KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — President Donald Trump arrived in Malaysia on Sunday in his first stop on a three-country Asia tour that is expected to culminate in a highly anticipated meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, as tensions between the world’s two biggest economies tick higher.
“The first message is Trump the peacemaker. The second is Trump the moneymaker,” said Victor Cha of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “And then, of course, with the meeting with China, I think what everybody’s expecting is that there’s probably not going to be a big trade deal, but there will be an effort to de-escalate or put a pause on the situation.”
Trade is expected to dominate the week. Aboard Air Force One on Friday, Trump said he would subsidize U.S. farmers if he did not reach a deal with China, and that he planned to discuss the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war with Xi, saying he’d like to see China “help us out.”
The president also suggested he was angling for a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, even as the White House has said that no meeting is planned.
“You know, they don’t have a lot of telephone service,” Trump said, before urging reporters to “put out the word.”
In Kuala Lumpur, Trump is scheduled to meet with Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim before attending a working dinner with leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Malaysia, this year’s ASEAN chair, has set “inclusivity and sustainability” as the summit theme.
During his first term, Trump attended the annual ASEAN summit only once.
The White House said Trump will also join a signing ceremony for a peace agreement between Cambodia and Thailand, whose deadly border conflict he has claimed credit for helping to resolve.
Sandwiched between the summit in Kuala Lumpur and South Korea’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, Trump will pay an official visit to Japan, his fourth, for talks with the new prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, and an audience with Japanese Emperor Naruhito.
Trump will also meet with business executives and visit American troops while in Japan, which hosts more U.S. service members than any other country in the world.
Takaichi is a conservative protege of assassinated former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, with whom Trump forged a close personal relationship during his first term.
On Friday, she pledged to raise defense spending to 2% of GDP by March, two years ahead of schedule. The new target is likely to draw praise from Trump, who has pressed for allies to spend more.
Trump is concluding his trip in South Korea, where he is slated on Wednesday to address business leaders at the annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, hold a bilateral meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and attend a leaders dinner.
While in South Korea, Trump is also set to meet with Xi, the White House said, though China has not yet confirmed the session.
Topping the agenda at every stop is trade, with negotiators still ironing out the details of pacts with South Korea and Japan and taking steps toward agreements with China and Malaysia. U.S. and Chinese delegations were meeting in Malaysia over the weekend to find a way forward after Trump threatened new tariffs of 100% on Chinese goods and other trade limits starting Nov. 1 in response to China’s expanded export controls on rare earth minerals and related technologies.
“It’s not the U.S. president coming to Asia to meet the multilateral schedule; it’s the U.S. president coming to Asia and then bending the multilateral schedule around his schedule,” Cha said, noting that Trump is skipping the U.S.-ASEAN leaders meeting, the East Asia Summit and formal APEC sessions.
Even so, Cha said, regional leaders are eager to engage.
“Everybody still wants to cut a deal with the U.S. president,” he said. “They all want tariff relief, and they will try to make a deal to achieve that.”
During the meeting with Xi, Trump said he plans to raise the issue of fentanyl, accusing China of failing to curb the flow of precursor chemicals, and a senior administration official said China’s purchases of Russian oil will also be on the table. Trump said he also expects to discuss Taiwan, the self-governing island democracy that Beijing claims as its territory.
“We have a lot to talk about with President Xi, and he has a lot to talk about with us,” Trump said Friday, adding that he expects “a good meeting” even as he has intermittently threatened to call it off over trade frictions, including China’s halt to purchases of U.S. soybeans.
Both leaders want the optics and tactical aspect of this meeting to go well, a person familiar with the meeting planning said.
But analysts urged caution about what a leader-level encounter can deliver.
“During Trump’s first term, high-level exchanges with China did not prevent him from later taking a harder line,” said Sun Chenghao, a fellow at Tsinghua University’s Center for International Security and Strategy. “So the symbolic value of summit diplomacy should not be overstated.”
Earlier this week, a senior administration official pushed back on speculation that Trump could reprise his 2019 encounter with North Korea’s Kim, when he made a surprise visit to the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas in an effort to revive nuclear talks that had collapsed. Trump said before leaving Washington on Friday that he “would like” to meet with Kim, but was unsure whether it would happen on this trip.
Kim says he will negotiate only if the U.S. recognizes North Korea as a nuclear power, and he has only further strengthened his weapons programs since Trump’s first term.
“I think they are sort of a nuclear power,” Trump said as he began his journey to Asia on Friday, perhaps paving the way for a possible meeting. “They’ve got a lot of nuclear weapons, I’ll say that.”
