Trump asked China’s Xi Jinping if he’d ‘like to buy’ American

Here’s something you don’t see every day: an American president cutting through the diplomatic fog by simply asking if China wants to buy our stuff. Ambassador David Perdue confirmed that President Trump put the question directly to Xi Jinping about purchasing American weapons. It’s so blunt it almost sounds like a joke, but it’s actually a serious signal about how this administration views the world—as a place of deals, not lectures.

The old playbook would have kept this quiet, tucked away in some back-channel working group. Trump instead made it a headline. He asked the question out loud because he knows leverage is the whole game. China is modernizing its military at a breakneck pace, and whether they buy from us or build it themselves, they are going to have a modern military. So why not try to get a piece of that action? It’s the same instinct that got us a trade deal with Mexico and Canada up for grabs again—put America’s interests on the table and see what the other side is willing to pay for.

Critics will moan that arming a rival is short-sighted or that it’s just more Trump chaos. But a potential customer is easier to deal with than an adversary in the shadows. Transactions create dependencies, and dependencies are a form of control. If Beijing is spending billions on American tech, they are tied to our supply chains and our maintenance cycles. That’s a far better position than the one we were in four years ago, watching China poach our manufacturing. This is the difference between a president who sees foreign policy as a business meeting and one who sees it as a graduate seminar. Give us the business meeting every time.