تابع رؤية 2030
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The worsening fallout from the Iran war is forcing businesses to halt their UK investment and hiring plans, bosses have warned, as Britain enters a renewed period of political and economic instability. More than two months into the US-Israeli war on Iran, leading surveys of UK employers showed companies were increasingly prioritising cost management over growth as rising costs and global uncertainty weigh on confidence. According to a survey by the accountancy firm BDO, more than half of medium-sized businesses said higher energy and fuel costs, combined with supply chain pressures, were the biggest challenges they face as the Middle East conflict continues. Amid rising domestic political uncertainty as Keir Starmer’s Labour government braces for a leadership challenge, business leaders said companies were holding back from investing in Britain. Richard Austin, a partner at BDO, said instead of focusing on expansion, UK businesses were “struggling to absorb the latest economic shock in an uncertain global and political backdrop”. The survey comes as the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, travels to Paris for meetings with G7 finance ministers to coordinate action between the world’s most powerful nations to limit the economic fallout from the war. Reeves is expected to this week announce the next phase of support for British households and businesses to soften the impact. However, bosses warned the damage from the Middle East conflict was steadily rising. A separate report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, the professional body for HR, also found that UK employers were prioritising cost management over growth. Almost 60% of employers cited costs as their key priority as rising energy and supplier bills compound higher labour costs prompted by last year’s step-up in employer national insurance and increases in the legal minimum wage. Another report from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation showed job creation was under threat, with the number of vacancies in the UK for April down 7.7% on the level in March to 711,733 and down by 5.6% from April last year. Job postings for pilots, travel agents and train drivers had fallen the most, while postings for nannies and au pairs, as well as sales executives and couriers, had increased. Neil Carberry, the chief executive of the REC, said: “The labour market is entering a more unpredictable phase after a solid start to the year.” He said that momentum had eased in April after a good start and this reflected “growing sensitivity to the conflict in the Gulf” as well as the timing of the Easter holidays. Combined with “sudden domestic political uncertainty”, he warned hiring could take a further hit in the coming months. “The likely outcome is a more uneven hiring environment, with some firms pulling back while others continue to support underlying demand,” he said. BDO said there could be some “bright spots” for the UK economy emerging amid the Middle East conflict as some companies seek to protect their supply chains in the light of geopolitical uncertainty. Almost a third of business leaders told BDO they are looking to prioritise UK-based suppliers and a further 28% are considering moving production to the UK or closer to home, potentially providing a boost to British manufacturers. Britain’s economy has so far defied expectations for a weak first quarter amid the escalating fallout from the Iran war. Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed growth of 0.3% in gross domestic product in March. It was a sign that the Iran war, which broke out on the final day of February, did not immediately affect activity for businesses and consumers as badly as expected, despite soaring oil and gas prices owing to the closure of the strait of Hormuz. However, economists are pessimistic about the outlook for the rest of the year, saying some of the growth in the first three months could be the result of businesses and consumers stocking up on goods, fuel and raw materials ahead of possible supply shortages and higher borrowing rates.

“Farewell,” the flag-waving Chinese children chanted to Donald Trump as he strolled along the red carpet back to Air Force One at the end of his summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing. The US leader claimed he was leaving with a cluster of “fantastic” trade deals to sell US oil, jets and soya beans to China. That has not been confirmed by his smiling host, but one thing was crystal clear from the two days of meetings: the global balance of power is shifting, from the declining petrostate in the west to the rising electrostate in the east. Trump flew home to chaos – war with Iran, surging gas prices, spectacular unpopularity, friction with former allies and a 20th-century policy of “energy dominance” that seeks to turn back the clock, use tariffs and military threats to open markets, and enrich his supporters in the fossil fuel industry. The long dominant superpower increasingly appears a malignant force as it pushes the world towards ever greater turbulence. Xi, meanwhile, presides over a country that has invested more than any other in renewable energy, which has helped to buffer its economy from the gas price shocks caused by the conflict in the Middle East, while opening up huge new export markets for solar panels, wind turbines, smart grids and electric vehicles. While the Chinese president’s Communist party still faces criticism for its suppression of dissent, its soft power deficit no longer seems so great when its main global rival is killing protesters at home and bombing schoolchildren overseas. double quotation mark Future historians may well see the Iran war as the moment the US unwittingly ceded leadership to China Why is this happening now? Tempting as it is to blame these global shifts on a single malignant narcissist in the White House, a more useful – and maybe even hopeful – analysis needs to take into account the tectonic changes that are shaking not just the foundations of politics, but the very nature of human power, as the world shifts from molecules to electrons. History has proven that when the dominant form of energy changes, there is often a shift in the global pecking order. We are now in the midst of one such transition as the epoch of petrol, predominantly produced in the United States, Russia and Gulf states, starts to give way to an era of renewables, overwhelmingly manufactured in China. But the outcome remains contested, and the process could be ugly. The new energy order is winning the economic and technological battle – wind turbines and solar panels were already producing record-cheap electricity even before the Iran war pushed up the costs of gas and oil-fired power plants. But the old petro-interests still have political, military and financial might on their side, and they are using that to try to turn back the energy clock. View image in fullscreen Donald Trump and Xi Jinping attend a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People on 14 May 2026 in Beijing, China. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images As a result, democracies across the planet are now threatened by what might be called fossil fuel fascism – an extremist political movement that breaks laws, spreads lies and threatens violence in an increasingly desperate attempt to maintain markets for oil, gas and coal that would otherwise be replaced by cheaper renewables. Of course, there are multiple other, overlapping reasons for the war against Iran: its nuclear program, Trump’s need for a distraction from the Epstein files, and his willingness to adopt positions favourable to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, to name a few. But the wider context is that the Earth is becoming a more hostile environment for humanity. This is driving up tensions, exposing economic limits that have been ignored for centuries and redefining geopolitical realities. Who is actually winning? In the short term, the biggest windfall from the Iran conflict has gone to companies, executives and shareholders in the US petroleum industry – a major source of campaign funding for Trump – that was struggling with low prices and a production glut at the start of the year, but is now enjoying a spectacular revenue surge while rival suppliers in the Gulf are choked by threats in the strait of Hormuz. Along with Russian and Saudi Arabian petro-companies, US energy suppliers look set to cash in for months to come, even as consumers pay more at the pumps. At the same time, the war is forcing countries across the world to explore ways to increase their energy independence. In the next few years, that will happen by increasing domestic production of oil, gas and coal. By one reckoning, this has increased the likely 2030 output of fossil fuels by a fifth – an alarming setback for global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and a victory for the petroleum industry and the far-right political groups it funds. But that will not be the final reckoning of this war, which has reinforced the argument for both renewable energy and a concurrent shift in geopolitical alignments. With major oil and gas producers now led by ever more erratic and menacing authoritarian leaders, other countries are looking for alternative ways to generate power. Electric cars, for example, have never been more in demand. The prime beneficiary is China, which suddenly appears a relative oasis of pragmatic, internationally minded diplomacy and energy independence. Beijing’s bet on renewable power and EVs over the past two decades is paying enormous dividends. Not only has this made it less reliant on fuel imports, it now has a wind, solar and battery export industry that looks set to dominate global markets for many decades to come. Future historians may well see the Iran war as the moment the US unwittingly ceded leadership to China. If so, it would not be the first time that a change in the world’s energy matrix led to a reordering of the political hierarchy of nations. When humankind taps new power supplies, new empires rise and old ones fall. Realignments tend to be violent. How empires fall One of the cornerstones of geostrategic thinking since the start of the Industrial Revolution, 250 years ago, is that the country that controls energy supply controls the world. For most of the past century, that has centered on oil. “Oil has meant mastery through the years,” wrote Daniel Yergin in his Pulitzer prize-winning book about the decisive role of energy in world politics, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. Yergin argues oil was a primary reason why Germany invaded the Soviet Union during the second world war, and motivated Japan to attack the US at Pearl Harbor. It was why the US launched Desert Storm to thwart Iraqi’s seizure of Kuwait, which would have given Saddam Hussein control over the planet’s most abundant oil supplies. It explained former US president Barack Obama’s comment that energy was “priority number one” for his administration. Earlier this year, it was a primary justification by Trump and other US officials for invading Venezuela, which has the world’s biggest untapped reserves, and it is now a key factor in the war on Iran, which has the fourth highest supply. double quotation mark We have entered the age of clean energy. Those who lead this transition will lead the global economy of the future António Guterres Not for nothing has the old joke been revived that the “US is a very fortunate country because everywhere it goes to bring freedom it finds oil.” But what is different today is the realisation that oil – once considered “black gold” – and other fossil fuels are now a toxic threat to the stability of the climate and the political world order. Now that cheaper, cleaner alternatives are available, the demand for these industrial fuels has to be artificially inflated, propped up by political lobbying, hefty subsidies, disinformation campaigns and military force. The most spectacular example of an energy transition completely upturning the world order was in the mid-19th century, when the coal-powered gunships of the Royal Navy shredded the fragile coastal defences of southern China to impose a market for the British empire’s most lucrative and unethical commodity: opium. Up to that point, Beijing had been the capital of the world’s biggest economy for most of the previous 2,000 years but its historic advantage in manpower and culture was being lost to fossil-fuelled engines and the spirit-sapping drug trade. The Daoguang Emperor was so deeply in denial about the changes reshaping the world that his actions stirred rebellion among his own people. His forces were crushed by the superior firepower of an industrialised adversary, ushering in an era of western dominance that became known in China as the “century of humiliation”. View image in fullscreen Illustration of the Battle at Sai-Lau Creek in China, during the second opium war, 1858. Illustration: duncan1890/Getty Images Britain’s empire also came to end – albeit it more limply – when its primary source of fuel – coal – was superseded by oil in the early-to-mid-20th century. Back then, the UK had no petroleum supplies of its own which meant it was at a disadvantage to the US. The power shift was confirmed in 1956 when Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt to try to secure the Suez canal – a vital route for fossil fuels from the Middle East. The US refused to help this imperial adventure by the old world, thereby confirming Washington as the dominant superpower outside the Soviet bloc. Since then, it has steadily expanded its primacy in the age of oil. That era – and that supremacy – are both now winding down, as the pendulum swings again, this time towards renewables and back to Asia. In the past decade, clean energy investment worldwide has risen tenfold to more than $2tn a year. Last year, it was more than double that of fossil fuels, and for the first time renewables overtook coal as the world’s

In July 2016, in a canalside conference centre in central Birmingham, Theresa May took the stage for a speech that would formally launch her Tory leadership bid. The home secretary of six years was seen as a safe pair of hands, including by the business community still reeling from the shock result of the Brexit referendum. What business had not banked on, though, was a social reform platform that would see May pledge to rein in corporate Britain and give workers and consumers seats on company boards. “If we are going to have an economy that works for everyone, we are going to need to give people more control of their lives,” she said. “And that means cutting out all the political platitudes about “stakeholder societies” – and doing something radical.” It was a gamble. But while it borrowed from left-leaning models used by other EU states, it echoed the kind of anti-establishment rhetoric that had fuelled the pro-Brexit vote and ultimately led to David Cameron’s resignation as prime minister weeks earlier. Days later, May took Cameron’s job. But her dreams of boardroom reform were scuppered, having quickly bowed to powerful business groups keen to kill off the radical reforms. Meagre changes followed instead, allowing listed companies to do as little as assign one of its existing board members to engage with workers, or, simply explain why they failed to do so. But now, a decade on from May’s speech, one of the UK’s biggest lenders is facing a customer boardroom that could shake up the status quo and revive the debate over corporate democracy. View image in fullscreen James Sherwin-Smith says he is against demutualisation. Photograph: James4Nationwide Nationwide building society will, on 15 July, have one of its customers up for a boardroom seat at its annual general meeting (AGM). It is a significant moment, including for 45-year-old James Sherwin-Smith, who has been a vocal advocate for overhauling the governance of the 142-year-old building society. Building societies – which are owned by their members – remain one of the only UK sectors that legally gives its customers the right to nominate peers for boardroom elections. But that does not mean it is common, or easy, to make the cut. Sherwin-Smith has spent the better part of two years gathering more than 250 peer nominations from scratch, given member details were withheld, owing to data rules. Signatures only qualified if nominators’ balances or loans stayed above a certain level – £100 or £200 in most cases – over the preceding two years. “I didn’t expect the process to be easy, but I also didn’t expect that securing the necessary nominations would be quite this hard,” Sherwin-Smith said. But that was just the first step. “Getting 250 people to nominate you is no small hurdle,” said Andrew Johnston, a professor of company law and corporate governance at Warwick University. He believes Nationwide will be weighing its options carefully. “I suspect they don’t want him on the board because he’s going to just ask lots of awkward questions about stuff that they want to do.” There are now no member-nominated directors sitting on any of the UK’s 42 building society boards, according to the Building Societies Association (BSA), and only three member-supported candidates have been elected to Nationwide’s board in living memory. That includes Paul Twyman, whose retirement in 2002 marked the last time a member-nominated director held a boardroom seat in Nationwide or any UK building society. That has meant that while Nationwide’s listed banking rivals including Barclays, Lloyds and NatWest have to answer to shareholders, Nationwide does not have to answer many intrusive questions, apart from those posed by regulators – or members – at its virtual-only AGMs. Nationwide said it engaged with members through a 6,500-member talkback panel as evidence of engagement, though some critics claim this is more of a market research panel. “The managers of the mutual are insulated from outside pressure,” Johnston said. “Is it good or bad? The answer is always: it depends.” “If they’re not being held accountable to anybody, then they could be abusing their position or the quality of their decisions could be poor, and they’re just not having to justify themselves. So it creates a danger of groupthink.” In 2016, business lobby groups such as the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) were careful in making public arguments against May’s boardroom reforms. However, they did raise some specific concerns, including around corporate confidentiality and that it would be difficult to find someone who properly represented workers or customers. Gareth Thomas, the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for mutuals, said he was wary about giving unseasoned members a seat on the board of the UK’s second largest mortgage lender, with about £368bn worth of assets. Specifically, he fears they might try to upend the mutual model and profit from the payoffs that follow. “If you don’t have thresholds for the bigger institutions then you risk opening the door to those who want to demutualise,” he said. The BSA chief executive, Sarah Harrison, agreed that lenders like Nationwide needed to be cautious when accepting members into the fold. “It’s right that members have the ability to apply to be on board … But it doesn’t follow that just being a member alone, or a customer alone, is sufficient to be on the board, because there are skills, there’s expertise, there is experience that will be needed … in order for that board to be able to deliver for its customers.” “I am against demutualisation, in common with the stated position of the Nationwide board,” said Sherwin-Smith. “As to complexity, building societies rely on their members to accept the accounts, appoint auditors, vote on remuneration reports and policy, and elect directors. To suggest that they are incapable of standing for election to the board that serves their interests is offensive.” The former Oliver Wyman consultant has undoubtedly ruffled some feathers, having held Nationwide’s feet to the fire for not holding a member vote over its £2.9bn takeover of Virgin Money in 2024, and again for failing to hold a binding vote on a 43% pay rise for its chief executive, Debbie Crosbie last year that pushed her maximum pay package to £7m. In short, Sherwin-Smith is concerned that the building society’s rapid growth has compromised its democratic roots, leaving members with a much smaller say in its operations. Nationwide has yet to answer some questions about the election process. It said Sherwin-Smith would need a simple majority of more than 50% to be elected, like other directors. However, the society did not confirm whether he would need to get more votes than, and unseat, an existing board member. It also said the remuneration committee had yet to decide whether Sherwin-Smith might be paid. The board is also deciding whether to officially recommend Sherwin-Smith’s election to members. A refusal to do so would significantly hinder his chances, given the board gives members a “quick vote” option that backs all board recommendations with one click. Monica Franco-Santos, a senior academic specialising in corporate governance at the Cranfield School of Management, said this could be used to sway member votes. “A one-click endorsement of the board’s preferences is likely to make ratification the default, and that is a powerful control mechanism,” she said. Nationwide said that it had used the quick vote model for more than 20 years and that the vast majority of members said they “understand the choice that it gives them and they value the convenience it provides”. “Nationwide may not have shareholders, but it does have strong membership involvement,” the mutual added. “Every director is elected each year by the society’s membership, and they are under a duty to act in the interests of the society and its current and future members. More people are choosing Nationwide than ever before and it has had market-leading customer satisfaction for 14 years.”

Back in 2016, Marco Gutiérrez, the Mexican-born founder of Latinos for Trump, issued an ominous warning to the US. “My culture is a very dominant culture,” he said on MSNBC. “It is imposing and it’s causing problems. If you don’t do something about it, you’re going to have taco trucks on every corner.” A decade later, I regret to inform you there is not a taco truck on every corner. But I am here to issue my own ominous warning about the takeover of America: not by immigrant culture but by AI culture. To echo Gutiérrez: it is imposing and it’s causing problems. And if we don’t do something about it, we’re going to have datacenters on every corner. I’m not some sort of data-hater, OK? Datacenters – physical facilities housing storage systems, servers and network devices – are a critical part of powering the internet; if they disappeared, the modern world would cease to function. The banking system would collapse; you wouldn’t be able to stream Netflix, go on social media, or (most importantly) read the Guardian online. But while we obviously need datacenters, the AI boom, and the enormous amounts of computing power it requires, has caused their footprint to massively expand – and our utility bills to jump. “When a data center comes online, retail customers usually help to foot the electric bill: American utilities sought almost thirty billion dollars in retail rate increases in the first half of 2025,” the New Yorker explained last year. Meanwhile Bloomberg reported on a new study this week that shows “power prices on the largest electric grid in the US jumped 76% in the first quarter due to rampant demand from data centers.” Things will only get worse. Today datacenters consume 6% of electricity supply in the UK and US; by 2030, they could account for more than 14% of the US’s total power demand. It’s not just how much they cost that’s problematic. AI datacenters are noisy, emit pollution that could harm community health and divert much-needed resources. Last year, for example, residents in Fayetteville, Georgia, noticed low water pressure; eventually they discovered a nearby datacenter had taken 30m gallons of water, initially without paying for it. It is no surprise that a new Gallup poll has found seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing AI datacenters in their local area. Indeed, most Americans would rather live by a nuclear power plant than a datacenter. Of course, the people getting filthy rich from AI will never have to live nextdoor to their moneymaking creations and seem fairly blase about the issues associated with their expansion. Take the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, for example. “As AI grows, how big do data centers need to be?” podcaster Theo Von asked Altman last year. “Is that a concern of you guys?” Not really, judging by his response. Altman waxed lyrical about the scale of the datacenter OpenAI was building before saying that while he wasn’t sure where things were going, he had a lot of guesses. “I do guess a lot of the world gets covered in datacenters over time,” Altman said. “But I don’t know because maybe we put them in space … I wish I had, like, more concrete answers for you, but like, we’re stumbling through this.” In true Silicon Valley fashion, while the industry may be “stumbling”, it’s regular people getting hurt. But forget the regular people. Won’t anyone think of the poor, oppressed datacenters? As backlash grows, the industry has gone into full-on defensive mode. The venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary, for example, has claimed that people protesting against a vast datacenter in Utah are not actually concerned, they’re just paid agitators. “There are professional protesters that are paid by somebody, I don’t know who,” O’Leary said in a video on X last week. More perniciously, we’re starting to see more discussion around the idea that AI might have legal personhood, and datacenters might have certain rights. Earlier this month, MLive and 404 Media reported on the University of Michigan’s attempts to build a $1.2bn, nuclear weapons research and AI datacenter in Ypsilanti Township. Township officials voted on a year-long moratorium on water and sewer services for the facility, while it conducted environmental impact studies. In response, the university claimed the moratorium discriminated against datacenters. “[T]he proposed moratorium is pretextual and unlawfully discriminatory because it singles out ‘data centers’ by label rather than by utility impact,” a legal threat said. It seems highly likely that we are going to see more discussion about certain “rights” being attached to datacenters. After all, looking at the issue more broadly, corporate personhood has been a part of US law for over a century and, in recent decades, the rights afforded to corporations have steadily expanded. The supreme court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling found corporations have a right to political speech. Then in 2014, the supreme court’s Hobby Lobby ruling found some companies should be allowed a religious exemption from requirements to include contraception in employee health plans. This significantly broadened the scope of personhood rights by acknowledging a right to corporate religious expression. In its 2023 303 Creative LLC v Elenis decision, the supreme court similarly held that a website design business owned by an evangelical Christian could refuse service to same-sex couples. This once again seemed to put the free speech right of corporations over the rights of LGBTQ+ people not to be discriminated against. “Today the Supreme Court once again advanced the personhood rights of some corporations to the detriment of actual human beings,” The Brennan Center for Justice said at the time of the Hobby Lobby judgment. “[We are] very concerned about the continued trend of corporations successfully asserting the rights of human beings, while injuring the interests of actual human beings.” They were right to be concerned. Given the way things are going in the US, corporations seem to have more freedom of speech than university students. And it might not be long before datacenters have more rights than women. Oklahoma bill on child marriage becomes law The bill makes it illegal for anyone under 18 to be married, removing current exceptions that allow minors to get married with parental consent or court approval. While one lawmaker voted against it, we were largely spared the creepy speeches we saw when New Hampshire raised the legal age of marriage in 2024. Back then the Republican state representative Jess Edwards said that the bill would make abortion “much more desirable” for people of a “ripe, fertile age”. What happened to Aisha and Huda Al-Aqqad? Ever since seeing it, I have been haunted by this photo of 78-year-old Aisha and 41-year-old Huda Al-Aqqad, a mother and daughter who were abducted from Gaza. A grinning Israeli soldier posted a photo of the blindfolded women in a van while flashing a thumbs-up. An investigation by Sky News identified the women and tried to find out what happened. Are they being sexually tortured in an Israeli detention center? Are they dead? The Israeli military has no answers and seemingly no interest in investigating. Supreme court allows abortion pill mifepristone to continue to be available by mail While this is good news, we shouldn’t be complacent. Expect anti-abortion extremists to continue to try to outlaw abortion pills nationwide. Single women are buying more houses than single men The Guardian has a fascinating piece about the men who feel emasculated by this. (Love is Blind enthusiasts will immediately recall the Chris Fusco/Jessica Barrett drama from season 10, and how hostile Chris was after seeing Jessica’s nice house. Which reinforces my thesis that all you need to know about US culture, you can learn from Love is Blind.) Hannah Einbinder is in a new lesbian horror movie, and she’s got her priorities straight During her Emmy Awards win last year, the Hacks star signed off with the instantly iconic phrase: “Go birds, fuck ICE, free Palestine.” (For confused non-Americans, Einbinder wasn’t bigging up her local street pigeon – “‘birds” refers to Philadelphia’s football team.) In an interview promoting her new queer slasher film, Einbinder, who has called out Hollywood’s silence about Gaza, said she would continue to be vocal about Palestine. In antiquity, women were considered the more sexual sex The Guardian has a piece by a historian on why that changed. The week in pawtriarchy A Canadian fox was caught red-handed after police officers received a call about a “theft of BBQ goods”. Despite apprehending the fox with a mouth full of hotdogs, police let the animal go. I don’t know if justice was served, but dinner certainly was. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

It was historic, to be sure, but not as anyone had predicted. First there was Donald Trump, a self-declared teetotaler, apparently drinking champagne after Xi Jinping assured him that China’s “great rejuvenation” could go hand in hand with “Make America great again”. Then there was a Chinese military band playing a rendition of the US president’s signature campaign song, YMCA. Beneath giant chandeliers, blue and gold balconies and a big orange backdrop with pagoda-style roofs, Thursday’s state banquet in Beijing featured characters whose presence would have been unthinkable here a decade ago: Elon Musk, the eccentric tech billionaire, Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host turned “secretary of war”, and of course Trump himself, a former reality TV star now leading the world’s biggest superpower. As the guests dug into a quirky menu that included lobster in tomato soup, crispy beef ribs, Beijing roast duck and slow-cooked salmon in mustard sauce, the mood was convivial after the first day of a summit that had offered cosy choreography and the promise of stability in the world’s most important bilateral relationship. But by the time Trump and his entourage boarded Air Force One on Friday, the generous helpings of food might not have been enough to stave off an empty feeling. He came, he saw, he left without much to show for it: no swift end to the war in Iran, no definitive answer on the fate of Taiwan and only the vague outlines of corporate mega-deals. Underwhelmed observers suggested that the summit failed to live up to the hype. “It was heavier on symbolism than it was on substance,” Rush Doshi, director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank in Washington, told reporters. “There was a focus on managing problems, not on solving the problems that exist between the US and China … A lot of pomp, a lot of pageantry, a lot of symbolism but not a lot of substance or deliverables.” View image in fullscreen Donald Trump raises a glass of champagne as he speaks at a state banquet at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Thursday. Photograph: Evan Vucci/Reuters The Beijing that greeted Trump is oozing self-confidence. Commuters cram into smooth-running subway trains and find just enough room to scroll through slick social media apps. Designer labels from around the world populate luxury shopping malls. The magnificent National Centre for the Performing Arts rests like a titanium and glass boiled egg in an artificial lake. The National Museum on Tiananmen Square shows off the latest advances in green energy, robotics and space exploration and proclaims: “Forging the path to national strength.” America, meanwhile, is plagued by self-doubt over its internal divisions and external misadventures. Sensing a potential shift in the balance of power, Xi urged the two nations to avoid the “Thucydides Trap”, the historical concept that an established power tends to be threatened by a rising one, leading to an inevitable clash. The summit, held partly in the ornate surroundings of Zhongnanhai – the secretive Communist party leadership compound often likened to a Chinese Kremlin or White House – unfolded with pageantry and fanfare. Xi personally escorted the US president through manicured gardens filled with centuries-old trees and Chinese roses. Trump marvelled at them as “the most beautiful roses anyone has ever seen”, prompting Xi to promise he would send him seeds. Beijing appeared determined to flatter a president known to value personal diplomacy and spectacle. Trump responded in kind, repeatedly praising Xi as “all business” but also “a warm person”, adding: “We’ve settled a lot of different problems that other people wouldn’t have been able to settle.” View image in fullscreen Xi and Trump talk at the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing on Friday. Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/Reuters The Chinese leader described the visit as “historic”, saying the two countries had agreed on “a constructive, strategic and stable China-US relationship”. Chinese officials suggested the framework could guide relations for the remainder of Trump’s presidency. George Chen, a partner at the consultancy The Asia Group, told the Associated Press that the summit resembled “a political reality show at times” but both sides had achieved something important by simply restoring direct leader-to-leader rapport after months of escalating tensions. Chen added: “The readouts from Beijing and the White House differ in tone and emphasis but neither side contradicted the other’s account. That alone reflects a rare moment of mutual respect.” ‘Clashes and even conflicts’ Still, the disagreements were profound. Nothing loomed larger over the talks than Taiwan, the democratic island claimed by Beijing as Chinese territory and viewed by many analysts as the most likely trigger for a US-China war. Xi used the summit to warn Trump in unusually stark terms that mishandling Taiwan could propel China and the US towards “clashes and even conflicts”. Trump later claimed that ​Xi asked directly whether the US would ​defend Taiwan if China attacked the island but Trump declined ⁠to answer. “There’s only one person that knows that, and it is me,” he told reporters later. “I’m the only person.” For decades, the US adopted a policy of “strategic ambiguity” towards Taiwan but then president Joe Biden was explicit in saying he would use military force to defend the island. China, meanwhile, has sharply intensified military pressure on Taiwan in recent years and has never renounced the use of force to seize the island. View image in fullscreen Elon Musk and his son X Æ A-Xii walk on as the Chinese premier, Li Qiang, meets with American CEOs in Beijing on Thursday. Photograph: Go Nakamura/AP Ahead of the summit, Trump had hinted he might reconsider a massive $11bn weapons package for Taiwan approved last year by his administration. The sales have not yet been implemented and Beijing has made clear it views them as a core test of US intentions. Speaking onboard Air Force One on Friday, Trump said only that he would make a decision “over the next fairly short period of time”. That vagueness is likely to alarm officials in Taipei, who have watched Trump’s rhetoric on Taiwan with increasing nervousness. He has repeatedly complained that Taiwan “stole” America’s semiconductor industry and demanded the island pay more for its own defence. If Taiwan represented the long-term strategic danger, Iran dominated the immediate agenda. China remains Iran’s biggest oil customer. Trump emerged from his meetings with Xi insisting that China and the US were broadly aligned over the conflict, now in its 11th week after US and Israeli strikes on Iran on 28 February. View image in fullscreen A person reads a local newspaper reporting on Trump’s meeting with Xi in Beijing on Friday. Photograph: Jessica Lee/EPA “We don’t want them to have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said beside Xi. “We want the straits open.” The strait of Hormuz – through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil previously flowed – has been effectively closed since the outbreak of the war. The resulting disruption has sent oil prices surging towards $109 a barrel and raised fears of a global recession. Rising gas prices in the US have also dragged Trump’s approval rating to an all-time low. Trump claimed Xi had agreed that Tehran must reopen the waterway and had promised China would not supply Iran with military equipment. “That’s a big statement,” Trump said later in a Fox News interview. Beijing’s own public statements were more restrained. China’s foreign ministry bluntly declared that the conflict “should never have happened” and called for shipping routes to reopen but stopped short of endorsing Trump’s approach. View image in fullscreen Trump stands after his speech at a state dinner with Xi at the Great Hall of the People on Thursday. Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/AP Trump also returned from Beijing promising sweeping commercial gains and “fantastic trade deals”. He claimed that China would buy “billions of dollars” worth of American agricultural goods, particularly soybeans, offering a potential lifeline to US farmers who have suffered badly from years of trade tensions and Chinese diversification towards Brazilian suppliers. The US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, said Washington expected “double-digit billions” in agricultural purchases over the next three years. Trump added: “The farmers are going to be very happy.” Trump announced what could become one of the biggest aircraft deals in history, saying China had agreed to purchase 200 Boeing aircraft immediately, with the possibility of expanding the order to 750 jets if the arrangement proved successful. But Chinese officials did not confirm the deal. One of the more surprising announcements concerned nuclear arms control. Trump said he had proposed a trilateral agreement among the US, Russia and China to cap nuclear arsenals. “I got a very positive response,” he said. “This is the beginning.” But hopes that Trump and Xi might put the brakes on the uncontrolled development of AI were seemingly dashed. Despite the presence of Musk, who pulled funny faces when asked for photos, Apple’s Tim Cook, chipmaker Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and other tech executives, there were no obvious signs of new guardrails in the AI arms race between the two countries. Unnaturally subdued The talks also touched on human rights, albeit briefly. Trump said he had raised the cases of the imprisoned Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai and detained Chinese pastor Jin Mingri. Xi appeared more open regarding the latter, according to Trump. “I think he’s giving very serious consideration to the pastor,” the president said. But Lai’s case was “a tough one”. For a president who normally commands the spotlight with daily, freewheeling press interactions, Trump was unnaturally subdued in Beijing. In what appeared to be an act