Three landmines, eight weeks: Why the Trump-Xi summit is built to explode

For weeks now, President Donald Trump has been repeating a single date with unusual consistency: Sept. 24. That is when, he insists, Chinese President Xi Jinping will walk into the White House for the first state visit by a Chinese leader to the United States in more than a decade.

The machinery of diplomacy is visibly turning to make it happen. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations foreign ministers’ gathering in Manila last week, working to “identify areas of cooperation” and set the stage for what Rubio called a “very positive visit.” Deputy-level officials are reportedly shuttling between the capitals to iron out logistics.

On paper, then, this looks less like a maybe and more like a matter of scheduling. But anyone who has watched U.S.-China summitry over the past decade knows that “on paper” and “on the tarmac” are two very different things. Three live issues could still derail, delay, or hollow out Xi’s trip before Sept. 24 arrives: Taiwan, trade sanctions, and the state of American domestic politics.

Taiwan: The card Trump hasn’t played

Trump holds a piece of leverage he has so far kept in his pocket: a new Taiwan arms sale. Such sales are treated by Beijing as one of the most serious affronts to its sovereignty claims, and a poorly timed announcement has derailed diplomatic momentum before. What’s notable right now is the relative quiet, Chinese military flights near Taiwan appear to have eased somewhat in recent months, a pattern consistent with Beijing wanting to avoid giving Washington any pretext to escalate before the summit.

That restraint cuts both ways: it suggests China badly wants this visit to happen, but it also means the temperature could spike quickly if Trump decides an arms package serves his negotiating position better than a smooth summit. Taiwan remains the single most volatile variable in the run-up to September, the kind of issue that can turn a “confirmed” visit into a “postponed” one with a single announcement.

Trade: a truce sitting on top of new sanctions risk

The tariff war that dominated 2025 has, for now, settled into an uneasy truce. Trump’s new tariffs, 10% to 12.5%, imposed last week on more than 80 countries, including China, on grounds of inadequate “forced labor” enforcement, have rattled that truce again but likely won’t break it outright.

The bigger risk to the summit comes from a different direction. The Sanctioning Russia Act, reintroduced this July and renamed for its late chief sponsor, Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, has picked up more than 60 bipartisan co-sponsors and, notably, the White House’s own support. Its current form would impose tariffs of up to 100% on the top five purchasers of Russian oil and natural gas, a list that includes China as both a crude oil and gas buyer.

If Washington moves to designate China under this bill anywhere close to September, expect Beijing to treat it as an act of bad faith incompatible with a “positive” summit atmosphere, trade and geopolitics have a way of becoming inseparable in Beijing’s calculus.

Domestic politics: an unwelcome backdrop

The third variable is the most unpredictable because it isn’t really about China-U.S. policy at all, it’s about the mood in Washington. Trump’s recent accusation that China interfered in the 2020 U.S. election, an allegation Beijing has flatly denied, has already injected friction into the run-up to the summit, surfacing even during the Rubio-Wang meeting in Manila.

Layer onto that an increasingly sharp anti-communism rhetoric across the U.S. political spectrum, and Xi faces a real risk of arriving at a Washington backdrop that feels hostile rather than hospitable, regardless of what happens at the negotiating table itself. The timing compounds the problem. Sept. 24 falls squarely in the run-up to the U.S. 2026 midterm elections, a period when anti-China and anti-communist rhetoric on Capitol Hill tends to intensify rather than fade, as candidates on both sides look for a low-cost way to appear tough on China ahead of a vote.

On the other hand, Xi is the most committed evangelist of communism in a generation, having spent over a decade tightening the Chinese Communist Party’s grip over the state, the economy, and civil society, and positioning himself as head of the largest communist party on Earth, with more than 101 million members. That is precisely the kind of figure sharpening anti-communist rhetoric in Washington is aimed at.

The bottom line

Trump’s own objective for this visit may be relatively narrow, stabilize the relationship, avoid further economic disruption, notch a visible diplomatic win. But China has never treated a summit of this magnitude as a transactional errand. For Beijing, these visits carry heavy symbolic weight, face, reciprocity, and the optics of being received as an equal matter as much as the substance discussed.

OPINION: WASHINGTON’S ANTI-CHINA TECH STRATEGY IS BUILT ON A DANGEROUS ILLUSION

If Xi’s advisers conclude the environment has turned toxic, through a Taiwan arms announcement, a sanctions escalation, or a domestic political firestorm, postponement or outright cancellation becomes a live option, invitation or no invitation.

Overall, the U.S-China relationship remains a system with too many moving parts for any date to be treated as locked in. A window of opportunity is open right now. Whether it stays open depends less on what’s already been agreed than on what will happen over the next eight weeks. Time will tell.

David W. Wang (@DavidWWang203) is a senior international business executive, geopolitical affairs consultant, analyst, and writer based in the Washington, D.C., metro area.