US may take trade off the table for next Trump-Xi meeting
- Leaders are slated to meet at G20 summit in Argentina but White House sources say they may not address ongoing trade war
- US waiting for signal from Beijing that it is serious about addressing its list of demands
The White House is considering excluding trade from the agenda of a meeting between US President Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping next month but is not likely to cancel it altogether, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Some of Trump’s trade advisers do not want to engage with China on trade until Beijing shows it is serious about addressing the US’s list of negotiating demands, according to one of the people, who declined to be identified because the discussions are not public.
Even if trade is left off the official agenda, the discussion may be hard to avoid when the leaders of the world’s two largest economies, who are locked in a tariff war, meet. Trump also has a history of cutting vague deals on the fly with fellow world leaders.
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said on Tuesday that the two presidents would meet “for a bit” at the Group of 20 leaders summit in Buenos Aires. The hope was “the two presidents agree on some basic principles”, said Kudlow, who declined to predict that outcome.
On Thursday White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said a meeting between Trump and Xi at the summit, which will be held on November 30 and December 1, was still in the planning stages. “We’ll keep you guys posted as we finalise those plans,” she said.
However, another official rejected the notion that excluding trade from the agenda was being seriously considered, saying they were not aware of any discussion of the idea at the top level.