President Donald Trump may have just sold out one of America’s most stalwart allies, according to a recent report.
“Some close advisers to President Trump fear the biggest substantive result of the China summit is heightened danger that Chinese President Xi Jinping will invade Taiwan in the next five years, potentially choking off the chips used to power AI to U.S. companies,” Axios reported on Sunday. A presidential adviser added that Trump, who reportedly enjoyed the pageantry showered on him by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, has been persuaded by Xi to see China as America’s equal rather than a rival — and to therefore give it wider latitude.
Xi is "trying to move China to a new position where he's saying: 'We're not a rising power. We're your equal. And Taiwan is mine,’” the adviser reported. "This trip signaled a much higher likelihood that Taiwan will be on the table in the next five years.”
The adviser argued that this could damage the American economy, adding that "there's no way we can be ready economically — the chips supply chain won't be anywhere close to self-sufficiency. For CEOs, and really the economy as a whole, there's no more pressing issue than the supply chain for chips."
Despite these criticisms, Trump was praised from several CEOs for his wars against Venezuela and Iran, who argue that he is opening up their markets, and believe that his negotiations with China will achieve similar results.
This is not the first report to indicate that Trump’s meeting with China led to him being manipulated by the Chinese government. Derek Grossman, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and the China-Global South Project, pointed to American policy in Southeast Asia and its flailing war against Iran as evidence of this.
Per the former, he observed that China has sent prominent state representatives including Xi to visit Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Malaysia and Vietnam, while Trump only made a single visit to Malaysia in his second term while Secretary of State Marco Rubio failed to visit any of them.
“Why does this matter?” Grossman said. “Because showing up in Southeast Asia is more than half the battle when it comes to waging and winning the competition for influence. Washington, thus far, has shown relative disinterest in sustained high-level engagement, undermining its ability to compete with China. Without routine engagement, Southeast Asian countries become uneasy about U.S. commitments and tend to look elsewhere — such as to China — to fulfill their needs.”
Fortune’s Steve H. Hanke made a similar argument earlier this month.
“While Washington raises walls, Beijing is opening doors,” Hanke argued. “On May 1, Chinese tariffs on imports from all 53 African countries with which China holds diplomatic relations plunged to zero. Europeans now enter China visa-free. India’s Modi government is fast-tracking minority Chinese investment in seven strategic sectors. China’s DeepSeek AI went open source, giving the world’s developers free access to a frontier Chinese AI model. While Washington is tightening export controls on America’s AI enterprise, China is open for business.”