Brookings Foreign Policy is reporting that U.S. President Donald Trump's upcoming summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing will focus on five key issues. Patricia M. Kim sets out these potential discussion points. It said nine scholars from Brookings are also examining how the meeting will affect their areas of expertise and whether it will be successful. Michael E. O’Hanlon warns that while U.S. munitions inventories may be low following wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, any adversary viewing this depletion as an invitation to attack would be making a significant miscalculation. New research by John F. McCauley, Margaret M. Pearson, and Xiaonan Wang indicates that foreign investment increases local perceptions of an investing country's influence but decreases positive sentiment towards it. They caution policymakers against seeing investment as a simple way to gain allies. Suzanne Maloney, writing in The New York Times, expressed skepticism that a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz would succeed within the timeframe needed for the global economy or for President Trump's midterm election prospects. Brookings also explores China's perspective on the Iran war, the diplomatic rift between China and Japan, Ukraine's place in Europe, and Thomas Wright's argument in The Atlantic that both Iran and the United States believe they have won the war, preventing a deal.
