The Trump-Xi Summit: Geopolitics and Atmospherics

The recent summit meeting in Washington, D.C., between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping was long on atmospherics and short on substance. And that’s fine. President Trump treated Xi with respect as the leader of a great power rival of the United States.

Both sides agreed to lower tariffs. The leaders talked artificial intelligence (AI), with President Trump noting that the United States will continue to pursue AI dominance over China, and discussed Taiwan, with Trump noting that President Xi “understands very much how I feel” about Taiwan. But the most important thing about the summit was what happened a few days before, leading up to it: first Trump’s bold speech at the United Nations, and second, Trump’s security deal with Denmark and Greenland. (RELATED: Trump’s Greenland Agreement Is the ‘Art of the Deal’ in Action)

At the U.N., Trump exuded confidence about America’s economy, its energy capacity, its technological leadership, and its unmatched military power. He proudly noted that as president of the United States, he will not allow problems to fester. He will confront them. He will act, as he did in Iran, and as he did in Venezuela. Trump has demonstrated, in other words, that while he will work to make peace, he will not shrink from waging war to protect America’s interests. “We are reasserting American power, including military power where necessary in our region and around the world to create a safer future for all of us,” he said. And he hinted that Cuba could be next. (RELATED: Trump Faces a Choice on Iran: Make a Deal or Escalate the War)

Trump didn’t hold back when reciting the flaws of the United Nations, which ignores the persecution of Christians, is biased against Israel, and promotes mass migration and other globalist goals. He denounced globalist goals to control artificial intelligence, which he renamed “Super Intelligence,” and said that it will be “bigger than the industrial revolution or the internet,” and that the United States will lead the way. In Trump’s U.N. speech, there was none of the self-criticism of Obama speeches and none of the mindless globalism of Biden’s speeches. It was all America First.

Pardon the pun, but geopolitics trumps summit atmospherics every time.

As important as Trump’s U.N. speech was, the subsequent deal with Denmark and Greenland showed Trump at his geopolitical best. The deal he reached with the prime ministers of Denmark and Greenland expands U.S. military presence on the strategically important island and prohibits China, Russia, or any other power from gaining access to Greenland. (RELATED: The Panama Canal, Venezuela, Greenland: Is Cuba Next?)

The deal further consolidates U.S. hemispheric security and stakes our important interests in the Arctic Ocean, which has become the scene of a new “great game” between the West, Russia, and China. As the geopolitical theorist has pointed out, the expansion of the Arctic waterway due to the warming climate has transformed the Eurasian landmass into what the great British geopolitical thinker Sir Halford Mackinder as the “World-Island,” the control of which, Mackinder wrote, would enable “command” of the world.

Many of Trump’s critics, including some Republican lawmakers, called the president’s “red carpet” treatment for Xi catering to a communist despot. In the 1970s, President Nixon received similar criticism for his summits with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and Chinese leader Mao Zedong, and in the 1980s, President Reagan was criticized for becoming too “chummy” with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The critics’ focus — then and now — on the atmospherics of summits is misplaced. Pardon the pun, but geopolitics trumps summit atmospherics every time. (RELATED: Trump’s Nixon Playbook: Squeeze Iran, Dare China to Blink)

You can be quite certain that Xi Jinping paid more attention to Trump’s confidence in America’s world leadership and his geopolitical triumphs in Panama, Venezuela, and Greenland, as well as Trump’s steadfastness in Iran, than pleasant greetings, state dinners, and respectful words uttered by Trump, just as Brezhnev and Mao paid more attention to Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnam War than they did to ceremonial functions connected to the summits, and Gorbachev paid more attention to Reagan’s nuclear buildup, SDI, and geopolitical offensive than to summit atmospherics. (RELATED: Trump, Nixon, and Their China Legacy)

As the great German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck once remarked, “it is not by speeches and … resolutions that the great questions of the time are decided … but by blood and iron.”

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