President Donald Trump is scheduled to travel to Beijing later this week for talks with President Xi Jinping — a summit that has taken on substantially more significance with the U.S.-Iran standoff stuck in stalemate. According to Henry Wilkinson, chief intelligence officer at geopolitical risk firm Dragonfly, Trump may use the Xi meeting to press China to lean on Iran to accept U.S. terms. Wilkinson made the assessment on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” Tuesday.
China’s alignment matters because roughly half of all crude exiting the Persian Gulf in pre-conflict times was destined for Chinese refineries. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has therefore hit China’s energy supply harder than any other single country. Beijing has publicly called for the strait to reopen multiple times during the conflict. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi traveled to Beijing on May 5 as China continued to mediate, alongside Pakistan and Qatar, in parallel with the bilateral U.S.-Iran channel.
The structure of the Trump-Xi meeting limits what can be agreed publicly. Trump cannot extract concessions from Iran through China alone — Tehran retains its own decision-making authority and is constrained by domestic politics that demand visible resistance to U.S. terms. What China can do is signal back-channel preferences to Tehran that affect Iranian calculations on timing and on which red lines are firm versus negotiable. That kind of pressure is invisible from outside but historically effective in similar standoffs.
The summit is also a domestic test for Trump. Arriving in Beijing with the conflict unresolved — or with the U.S. publicly threatening renewed strikes after rejecting Iran’s counterproposal Sunday — places Trump in a weaker negotiating posture than at any point in recent months. China negotiates from strength when its counterpart is constrained. The Iranian standoff has become a constraint that Beijing can exploit on adjacent issues including trade, Taiwan, and rare-earth supply chains.
Markets are watching the summit timeline as a hard deadline. If Trump returns from Beijing with even a framework of Chinese pressure on Iran — quiet, off-the-record, but credible to U.S. and Iranian audiences — the panic premium could compress meaningfully. If Trump returns without anything substantive, markets are likely to price the stalemate as durable through the summer, with WTI in the $100-110 range and Brent $105-115 as the new normal. Crude futures Tuesday already reflected the latter scenario: WTI $102.18, Brent $107.77, both up more than 45% YTD.
There is a parallel diplomatic risk if China publicly aligns with Iranian positions during the summit. Beijing has been careful throughout the conflict to maintain official neutrality while pressing privately for reopening. A public Chinese statement that explicitly endorses Iran’s 30-day OFAC sanctions suspension demand or end-the-blockade demand would mark a meaningful diplomatic loss for the U.S. and would likely accelerate any Trump decision on restarting Project Freedom escorts through Hormuz.
The most likely outcome from the summit, in Wilkinson’s framing and that of other geopolitical analysts, is process commitments rather than substantive movement. Trump and Xi may agree on continued mediation, on shared interest in reopening Hormuz, and on bilateral talks at the foreign-minister level over the coming weeks. None of that would resolve the stalemate, but all of it would buy time and tamp down the most extreme escalation scenarios in the near term. For continuing coverage, see our geopolitics dashboard.