President Donald Trump may be brimming with confidence going into his Mar-a-Lago summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, but some China watchers say he could easily be outmatched by a superbly well-prepped Beijing diplomatic team aiming to exploit gaping holes in the White House’s fledgling China policy group.

Trump will be relying heavily on son-in-law and real-estate magnate Jared Kushner with some assistance from old China hand Henry Kissinger and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, an oil executive who is mostly unfamiliar with the customs and political protocols of a Chinese delegation that places a premium on them. But Trump hasn’t filled many key positions that could bolster him in the negotiations, including assistant secretaries of State and Defense for East Asia, according to former U.S. officials and other experts familiar with China policy.


“Those are very key players, and without people in those positions, it is hard to imagine that the administration in this short period of time has been able to come with a comprehensive China policy,” said Dennis Wilder, who served from 2015 to 2016 as the CIA’s deputy assistant director for East Asia and the Pacific.

A Trump administration spokesperson had no comment on whether the White House’s China team is up to the task, or hindered by unfilled positions or lack of experience.

Other key positions remain unfilled, including a China-related slot at the U.S. Trade Representative’s office. And one of the most important slots -- Trump’s senior director for Asia on the National Security Council – is occupied by Matthew Pottinger, a former Beijing-based journalist turned Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and was brought in by Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

“While I'm sure he will learn quickly, he has no experience in negotiating with the Chinese at this stratospheric level," said Wilder, who was also special assistant to the president and senior director for East Asian Affairs at the National Security Council in the Bush and Obama administrations.

In contrast, Xi will come to the summit with a team of players with decades of experience in negotiating with at least three successive American presidents, and a huge playbook brimming with research and intelligence on U.S. positions on trade, security and other key issues, according to Wilder and others.

Xi will have his secret weapon, Wang Huning, a senior adviser to three Chinese presidents and a specialist on U.S. politics who has accompanied the Chinese president on dozens of overseas trips to meet with world leaders.

Security experts say that Trump to some degree should be able to wing it, by focusing on trade and North Korea, and committing to a series of follow-up meetings where the real policy experts meet to discuss the nitty gritty details. He will also have Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Reince Priebus and some other aides at his side at his Palm Beach resort, according to a background briefing provided by the White House in advance of the summit. But none of them are considered China experts, either. One who is an expert on China is a holdover from the Obama administration, NSC Director for China Leah Bray.

By all accounts, Trump and Xi aren’t expected to reach any significant agreement on key issues like trade and North Korea’s increasing belligerence and test firing of intercontinental missiles. The two-day summit is being pitched as a first step in building – some say repairing – the relationship between the two leaders, and overcoming a sense of mutual distrust that Trump reinforced by sharply criticizing China throughout the campaign.

Xi, who pushed hard for the meeting, isn’t traveling to Florida to make progress on those issues, or even to make friends with Trump, said Jonathan Adelman, a former China advisor to the State Department and Pentagon. That was also the case when Xi met with President Obama in 2013 at the Sunnylands resort in California, according to Adelman, who was also former honorary professor at People’s University in Beijing.

Instead, Adelman said, Xi’s goal is to show the billions of Chinese back home – and other world leaders – that he is recasting the U.S.-China relationship as one of two equal superpowers, with the Trump administration giving tacit approval of his much-touted “Chinese Dream” of national revival and prosperity.

And without an experienced team behind him, Trump could end up going along with Xi’s plan without even realizing it – and risk deeply offending key U.S. allies in the region like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

“The basic problem is that Donald Trump doesn’t have any experience with the Chinese and his State Department itself doesn’t either,” said Adelman, who said that in addition to the marquee players, “They are missing a whole lot of lesser people.”

Some experts fear that Trump could easily fall into the same trap that Tillerson did on his recent visit to Beijing, in which the former Exxon-Mobil chief uttered some symbolically loaded phrases – and nodded in agreement to others – that are meaningless to anyone but the most veteran China observer. But on the global diplomatic stage, even the slightest of utterances can be hugely significant, said Cleo Paskal, an associate fellow at London’s Royal Institute of International Affairs.

“A lot of people noticed,” according to Paskal, especially because China exploited it to signal that the new administration is ready to treat China as a true equal, at the possible expense of key U.S. allies in the region.

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For many years, China had tried to get the Obama administration to embrace the phrases without much success, including the establishment of a “Great Power Relationship” between the two nations based on “win-win cooperation,” and mutual respect without conflict or confrontation, said Paskal, author of the 2010 book, “Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map.”

But Obama’s seasoned China hands knew that if they did embrace the phrases, the administration would be giving Xi an opening to show that he had convinced Washington to not oppose Beijing’s major initiatives, including expansion in the South China Sea.

If Trump were to validate the same language about a new “Great Power Relationship,” even inadvertently and in passing, Paskal said, it could have potentially disastrous diplomatic consequences.

“It would say that basically there are only two powers that count in East Asia, and send a signal to Japan and South Korea and everybody else that they are now secondary powers and that the U.S. is now most concerned about what China thinks, and making deals that can be to their detriment,” she said.

“Without experience,” Paskal added, “they have no idea the kind of bear traps the Chinese are laying for them.”