Washington is at war with Iran, and the ripple effects are already hitting Beijing. The immediate question is whether this sudden US military action will derail President Donald Trump’s highly anticipated trip to China.
The White House circled the dates weeks ago. On February 21, a spokesperson announced Trump would touch down in China from March 31 to April 2. But Beijing has kept the official schedule deliberately blank. The open secret in diplomatic circles: China wants concrete concessions on US arms sales to Taiwan before rolling out the red carpet.
The tension spilled into the open at Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s March 8 press conference. A CNN reporter lobbed a sprawling question at the veteran diplomat, asking how the joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran would warp the upcoming visit. The reporter pointed out that Trump suddenly seems eager to play nice—even keeping China entirely out of his latest State of the Union address. The underlying fear in Washington is that Trump might trade away American leverage on Taiwan just to ink a headline-grabbing trade deal.
Wang brushed off the premise with a quick jab at the reporter's long-winded setup. But the real issue is how these two giants manage their collision course. Wang made it clear that a complete freeze in relations only breeds dangerous miscalculations, while outright confrontation threatens the entire global economy. Neither superpower is going to fundamentally change the other. What matters is rewriting the rules of how they coexist.
The Agenda Is Set
Personal diplomacy is doing the heavy lifting right now. Wang credited direct, top-level engagement between the two leaders as the crucial shock absorber keeping the relationship steady through relentless turbulence.
Make no mistake: 2026 is shaping up to be a defining year for US-China relations, and the playbook for high-level talks is already locked in. The challenge now is clearing the runway. China insists it is ready and open, but Washington needs to meet Beijing halfway to ensure the year ends in stable, sustainable growth rather than crisis.
Read between the lines of Wang’s carefully calibrated response. He entirely bypassed the Iran conflict, effectively signaling that Middle East violence won't torpedo the bilateral summit. By stressing that failing to engage only triggers miscalculation, Beijing is quietly confirming that Trump’s trip is still on the calendar.
The friction points are obvious. When Wang talks about an "agenda on the table" and the urgent need to "manage existing differences," he is pointing directly at Taiwan. US arms sales to the island remain the single biggest flashpoint threatening to derail the dialogue.
The summit is happening, but the optics are shifting. Early whispers suggested Trump would arrive backed by a massive entourage of American corporate heavyweights. Now, the momentum has stalled, and business leaders might stay home. This sudden downsizing of the delegation is the biggest wild card still in play.
Pragmatism Meets Pushback
Beijing is treating this summit as a containment strategy. While Washington’s bureaucratic ranks are packed with anti-China hawks, Trump operates as a transactional pragmatist. The reality is that he is a bully who backs down only when punched in the nose. Look at last year's brutal trade war: Trump jacked up tariffs to a staggering 145%, but when Beijing fired back with sweeping counter-tariffs and a chokehold on rare earth exports, the White House was forced back to the negotiating table.
Now the American president has flipped the script completely. Trump is pitching the idea of a "G2" framework—a grand bargain where the US and China effectively carve up and co-govern the globe. But Beijing wants no part of it. This tension prompted another reporter to press Wang Yi on the contentious "co-governance" concept.
Wang’s rejection was absolute. He acknowledged the massive footprint both nations have, but firmly reminded Washington that the world belongs to more than 190 sovereign states. History proves that whenever great powers try to dominate or divide the world into rival camps, catastrophe follows. China refuses to follow the tired, imperial playbook of seeking hegemony and flatly rejects the logic of a two-power monopoly.
Consider this: the chaos currently gripping the globe flows directly from Washington. The United States is actively dismantling the international order, violating laws, and retreating into isolationism. In stark contrast, China is stepping up as the builder and defender of global stability. By keeping its markets open and playing by the rules, Beijing has secured the moral high ground. It is an anchor of certainty in a fractured world—and that gives China the ultimate advantage moving forward.
Lo Wing-hung
Bastille Commentary
** The blog article is the sole responsibility of the author and does not represent the position of our company. **
American politics right now is better than any TV drama.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — the same woman who once called Hong Kong's protests "a beautiful sight to behold" — was recently asked what she thought of Trump's latest social media post comparing himself to Jesus. Her reply: "You’d have to ask a psychiatrist." The notion that Trump may be mentally unwell is no longer a punchline in American political circles. It is now being treated as a serious question.
The New York Times dedicated a full piece to examining Trump's mental state. On April 4, chief White House correspondent Peter Baker published a piece titled "Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate". It noted that Trump's increasingly erratic behaviour — beginning when he decided to strike Iran — has intensified the debate over whether he is "playing crazy or actually crazy." Last week, Trump threatened to wipe Iran off the map, declaring that "tonight all of civilisation will be destroyed." On Sunday night, he launched a bewildering attack on the Pope, calling him weak on crime and disastrous on foreign policy. This series of incoherent, crude statements has led many observers to see him as a power-drunk, hysterical authoritarian.
The Times piece did not only quote Democrats. It also cited a range of voices from the right questioning Trump's mental state. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican congresswoman who recently broke with Trump, has called for invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office on grounds of incapacity. Greene said Trump's threat to destroy Iranian civilisation was "not tough talk — it's a mental breakdown."
Far-right blogger Candace Owens called Trump "a genocidal lunatic." Infowars founder Alex Jones said Trump "does babble and sounds like the brain’s not doing too hot." Even those who once worked alongside him are now speaking out. Former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham wrote online: "he’s clearly not well."
Trump fired back with a lengthy, furious post — which only served to illustrate his emotional instability. "They have one thing in common, Low IQs," he wrote. Of Owens, Jones, and commentator Tucker Carlson, he added: "They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too! They’re NUT JOBS, TROUBLEMAKERS, and will say anything necessary for some ‘free’ and cheap publicity."
The Times piece ultimately drew no firm conclusions. What it did note, however, is telling: unlike Trump's first term, his second has no equivalent of former Chief of Staff John Kelly — someone willing to quietly restrain him from going too far. Those around him now do not even attempt to hold him back behind the scenes.
Make no mistake: if so many figures in American politics are seriously debating whether Trump is mentally unfit, we should all be alarmed. This is the man with his finger on the nuclear button. The situation demands examination from two angles.
A War Spiralling Out of Control
After negotiations with Iran broke down, Trump announced he was deploying US forces to blockade the Strait of Hormuz. Using a blockade to counter a blockade is, frankly, a kind of madness. Yet within a day of the blockade taking effect, Trump told Fox News that the war was "basically over" and hinted at renewed peace talks with Iran in Pakistan within two days.
On the surface, the conditions for continuing the war do not favour the US. Soaring inflation could hand Republicans a crushing defeat in November's midterm elections, giving Trump every reason to wind things down quickly. Iran, too, appears willing to negotiate, having agreed to face-to-face talks. By conventional logic, there is perhaps a 70% chance this war ends soon. The remaining 30% represents the possibility that Trump acts against all logic and lets things spiral out of control.
The reality is, if so many Americans believe Trump is mentally unwell, who can say with confidence that an unstable person would not turn a manageable conflict into an unmanageable one? We must always leave room for the possibility of irrational decisions from those in power. If every leader always acted rationally, the First and Second World Wars would never have happened.
A System That Elects a Madman
The same Nancy Pelosi who now laughs at Trump as a madman was once a vocal advocate for Hong Kong to replicate the Western democratic model. She called the push for direct elections in Hong Kong "a beautiful sight." But the reality is that American democracy has produced — twice — the very person Pelosi now calls a madman, with his hand on the nuclear button. Once could be called an accident. Twice is unmistakably the choice of a majority of Americans.
This forces us to ask: what has gone so wrong with the Western democratic model? The question becomes even more pointed when we consider the pressure placed on Hong Kong to copy it wholesale. Director of the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office Xia Baolong put it well: Hong Kong must balance development with security. If Hong Kong had copied their system and ended up electing some pro-Western neurotic, it would likely have neither development nor security.
Lo Wing-hung
