President Trump is already anticipating a “very difficult” meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping later this week. But the two-day summit could be tougher than imagined due to the fledgling administration’s shortage of senior officials with significant Asia experience, experts say.
Trump and Xi will spend roughly 24 hours together at the president’s beachside club in West Palm Beach, Fla., with the Chinese leader arriving Thursday afternoon and departing early Friday evening. Their first sit-down meeting comes amid increased concerns about North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities.
North Korea, trade and China’s expansion in the South China Sea are all on the agenda, and some experts worry the president is woefully unprepared to be addressing such issues at this time.
“This administration is unprecedently unstaffed to be going into a summit with our major strategic rival in the world, and that has to influence the question of what we want to come out of the summit,” said Stapleton Roy, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and former U.S. ambassador in Beijing.
He continued, “Every issue – the Taiwan issue, the One China policy, the South China Sea – are very complex issues with historical backgrounds behind them, and who in this administration at the present time has a grasp of all of these?”
A White House official confirmed to the Washington Examiner that National Security Council Senior Director Matthew Pottinger is currently the only staffer ensconced in the West Wing who possesses extensive experience in Asian and Pacific security affairs. The Marine Corps veteran previously worked in the Wall Street Journal’s Beijing bureau and joined Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on his first diplomatic trip to China last month.
“He’s a very effective bureaucratic player, which is saying something because he’s never had a policy job before,” Michael Green, who served on the NSC during the Bush administration, told the New York Times earlier this month.
Nevertheless, Roy said Trump should be surrounded by senior administration officials by this point who are capable of, and qualified to be advising him, on U.S.-China policy.
“I don’t recall any administration that has been so backward in terms of getting senior staffers into the State department, Defense department, etc. at this stage,” he said.
“There are important concepts to be discussed and it seems we haven’t gotten into this area as much as we should,” he added.
This story has been updated.
