Trump leaves China without breakthroughs on Iran, Taiwan or AI

US president hails ‘fantastic’ deals, but details remain scarce after pageantry and little progress at much-hyped summit with Xi Donald Trump left China on Friday after a much-hyped summit of the world’s two major powers that was rich in pageantry and promises of stability, but offered little by way of tangible progress. The US president had gone into the two-day talks with China’s Xi Jinping weakened by his prolonged war in Iran, and did little to change the perception that he and his nation are diminished on the global stage. Instead it was Xi who delivered the sharpest rhetoric of the meeting – over the future status of the self-governing island of Taiwan, with Trump notably failing to push back. In his final remarks in Beijing on Friday, Trump did claim that the US and China struck “fantastic trade deals”, although details were scarce, and that he and Xi settled “a lot of different problems”. But critics are likely to suggest that the carefully choreographed summit – attended by tech executives including Elon Musk of Tesla and Tim Cook of Apple, as well as Trump’s son Eric – was more performative than substantive, with no major breakthrough on Iran, Taiwan or the countries’ AI