For China’s president, Xi Jinping, it was supposed to be a chance to show himself as the political titan whom Communist party propagandists fete as the “leader of China’s great revival”. During a two-day visit to Donald Trump’s glamorous Mar-a-Lago estate, Xi would grab headlines as a globe-trotting statesman whose nation could now stand side by side with the world’s leading superpower. But Trump’s decision to unleash a barrage of cruise missiles against Syria, a decision made just before he sat down to dinner with Xi, has upended those plans and risks derailing an embryonic rapprochement that followed months of tensions between the leaders of the world’s two largest economies. Read more
