Trump calls Xi a ‘friend.’ But he left China without any breakthroughs.

Trump departed Beijing on Friday with almost nothing concrete to show for his two-day summit with Xi.

By ANTON TROIANOVSKI

There was a vague agreement that China would purchase Boeing jets and more U.S. soybeans. There was discussion about Iran and opening the Strait of Hormuz, and a nod to other issues, such as cracking down on chemicals used to make fentanyl.

But President Donald Trump departed Beijing on Friday with almost nothing concrete to show for his two-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. After months of buildup and a delay necessitated by Trump’s difficulty in extricating the United States from the war with Iran, the summit ended with no major public progress on the Middle East, trade, Taiwan, nuclear proliferation, artificial intelligence or any of the other myriad issues that are sources of friction between the world’s two superpowers.

Instead, Trump seemed intent on a different kind of diplomacy, forging a personal bond with a Chinese leader who appeared far more focused on advancing his own nation’s strategic agenda.

Trump toasted Xi as “my friend” at their banquet in Beijing on Thursday and said he had “become really a friend” when they sat down before the cameras on Friday.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, asked at a briefing during the summit whether Xi considered Trump a friend, responded with boilerplate: “The two sides exchanged views on major issues.”

Trump has hailed the summit in Beijing as a major success, highlighting the personal bond he says he has built with China’s longtime leader. But the feeling is not necessarily mutual, as evidenced by Xi’s more measured tone and the lack of clarity about any major agreements.

Orville Schell, vice president of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, called the summit “quite insubstantial and aspirational.”

“We have Trump dreaming out loud,” he said.

The mismatch shows the risks in Trump’s personality-driven foreign policy, his bet that he can solve the world’s problems and defend U.S. interests by his charm and force of will. In Xi, Trump faced a counterpart this week well versed in his desire for praise and pomp, and with an apparent strategy for how to exploit it.

The result, analysts said, was a summit that illustrated the growing confidence of China on the world stage alongside a strategically muddled U.S. foreign policy under Trump.

The summit might yet come to be seen as the start of a shift toward a more stable relationship between the United States and China. But few of even the limited accomplishments that Trump spoke about were confirmed by China, while Xi set the tone with an assertive posture over Taiwan.

Experts say there is no question that personal chemistry between leaders is crucial, especially when authoritarian, centralized countries like China are involved.

Trump has discovered the power of his personality has limits in foreign policy. In his first term, he failed to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons despite asserting that he and Kim Jong Un, the country’s leader, “fell in love.” In his second term, he has failed to stop Russia’s invasion of Ukraine despite a dozen phone calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin and their Alaska summit.

Still, asked to name the summit’s most important achievement for the United States, Trump told Fox News’ Bret Baier: “I think the most important thing is relationship. It’s all about relationship.”

“It sounds like something that doesn’t mean anything, but it’s everything,” Trump said.

China, too, hailed the personal aspect of the visit. Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, said after the summit that “head-of-state diplomacy is the ‘guiding star’” of “the most important and complex bilateral relationship in the world.” He said Trump and Xi spent nearly nine hours together and had been able “to achieve overall stability after experiencing ups and downs.”

But China entered the meeting with a broader agenda, while deflating U.S. claims of success. Xi warned Trump about the threat of a clash over Taiwan, even as Trump said nothing about the island democracy until after Air Force One took off from Beijing. Wang also suggested that the achievements Trump had trumpeted — for example, China buying as many as 750 “big beautiful” Boeing jets — were not a done deal. On Saturday, China said it would acquire some aircraft but stopped short of confirming a specific purchase of Boeing planes.

If concrete agreements do “come as a result of the bonhomie of this summit, I think we might be able to call it something of an inflection point,” Schell said. “That has not yet happened.”