CNN
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Imagine the scene at noon on January 20th on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol.

As Donald Trump vows to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution at the same spot where his supporters rioted four years ago, an extraordinary VIP guest who puts former presidents, military officials and members of Congress to shame looks on.

Wrapped up to ward off the winter chill is Xi Jinping, the hardline leader of China – the country that almost everyone on the opening platform sees as an existential threat to the U.S. superpower’s supremacy as the Cold War accelerates in the 21st century.

It’s a fantastic image because even before sources confirmed on Thursday that Xi would not attend, it was clear that could not happen, despite Trump’s overwhelming invitation to the Chinese Communist Party leader for a second inauguration, which he made a striking one Globalists wanted to make a statement.

Getting Xi to fly around the world would be a massive coup for the president-elect – a fact that would make it politically unfeasible for the Chinese leader. Such a visit would put the Chinese president in the position of paying homage to Trump and American power – which would contradict his vision of China assuming a rightful role as a preeminent world power. At the inauguration ceremony, Xi would be forced to listen to Trump, with no control over what the new president would say and no right to respond. Xi’s presence would also be seen as an endorsement of a democratic transfer of power – anathema to an autocrat in a one-party state obsessed with suppressing individual expression.

Still, even without a positive response, Trump’s invitation to Xi represents a significant development that illuminates the president-elect’s confidence and ambition as he wields power ahead of his second term. The CNN team covering Trump reported that he also asked other world leaders if they wanted to come to the inauguration – a break from convention.

This is a reminder of Trump’s penchant for foreign policy through grand gestures and his willingness to flout diplomatic rules with his unpredictable actions. The Xi invitation also shows that Trump believes that the strength of his personality alone can be a decisive factor in diplomatic breakthroughs. He is far from the only president to take this approach — which rarely works because hostile U.S. adversaries make tough decisions based on national interests rather than sentiment.

The president-elect’s invitation to Xi is all the more interesting given that in recent weeks he has assembled a foreign policy team that is deeply hawkish on China, including his picks for secretary of state, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and national security adviser, Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, who sees China as a threat to the United States on multiple fronts, economically, at sea and even in space.

“This is a very interesting move by Trump that fits very well with his practice of unpredictability. I don’t think anyone expected this,” said Lily McElwee, deputy director and fellow at the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). McElwee said the invitation should be seen in the context of the carrots and sticks the president-elect is using as he prepares to take on the world’s most critical diplomatic relationship. “It’s a very, very cheap carrot. It’s a symbolic carrot – it upsets the tone of the relationship a little bit in a way that certainly doesn’t harm U.S. interests.”

Trump’s outreach to Xi comes as expectations grow that strained U.S.-China relations will worsen in the incoming administration, as officials are determined to build on an already tough line from the Biden administration, which built on a tightening of policies during Trump’s first term.

The rivals disagree over Taiwan, an island democracy that China considers part of its territory and which the United States may defend if Xi orders an invasion. China is increasing its cooperation with other US adversaries in an informal anti-Western axis alongside Russia, North Korea and Iran. During clashes in the South and East China Seas, the air and naval forces of the two Pacific powers often come dangerously close. And lawmakers from both parties accuse China of stealing U.S. economic and military secrets and failing to comply with international law and trade rules.

Since Trump has already threatened to impose crippling tariffs on China, his attempt to lure Xi to Washington appears to be a monumental contradiction. And as foreign governments puzzle over how to deal with the new U.S. president, the question arises: How seriously should U.S. allies and adversaries take his tyrannical tone and volatile policy shifts? Is the true American approach characterized by its hardline officials and policies, or is it more represented by the president-elect’s groundbreaking moves that reveal his eagerness to make deals and sit at the negotiating table with the tough world leaders?

Trump’s latest move may feel chaotic — but that doesn’t mean it can’t work.

While Trump’s critics often decry his unpredictability, his spontaneous moves can unbalance rivals and open up potential advantages for the US. For example, any success he has in drawing Xi away from Iran, Russia and North Korea would be a major foreign policy victory, regardless of other differences between the US and China.

But at the same time, it’s fair to wonder whether the fire and fury of his foreign policy in his first term produced lasting results.

Trump’s views on China are particularly confusing – as he seems to believe that Beijing’s mercantilist policies pose a direct threat to the US and have betrayed America for decades. But he still wants to be friends with Xi. On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly emphasized that Xi was tough and smart and that they were friends – apparently believing their warmth meant the Chinese leader might have a similar opinion of him.

Trump expressed this contradiction in a single sentence in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC on Thursday. “We’ve talked and discussed some things and other things with President Xi and other leaders, and I think overall we’re going to do very well,” Trump said. But he added: “We have been abused as a country. We were badly mistreated from an economic perspective.”

Trump’s habit of undermining his administration’s hard-line policies was evident again and again in his first term, particularly with strongmen like Xi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. At times it seemed like he was taking positions just because everyone was telling him not to.

One of Trump’s former national security advisers, HR McMaster, noted in his book “At War with Ourselves” that this was particularly pronounced with Putin. “Like his predecessors George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Trump was overconfident that he could improve relations with the dictator in the Kremlin,” McMaster wrote. “Trump, who describes himself as an ‘expert dealmaker,’ believed he could develop a personal relationship with Putin. Trump’s tendency to be reflexively contrarian only added to his resolve. The fact that most foreign policy experts in Washington were advocating tough action against the Kremlin only seemed to drive the president to take the opposite approach.”

Such contrarianism could motivate Trump in his early olive branch to Xi. And the president-elect could also consider a new trade deal with Beijing, even if a bilateral first-term agreement largely failed. The Phase 1 trade deal he struck in late 2019, which he described as “historic,” never materialized. While Trump turned sharply against Xi months later over the Covid-19 pandemic that began in the Chinese city of Wuhan, it was never clear that Xi ever intended to bring about what Trump described as large-scale economic structural change and massive U.S. Purchases designated to fully implement agriculture, energy and industrial goods. There is no evidence that Xi has changed his mind.

Trump’s tariff strategy is also questionable because no one knows whether a president who does not want to harm his base would be willing to pay the political price that such an approach would entail. Although he insisted the tariffs would ultimately cost Beijing billions, U.S. retailers would pass on the higher prices of imports to consumers – including voters who saw Trump as the best hope of bringing down high food prices.

Another question: Does Trump view tariffs as a negotiating tactic or a true act of economic warfare? Many analysts believe that his threats to allies such as Canada and the European Union were simply intended to improve his negotiating position. But the antipathy toward China in Washington is so great that trade wars with Beijing could last longer and become an end in themselves.

“As far as China is concerned, we still have a question mark about whether the tariff threats are aimed at negotiating a deal or whether they are aimed at some sort of unilateral decoupling of the US and Chinese economies,” McElwee said.

Beijing appears to be taking Trump seriously. Retaliatory measures have been prepared in the weeks since Trump’s election. On Wednesday, the company announced an antitrust investigation against US chipmaker Nvidia. On another front of the technology war, China banned the export of several rare minerals to the United States. And on Thursday she pledged to increase the budget deficit, borrow more money and ease monetary policy to safeguard economic growth as a hedge against new tensions with Trump.

This shows that a trade war could be disastrous for both China and America. While tariffs could drive up prices in the U.S., they could dry up profits and exacerbate some of China’s biggest economic vulnerabilities, including industrial overcapacity and low household demand.

So Trump’s unorthodox approach could begin to attract attention in Beijing.

Viewed from this perspective, Trump’s inaugural invitation looks like an opening move in a grand pan-Pacific game that will define his second term.