Behind the Pageantry: Why the Donald Trump and Xi Jinping Summit Faces Steep Hurdles

China's leader Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan disembark upon their arrival at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on Wednesday. The lavish fanfare President Donald Trump is laying on for China’s leader Xi Jinping implies that a grand global moment is at hand. In an unusual move, Trump traveled to a blustery Joint Base Andrews to greet Xi at the foot of the steps to his plane when he arrived Wednesday for a two-night stay.

The leaders chatted, together with their wives, before strolling down a red carpet side by side. There was one blip in the choreography, however, when a jet performing a flyover split the sky with a thunderous roar during the national anthem, causing Trump to flinch and grimace. Still, the imagery suggests two great leaders of the world’s most powerful nations meeting to chart the planet’s destiny.

The timing could not be more propitious as the US and China push across a new technological frontier amid warnings from industry chiefs that artificial intelligence may soon race out of control. But pageantry can deceive. Xi’s state visit is no equivalent of the summits between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that set the Cold War on course for a soft landing. For one thing, it is expected to end without an agreement to protect humanity that would parallel 1980s nuclear weapons cuts.

Forty years on, such moves might include curbs on AI development or the US and China offering mutual visibility into their tech industries to build trust and safety. There’s still a chance the summit could surprise — though to do so it would have to confound China’s traditional diplomatic codes, which require intricate pre-meeting diplomacy to line up deliverables. In reality, then, a good outcome would be limited to an extension of the bilateral trade truce announced Wednesday evening; new efforts to forge stability between Washington and Beijing; and minor initiatives on AI, fentanyl flows, trade and avoiding military clashes.

The AI issue is especially emblematic of the gulf between the rivals. Each thinks it can prevail, and both understand the stakes for their superpower duel: “Whoever wins AI, wins,” as Trump put it. Both are resisting any meaningful constraints in a sector that is vital to propping up economic growth. Many analysts believe China is trailing in the AI race, and wouldn’t sign up to any mutual slowing of the industry. It typically sees any move to limit its technological rise as part of a Western strategy to deprive it of its rightful global power.

A personality mismatch between the improvisational Trump and the deliberate Xi also augurs against spontaneous decision-making. The US and Chinese political systems are so different — and so increasingly weighted to counter the other — that little common ground exists. And each side wants to avoid blowups but lacks the leverage to force concessions. Trump’s plunging poll numbers amid the Iran war risk fraying his global clout, while Xi is facing a property crisis and economic issues back home.

To be fair to Trump, most global summits under-deliver, and meetings between US and Chinese leaders unfold amid unflattering comparisons to epochal 1970s meetings between President Richard Nixon and China’s Mao Zedong. Still, the president often gives the impression that he’s more interested in the spectacle of global leader summits than their substance. His high-profile meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in his first term, and last year’s Alaska encounter with President Vladimir Putin, produced little apart from photos of Trump with strongmen he appears to admire.

Lyle Goldstein, senior fellow and director of the Asia Program at the think tank Defense Priorities, noted that personal diplomacy between Xi and Trump had helped stabilize the relationship and reduced military tensions, including over Taiwan. Still, Trump has taken faith in his own indispensability to new levels, boasting about his “great relationship” with Xi. Meanwhile, Chinese leader Xi Jinping rarely reciprocates with personal warmth, playing a long diplomatic game.

Some Republicans have been critical of Trump's approach. Sen. Roger Wicker, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, blasted the meeting, calling his guest a brutal, unelected, and oppressive dictator. Despite global warnings from AI developers about unregulated technology, Trump rebranded AI as “super intelligence” and rejected globalist control schemes at the United Nations General Assembly. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that ahead of the summit, the US and China were discussing opening a line of communication regarding AI incidents to help determine leading AI dangers.