The Hippocratic Summit

The delegation that arrived with President Trump in Beijing on Wednesday night looked less like the diplomatic corps of a superpower and more like a Fortune 500 board meeting. On Air Force One were Elon Musk, Tim Cook (“Tim Apple,” as the president calls him), and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Joining in Beijing were honchos from Wall Street and aerospace firms. The message was impossible to miss: This trip, billed as a high-stakes summit between the leaders of the world’s two most powerful nations, is about money first and geopolitics second—with differences in ideology trailing far behind.Trump in 2017 was a China hawk, elected in part because he called out the country for the damage its economic practices had done to the U.S. workforce. But Trump in 2026 has gone full chamber of commerce booster, cheering on those in the top ranks of the Chinese Communist Party, including President Xi Jinping. “I will be asking President Xi, a Leader of extraordinary distinction, to ‘open up’ China so that these brilliant people can work their magic, and help bring the People’s Republic to an even higher level!” Trump wrote on Truth Social earlier this week. He added that he would make that his “very first request,” presumably in the meetings the two men held today in the Great Hall of the People. That volte-face reflects the fact that neither the first Trump administration nor the Biden administration nor the second Trump administration has figured out how to deal with the world’s most intricate trade relationship and most confounding rivalry.Trump arrived in China this week at a moment when both Washington and Beijing are exhausted by commercial and strategic confrontation, but unwilling to retreat. The trade war has not ended. The tech war (think AI and the computer chips required to power it) is just ramping up. Yet China remains the world’s manufacturing powerhouse, and the U.S. remains China’s biggest market. It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that the two sides are finding it h