Kate Hawkesby

One thing he agreed to today is going to order 200 jets.

I mean, this was all about praise, pomp, pageantry.

This was a very warm on the surface meeting between these two leaders, but you didn't have to scratch far to find where the tensions actually lie because these are two leaders of

The two biggest superpowers that America's own national defence strategy has warned about the significant challenges that the US faces with China.

And Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, was saying this

just a matter of yesterday.

And Taiwan became the real sort of flashpoint.

He has said this before, not just about, you know, the United States, but others, but particularly making this a direct message to the US president in the room.

It was fundamentally clear what he was trying to do here.

We're told in the coming days he's going to publicly respond to that.

That's according to his Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessett.

So we still don't know exactly what President Trump said in response.

But I think what was interesting looking at...

the readouts of these two meetings from the white house and both uh the chinese side is that china didn't mention iran at all washington did beijing mentioned taiwan a lot washington didn't touch on it so still you have these two leaders with great big vast differences so on the surface yes everything might have appeared friendly yesterday though the host being nice to the guest and the guest being nice to the host

But I think you'll still find that these are two strong power playing individuals who have vast differences in what they want and how they're going to get it.

Oh, look, I think that a lot of the work had already gone into play.

I mean, there'd been a sort of... You'd heard President Trump's language shift over the course of the last little while.

I mean, go back to Trump administration 1.0, and he was talking about, you know, coronavirus is the China virus and all this sort of stuff.

And what concession is he going to give up?

Well, he's not going to want to budge on Taiwan, but that's precisely the issue that Xi Jinping is going to want him to move.