Xi Jinping, speaking to Trump at the White House: ‘The interests of China and the US are deeply intertwined’

China’s President Xi Jinping was received Thursday with full White House honors by his counterpart, Donald Trump. At the start of their meeting, Xi urged the wisdom of promoting “strategic stability” between the two countries at a time of great geopolitical turmoil. “The interests of China and the U.S. are deeply intertwined,” he said.Trump, for his part, went a step further in his enthusiasm when describing the relationship that, according to him, binds the two presidents: “We have a truly great friendship,” he declared.The two leaders were due to address a wide range of issues at Thursday’s summit, from Taiwan to artificial intelligence, and from bilateral trade to the war in Iran. Immediately before welcoming Xi at the White House, Trump had written on his social network, Truth, that AI “will be a big topic of discussion” but that he wanted to “leave it exactly where it is. That is China’s position also.”Xi received an extraordinary welcome on landing Wednesday: before Trump, the last time a U.S. president had gone to an airport to greet a foreign leader arriving for a state visit was in 1962, when John F. Kennedy also traveled to Andrews to welcome British prime minister Harold Macmillan. Those were the days of the “special relationship” between London and Washington.Since then, the understood protocol that a U.S. president receives foreign leaders at the White House or, if meeting them outside Washington, at the agreed meeting site rather than at the airport, has only been broken on very rare occasions. Last year, Trump welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin, a theoretical adversary of the U.S., at Elmendorf-Richardson Air Force Base in Alaska before the summit the two held there. But that meeting was not at the level of a state visit.Immediately before Xi’s arrival in Washington, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent held an unscheduled meeting at World Bank headquarters with Chinese vice premier He Lifeng to finalize preparations for the leaders’ meeting. It was the pair’s second meeting after the one held in New York on Sunday, in which both agreed to set up a mutual early-warning mechanism in case an artificial intelligence incident threatened national security.After that second meeting, Bessent told Fox News that the two governments had agreed to extend by two months the tariff truce agreed last year between the countries, which expires on November 10. According to the treasury secretary, Beijing has raised the possibility of a more ambitious trade deal between the world’s two largest economies.Both Trump and Xi are aiming to preserve the “strategic stability” they referred to in May and to carry on with the trade truce struck last year at their meeting in South Korea, without bilateral ups and downs distracting them from their own domestic problems. The Chinese president wants calm to focus on his country’s flagging economy. Trump faces the war in Iran and midterm elections in November.This is the second time the two leaders have met this year, after Trump’s visit to Beijing in May. Convinced that regular contact between them is the key to stability in bilateral ties, they plan to meet again in November at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Shenzhen and at the G20 summit in Miami in December.Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition