David E. Sanger

Hey guys, can you hear me?

Good, good, good.

I'm in my hotel in Beijing.

I just arrived with several of my Washington Bureau colleagues, and we are all preparing for the president arriving for his first trip to China in the second term.

He'll get in on Wednesday night and meet Xi Jinping the next morning and part of Friday before he just turns around and goes right back home.

Well, as initially conceived, Rachel, this was going to be the first of a series of meetings this year in an effort by the president to have something of a rapprochement with the Chinese after many, many years of tension.

The last time the president was here was 2017, and it was a very different situation.

The president was treated with all the pageantry that the Chinese do very well.

He had just been elected president to the surprise of China and the world and perhaps himself.

how China correlated with his economic policies and his defense policies.

And was going to focus on China's rise as a major power.

But this time he arrives under the cloud of the Iran conflict.

You'll remember he was supposed to come here in April and put it off and did so, I think, fairly convinced that by mid-May, Iran would have already capitulated.

And now instead, he shows up with Iran resisting, with

other world leaders like Chancellor Merz of Germany contending that Iran has humiliated the United States, and with the Chinese themselves a bit mystified about why the U.S.

was having such a hard time opening up a body of water such as the Strait of Hormuz or defeating a kind of second or third-rate power in their mind like Iran.

And of course, all summits are about optics.

And while I'm sure there will be all the pomp and ceremony that goes with these, the fact of the matter is he comes into this summit looking a bit weakened.

Well, we don't know a huge amount right now, but the obvious in any summit that involves President Trump is that you begin with the trade and economic relationships.

And there, there's almost always a series of big purchases by China to be announced and potential business deals and memorandums of understanding, some of which will come to fruition and some of which will not.