Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed Friday that the Iran war is on the agenda of the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing, three days out. [1] The summit's working dates remain May 14 and 15. [2][3] The confirmation lands the week after Trump rejected Iran's counter to the fourteen-point American framework as "TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE," and inside the same Wednesday window the rejection has now armed against silence.

The paper's Sunday reading at T-4 carried the summit into Monday as an Iran-channel question with no prior text on the Iranian side. Iran's text now exists; it has been rejected. The Beijing meeting will absorb either a Wednesday collapse — the deadline expires without a counter-counter — or an extension Trump has not floated publicly. CNBC reports that the Iran focus may delay progress on the tariff and rare-earth files the summit was originally booked to advance. [1] The South China Morning Post says Trump has dismissed friction with Beijing over the war and is leaning on the Xi relationship as personal leverage. [3]

What sits inside the summit room is two lines that have not met on paper. The first is the China-Iran crude line — Tehran's purchase routes through Chinese state buyers under sanctions discount. The second is the Wang Yi Hormuz-reopening line Beijing surfaced through its own foreign ministry briefing earlier this month. Both pieces are Chinese-mediated. A Xi readout that names either explicitly would re-anchor the channel architecture into a documentary track separate from Pakistan and Qatar. [2] A Xi readout that names neither would tell the paper what the summit was for.

-- DAVID CHEN, Beijing