Mexico

Mexico, Friday, September 25, 2026. The Mexican press is documenting with a certain irony the staging of a "great friendship" orchestrated on Thursday at the White House between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, on the second day of a state visit marked by a red carpet, an official dinner, and the announcement of the sending of two Chinese pandas to the Atlanta zoo.

In front of his advisors, before the closed-door meeting, Trump assured that the relationship with his Chinese counterpart was "a truly great friendship, built on mutual respect and the vital interests of our peoples," recalling that it dated back to his first election in 2016. Xi Jinping, who arrived on the red carpet with his wife Peng Liyuan, called for "putting into practice a new vision" of strategic stability and invoked the "Thucydides trap," a theory that a rising power and an established power almost always end up at war.

The state dinner, served on the red china of the Reagan era, brought together a lineup of tech leaders — Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Cristiano Amon (Qualcomm), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk — alongside Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Vietnamese President To Lam. On substance, there was little movement: the two capitals only extended a trade truce that was set to expire on November 10 by two months, without an agreement on semiconductors or arms sales to Taiwan demanded by Beijing. On artificial intelligence, disagreement is apparent: Trump wants to keep it "exactly where it is," without new rules, while Xi insists that it remain "always under human control."

This diplomatic theatricalization resonates differently in Mexico. A column in Vanguardia recalls that the same Trump who is lavishing attention on Xi had, before the UN General Assembly, called Mexico the "epicenter of cartels," promising that "security will arrive in Mexico," adding, enigmatically: "when that day comes." The contrast between the protocol reserved for the Chinese rival — red carpet, state dinner, pandas — and the language used towards the Mexican neighbor is fueling, in the local press, a reading where Mexico is seen as being relegated to the register of a threat, while Beijing receives the honors of a respected partner.