon Stewart gave his own take on the Xi-Trump summit during the first seven minutes of this clip.