A direct conversation between the leaders of the world’s two most powerful nations must take place as soon as possible, a former senior US diplomat has suggested, as the clock counts down on the 90-day truce in the trade war between China and the United States
Nearly four months since Donald Trump began his second term as US president, it appeared that he and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping still had not spoken to each other, a situation that Michael McFaul, America’s ambassador to Russia during the administration of former president Barack Obama, described as “horrible”.
“It’s May. They need to be talking. And [US Secretary of State Marco] Rubio needs to come to your country. And we have to have government-to-government dialogue,” McFaul said on Sunday during an event at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University in Beijing.
He said various examples, including the short interaction with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City last month, proved that one-to-one meetings were “very important” to Trump.
“I think more engagement at the highest levels is the first step towards a better [US-China] bilateral relationship,” said McFaul, who is now the director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
