Can Trump charm President Xi? Personal diplomacy is his strength

Donald Trump is a creative fellow with a pronounced tendency to personalise his inventions — see his eponymous tower. Yet as he tours East Asia this week, it is worth recalling that he did not invent the hyper-personalised approach to diplomacy that overrides both protocol rules and well-established foreign policy doctrines. Rather, he learned it all from Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump already advertised his extreme dissatisfaction with allies who took advantage of America’s free-trade fanaticism — regardless of huge trade deficits — to deny US exporters access to their own markets even as they flooded the country with cheap imports. Trump was equally unhappy with allies who were “free-riding” US military protection, while spending very little on their own defence: in many cases not even 2% of their GDPs.

Japan was squarely in the line of fire on both accounts. On economics, structural obstacles to US imports had persisted even after years of talks, while on defence Japan was not devoting even 1% of GDP to defence, with 2% a far-off fantasy.

At the time, I was under contract with Japan’s foreign ministry — not to lobby the US government or any such thing, but to help redefine the country’s national strategy. That was Abe’s own personal focus, and therefore I met him every time I went back to work in Tokyo. He himself told me how very worried he was about the possibility of a Trump victory, a worse problem for him than for other leaders.

Obama, after all, had already caused him needless problems, including sending Caroline Kennedy as his ambassador to Tokyo. That empty-headed celebrity degraded a post previously held by eminent ex-speakers of the House or Senate Majority leaders, who Japanese prime ministers could usefully consult. On top of that, Kennedy took it upon herself to publicly criticise Abe for visiting the nationalistic Yasukuni Shrine very dear to his core constituency, an unprecedented impertinence for an ambassador.

It was in that fraught context that Abe decided to ignore all protocol rules, and brush aside both the foreign ministry’s traditional caution and indeed US law, to try to meet Trump as soon as possible after his surprise election. His aim? To explain — truthfully enough — that his own goal was to make Japan a much stronger ally for the United States: neatly pre-empting anti-Japan policies even before they were formulated by Trump’s “transition team”.

And so it was that, on the afternoon of 17 November 2016, Abe and his interpreter met with the President-elect in his family apartment in Trump Tower. Trump’s daughter Ivanka was present, as was his son-in-law Jared Kushner — but as they all sat comfortably on sofas, there were no officials or note-takers in sight.

That not only ensured a relaxed atmosphere, but also provided legal protection against the US Logan Act which prohibits private US citizens, including Trump before his inauguration, from negotiating with foreign governments.

As it happens, Abe liked Trump, and vice versa, and each believed the other’s assurances that they would step in whenever officials allowed disagreements to get out of hand. In fact, over the years that followed there were no US-Japan quarrels, and more immediately word got back from Tokyo that Abe thought Trump very reasonable — and a better negotiating partner than the studiously reserved Obama.

This feedback persuaded Trump that he could ignore State Department reservations, just as Abe had ignored his famously over-cautious foreign ministry, and bargain face-to-face with foreign counterparts, just as he had countless times before as a real-estate magnate.

In addition to less memorable encounters, Trump’s personal diplomacy in his first time culminated in the unprecedented June 2019 encounter with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. They met right on the DMZ, which Kim actually invited Trump to cross, making him the only US official to ever have stepped on North Korea’s soil. Some televised cordiality ensued while the TV cameramen had a bit of a rugby scuffle.

In the aftermath, in an astonishing display of collective amnesia, Trump’s critics kept saying that the Trump-Kim meeting had achieved nothing, because the DPRK had refused to give up its nuclear weapons. Yet that ignored how things had been before: with an alarming build-up of threats against South Korea, which Trump defused by his meeting with Kim.

Now, Trump is once again travelling in Asia to defuse a rise in mutual threats. But though North Korea remains as quiet as ever — a continued testament to Trump’s adept diplomacy six years ago — the President faces a much bigger crisis: with Xi Jinping’s China.

After mounting threats against Taiwan, and even a date-specific 2027 invasion plan, over recent months China has launched a broad campaign of geoeconomic escalation. One obvious example is Beijing’s politically deadly import boycott of US soya beans, whose exports to China went from 985-million bushels in 2024 to zero so far in 2025. The US, for its part, has revoked the small-package tariff exemption, once set at $200 but more recently at $600, which allowed a tsunami of Chinese clothing and gadget postal-order imports at extremely low prices, which drove many remaining US small manufacturers out of business.

This escalation culminated in last week’s Chinese attempt to limit the US products that can be made with imported Chinese-refined rare earths. This is an unprecedented intrusion, and one which incidentally exposed years of policy paralysis. The fact is that “rare earths” are not all that rare; they only seem so because unreasonable environmental restrictions virtually prohibit processing in the US.

Either way, ahead of his vital meeting with Xi on Thursday, Trump has prepared in the usual way — buttering up his Chinese counterpart with unreciprocated praise and fulsome compliments. Yet he is also loaded for bear with the tariffs America has already imposed, which really weigh heavily on the Chinese economy, whose years of ultra-rapid growth are but a fading memory.

The Chinese middle classes that invested their savings in apartments for rental — because bank deposits earned virtually nothing, while the stock market mostly lost money for investors — must now rent them for very little — with huge numbers unrented impoverishing their owners. Unfortunately for them, far too many housing blocks were built before the construction companies themselves finally collapsed.

Meanwhile, China’s huge investment in railways and roads has also slowed: too many high-speed trains were travelling empty. That means that the parents of many poorly educated youngsters, who can no longer find construction jobs, must support them instead. As for their well-educated compatriots, they can no longer expect to immediately find a good job in the cities—in huge numbers, they are living in basements on menial gig-economy jobs. In short, China is overbuilt and over-supplied for a rapidly ageing and falling population, and needs access to the insatiable American consumer to have any real growth.

Having imposed tariffs unilaterally — simply because he is not paralysed by free-trade dogma — Trump can now reduce them in exchange for Chinese concessions. That includes a return to soya-bean imports, with farmers an important pillar of the MAGA coalition, and a toning down of truculent threats to invade Taiwan. On the other hand, Trump knows that he cannot ask the Chinese to stop supporting the Russian war in Ukraine.

As for Japan, Sanae Takaichi, its new prime minister, promises to end the post-Abe decline in US-Japan policy cooperation. Under Abe, a minimum of communications between officials in Tokyo and Washington was quite enough to ensure that both countries coordinated smoothly, for example to sustain the Philippines and other weaker countries threatened by China.

After Trump left office in 2021, and after Abe himself was murdered, everything had to be negotiated point by point. Abe’s successors hesitated to act as decisively as he did, meaning significant initiatives just petered out. Fortunately for Trump, Takaichi, the motorcycle rider, martial artist, and anti-immigration Right-winger, was very much Abe’s disciple.

And, certainly, their meeting seems to have been a success. Takaichi gifted Trump a golf putter that once belonged to Abe, while the pair signed a rare-earth minerals deal and reiterated tariffs agreement negotiated earlier in the year. But for their relationship to thrive over the longer term, Takaichi must herself do what Trump’s Argentine protege just managed to do very successfully: win a parliamentary election to gain more seats for her party, allowing her to rule without frail coalition partners.

So far, at any rate, Trump’s highly personalised diplomacy is again serving him well, though of course his meeting with Xi Jinping will be the biggest test of all. That Xi has just locked up top generals he had himself appointed means that there are cracks in his regime on top of the stalled economy, while Trump faces relentless opposition at home — so both men will try to be tough poker players, in spite of some weak cards.

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