Trump heads to Beijing to confront Xi over Iran arms transfers

President Donald Trump is heading to Beijing this week for a three-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, carrying a diplomatic agenda that reads like a geopolitical greatest hits album: Iran, Taiwan, trade wars, nuclear stability, and oil. The centerpiece, though, is a direct confrontation over China’s alleged arms transfers to Iran.

The summit, scheduled for May 13-15, comes at a moment when the relationship between Washington and Tehran is balanced on a knife’s edge, with peace talks stalled and a fragile ceasefire holding together by what appears to be sheer diplomatic inertia.

What Trump wants from Beijing

Trump wants China to stop transferring weapons and dual-use technology to Iran. He also wants Beijing to buy more American oil.

Trump has already claimed victory on the first point. In a Truth Social post in April, he stated that China “agreed not to send weapons to Iran” and is “very happy” about the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which a significant chunk of the world’s oil supply flows.

China’s Foreign Ministry has repeatedly denied providing any military assistance to Iran, including drone components and anti-aircraft missiles.

Trump wants China to increase purchases of American crude, a move that would simultaneously reduce Beijing’s dependence on Iranian oil and boost US energy exports.

The Iran backdrop

The Trump-Xi summit follows a period of escalating tensions between the US and Iran that included military strikes, back-channel negotiations, and a peace proposal from Tehran that Trump publicly rejected as “unacceptable.”

Peace talks have stalled. Iran’s counterproposal was dead on arrival in Washington. And now there are reports that both Beijing and Moscow have been floated as potential guarantors of any future deal between the US and Iran.