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Donald Trump has asked Beijing to postpone his upcoming meeting with Xi Jinping in China, casting doubt on the long-awaited summit between the US president and his Chinese counterpart.
Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday afternoon that he wanted to delay the summit by a month as he grapples with the war in Iran. He had been scheduled to leave for Beijing in just over two weeks.
“I’d love to but because of the war, I want to be here,” Trump said, adding the White House had requested Beijing “delay” the visit by “a month or so”.
“It’s very simple. I have got a war going on,” he added.
Trump’s push to delay the summit comes as the White House deals with the dramatic fallout from the ongoing conflict in the Gulf, including the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
The closure of the strait, through which 20 per cent of the world’s oil passes, has had a major impact on the price of crude, sending the cost of petrol soaring in the US just months before critical midterm elections.
Trump on Monday said the market turmoil was a “very small price to pay” for preventing Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But despite repeating that the conflict would be a “brief excursion”, the president told reporters he did not think it would end this week.
“It’ll be soon. It won’t be long, and we’re going to have a much safer world,” Trump said when asked when the war would draw to a close. “It’ll be wrapped up soon.”
Beijing had been expecting the visit to go ahead until Trump on Sunday told the FT that he was considering delaying his first trip to China since 2017.
He suggested in the interview that he wanted China to decide whether it would send warships to the strait ahead of the start of his visit to Beijing, planned for March 31.
But US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent on Monday morning said any decision to postpone the meeting was unrelated to requests for ships and would be because the president needed to remain in Washington as the US continues to attack Iran.
“If the meeting for some reason is rescheduled, it would be rescheduled because of logistics,” Bessent told CNBC. “The president wants to remain in DC to co-ordinate the war effort and that, you know, travelling abroad at a time like this may not be optimal.”
The decision to ask China to delay the summit came after Bessent and US trade representative Jamieson Greer held two days of talks in Paris with He Lifeng, the Chinese vice-premier, who is leading trade negotiations with Washington.
The delay could affect the timing of a reciprocal visit that Xi is expected to make to the US at some point later this year.
The Chinese embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.