President Donald Trump’s high-stakes visit to China this week marks nearly a decade since a sitting U.S. president — in this case, Trump himself — traveled there to meet with Xi Jinping, president of the People’s Republic of China, or PRC. While the trip is expected to touch on a broad range of issues that have divided the two powers in recent years — from U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports and trade and competition in technology manufacturing to Beijing’s ambitions toward Taiwan and growing military tensions in the Indo-Pacific — experts are tuning in to see if the U.S. will call on China to help with the ongoing conflict in Iran.
“I think the Iran war has complicated the usual assumption that the U.S. automatically holds more leverage globally,” said Xiaoxiao Shen, an assistant research professor of political science at Northeastern. “Militarily, of course, the United States still has unmatched power projection. But the crisis also revealed how much the global economy depends on China’s position in supply chains, manufacturing and energy markets.” Others also agree with that assessment.
