President Donald Trump may delay his China trip due to the Iran war, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday it´s not to pressure Beijing on the Strait of Hormuz.
Bessent said any delay to Trump´s trip to Beijing would not be because of disagreements over the Iran war or efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
“If the meeting for some reason was rescheduled, it would be rescheduled because of logistics,” he said. “The president wants to remain in D.C. to coordinate the war and traveling abroad at a time like this may not be optimal.”
Trump has suggested he may delay the much-anticipated visit to China at the end of the month as he seeks to ramp up the pressure on Beijing to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz and calm oil prices that have soared during the Iran war.
In an interview Sunday with the Financial Times, Trump said China’s reliance on oil from the Middle East means it ought to help with a new coalition he is trying to put together to get oil tanker traffic moving through the strait after Iran´s threats have throttled global flows of oil. The Republican president said “we’d like to know” before the trip whether Beijing will help. “We may delay,” he said in the interview.
The uncertainty underscores just how much the US-Israeli strikes on Iran have reshaped global politics in the past two weeks. Calling off the face-to-face visit with Chinese President Xi Jinping could have its own major economic consequences: Relations between Washington and Beijing have been fraught as both sides have threatened the other with steep tariffs over the past year. The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In Beijing, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said only that China and the US have maintained communication on Trump’s visit. “Head-of-state diplomacy plays an irreplaceable strategic guiding role in China-US relations,” Lin Jian said at a daily briefing.
Bessent made his comments in Paris, where he was meeting with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng for a new round of trade talks that were meant to pave the way for Trump´s Beijing trip. The US and China have declared a truce that has prevented both sides from levying dueling tariffs, but the stakes remain high. “We had a very good two days here,” Bessent said, adding a statement “reaffirming the stability” between the two countries would be issued “in the next few days.”
In the early days of the Iran conflict, Trump had said US Navy vessels would escort oil tankers through the strait, and downplayed the threat posed by Iran. But as oil prices soared, he and his administration have been forced to consider new options – including the idea, broached this weekend, for other countries to join the push with their own warships. So far, none has yet formally heeded the call.
Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One as he returned to Washington from a weekend in Florida that the US had spoken to “about seven” nations about offering military support. He wouldn’t say which ones, though, and demurred when he was asked directly about China – though he subsequently suggested that he’d made such an offer to Beijing.
“China’s an interesting case study,” he said, noting its reliance on Gulf oil. “So I said, `Would you like to come in´ and we’ll find out. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t.”
War in Iran has sent the price of oil skyrocketing, which has raised the price Americans pay at the pump, just as the midterm election season begins to heat up. China, though, has faced its own economic pressures and recently lowered its 2026 target for growth slightly to 4.5% to 5%, its slowest projected growth since 1991 – meaning prolonged disruptions in the strait could have long-term impacts for Beijing as well.