GOP slams lavish welcome as China sets red lines for Trump-Xi

Ambassador Xie Feng’s four red lines are a gift to President Trump, whether he takes them that way or not. Beijing just handed us a written list of their anxieties—every one of them reads like a concession we should extract in exchange for a handshake. You don’t walk into a negotiation with a pre-printed list of demands and call yourself the party in charge. You’ve just told the other guy exactly where the pressure points are.

So it’s a strange look for Senator Bill Hagerty to be publicly carping about the pageantry of the welcome before a single meeting has happened. We get the instinct. The optics of rolling out the red carpet for a dictator are bad, particularly for a party that talks tough on China. But Hagerty is a smart man who knows diplomacy is theater. The whole point of a lavish welcome is to put Xi in a position where he has to reciprocate, not just in banquet toasts, but in actual policy. The pomp is the price of admission, and the substance happens behind closed doors.

The deeper problem isn’t the welcome mat. It’s the temptation for Trump to treat these red lines as a menu to negotiate from, instead of a list to reject outright. Caving on Taiwan or tech export controls because we want a photo op would be a disaster. But assuming the President will cave because he’s rolling out a state dinner is the kind of lazy thinking that gets our side clobbered in the press. Hagerty should save his fire for the outcome of the meeting, not the appetizer. America doesn’t win by being rude; it wins by being underestimated. Let Xi enjoy the dinner, then watch him squirm when the real talking starts.