Opinion: summit was not quite the meeting of equals Xi would have wanted
The two nations remain near-peers in the realm of contemporary great powers, and not absolute peers as China would will it
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s two-day visit to US President Donald Trump’s over-the-top estate at Mar-a-Lago in Florida was meant to offer an opportunity to showcase China as an equal to the United States.
Xi would ideally have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Trump, amid all the pomp and ostentatious kitsch of what Trump has called his ‘Winter White House’, and impressed on the US administration that China’s long-sought reality of a ‘G2’ of sorts with the United States was now a fait accompli amid Trump’s supposed lurch away from the old shibboleths of US foreign policy since the end of the second world war.
For Xi, the Mar-a-Lago summit could have represented the start of a new era not only in US-China relations, but also served to carve out an unmistakable role for Beijing in global leadership – something the Chinese leaders sought to impress on the world’s gathered elite at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January.
The Trump administration, however, had other plans. Just before the two leaders sat down to dine on steak, Trump authorised a major unilateral use of force, with the US military firing 59 cruise missiles against a Syrian military airfield in retaliation for President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians days earlier.
