WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is delaying a diplomatic trip to China that had been planned for months but began to unravel as he pressured Beijing and other world powers to use military might to protect the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump said Tuesday while meeting with Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin in the Oval Office that he would be going to China in five or six weeks’ time instead of at the end of the month. He said he would be “resetting”
his visit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, without elaborating.
Trump’s visit to China is seen as an opportunity to build on a fragile trade truce between the two superpowers, but it has become tangled in his effort to find an endgame to the war in Iran. Soon after pressing China and other nations to send warships to secure access to Middle Eastern oil over the weekend, Trump indicated his travel plans were up in the air, though he also indicated Tuesday that the U.S. didn’t need any help after being rebuffed by other allies.
In a Sunday interview with the Financial Times, Trump said he wanted to know whether Beijing would help secure the strait before he departed for the late-March summit. On Monday, he told reporters that he had requested to delay the trip about a month because of the demands of the war.
“I think it’s important that I be here,” Trump said. “And so it could be that we delay a little bit. Not much.”
