Trade, Iran, Taiwan in focus

President Donald Trump‘s face-to-face meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping is a high-stakes meeting full of risk along with reward.

The meetings in Beijing, set for Thursday and Friday, could be a watershed moment for the adversarial superpowers, whose fragile relationship has been snarled up by a flurry of economic and political conflicts in the past year alone.

The lingering Iran war and a longstanding dispute over Taiwan are also expected to loom large over Trump and Xi’s discussions. Each of those thorny issues affects not just Washington and Beijing, but the rest of the world.

“The stakes are extraordinarily high,” said Professor Arthur Dong, a China expert and professor of strategy and economics at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.

Trump is leaning into the hype. “Great things will happen for both Countries!” he wrote in a Truth Social post Monday.

For China, however, Trump’s visit is just the latest in a series of high-profile meetings with implications for geopolitics. An Iranian official met with his Chinese counterparts in Beijing last week, and Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to visit the city days after Trump leaves.

Analysts of U.S.-China relations say they are keeping their expectations for deliverables out of the meeting low, as each side has incentives to try to thaw tensions and avoid international incidents.

Trump and Xi want to “reconfirm their relationship and have that kind of stability,” said Kyle Chan, an expert on U.S.-China relations at the Brookings Institution. “All the other stuff is gravy.”

The White House is framing the meeting in terms of trade and the U.S. economy.

Trump’s chief goal is to continue “rebalancing the relationship with China and prioritizing reciprocity and fairness to restore American economic independence,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told reporters Sunday.

The stakes will be high for the summit, and every word out of each leader’s mouth will be parsed. Here’s what to watch out for:

In the days after the U.S. and Israel first attacked Iran on Feb. 28, some experts thought the offensive might boost Trump in his meeting with Xi, which at the time was scheduled to take place in late March and early April.

Less than two weeks later, Trump said the U.S. had asked China to delay the summit in light of the Iran war.

Now, with the war dragging on far longer than the Trump administration’s previous prediction of a…