US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping held a wide-ranging call on Wednesday that both leaders welcomed as a sign of warming ties.
The call touched on Taiwan, Ukraine, Iran, and trade, suggesting that lingering disagreements on fraught geopolitical issues haven’t derailed the superpowers’ months-old trade truce.
Trump has shifted Washington’s approach to Beijing away from a great-power struggle and toward a more transactional relationship centered around trade and tech competition, a Brookings scholar wrote.
But, he noted, “there likely will not be a firm floor under the US-China relationship,” which “rarely travels along a straight line for long.”
Xi said he hoped he and Trump could steer “the giant ship” of US-China relations “through winds and storms.”