(March 17): US President Donald Trump requested a delay to his summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping for about a month, saying it is important for him to remain in Washington to oversee the Iran war.
“We are working on that right now. We are speaking to China. I would love to, but because of the war, I want to be here,” Trump said on Monday during a White House event when asked about potentially rescheduling the high-profile summit. The meeting between the leaders of the world’s two largest economies is currently set to begin later this month.
“I have to be here, I feel. And so we have requested that we delay it a month or so, and I am looking forward to being with them. We have a very good relationship,” he continued. “But because of the war — there’s no tricks to it either. It’s just, it’s not like, ‘Oh gee, I am waiting.’ It’s very simple. We got a war going on. I think it’s important that I be here. So it could be that we delay a little bit, not much.”
Trump had heralded his plan to meet Xi during the trip from March 31 to April 2 as a key milestone in the relationship. Teams from the two countries met in Paris in recent days to hammer out potential areas of agreement, including on Chinese investment in the US and exports of advanced semiconductors.
But the war has overshadowed Trump’s other priorities, especially with Iran’s move to block the Strait of Hormuz sending the price of oil above US$100 ($127.96) a barrel. Trump has sought to raise pressure on other economies to provide resources to help secure the strait and ensure the safe passage of tankers and other vessels amid a global energy supply chain crunch.
In an interview with the Financial Times published on Sunday, Trump had said it was “only appropriate” that countries benefitting from traffic through the strait should help protect it and raised the prospect of delaying the trip to China if Beijing did not help with Hormuz.
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China’s state-run Global Times dismissed the idea as Trump’s attempt to spread the risk “of a war that Washington started and can’t finish”.
Earlier on Monday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent rejected speculation that Trump might delay the trip as a way to force China to help reopen the strait, saying any potential delay would be because of the “logistics” around the meeting and because the war effort had Trump’s focus.
“So if the meeting, for some reason, is rescheduled, it would be rescheduled because of logistics,” Bessent said on CNBC.
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The decision to put off the summit may not be a major disappointment for Beijing. China had previously proposed Trump arriving at the end of April to allow more time for preparations, according to a person familiar with the matter. Such a postponement would allow for more discussions on security and diplomatic issues including self-ruled Taiwan.
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