Trump-Xi accord on Iran elusive as US president’s China trip winds down

Donald Trump has claimed that the US and China “feel very similar” about ending the war in Iran but offered no details about a possible breakthrough. The US president was speaking alongside Xi Jinping of China at the Zhongnanhai garden in Beijing on the second and final day of the leaders’ summit . “We did discuss Iran ,” Trump said. “We feel very similar about [how] we want it to end. We don’t want them to have a nuclear weapon. We want the straits open.” He added: “We want them [Iran] to get it ended because it’s a crazy thing there, a little bit crazy. And it’s no good, it can’t happen.” There is much speculation about how much pressure the US is putting on China , the biggest buyer of Iranian oil, to use its leverage with Iran to encourage the country to reopen the strait of Hormuz. And there is a question mark over whether or not Beijing would be willing to accede to that pressure. Donald Trump walks with Xi Jinping at the Zhongnanhai leadership compound. Photograph: Mark Schiefelbein/Reuters US trade representative Jamieson Greer said in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Friday that the Chinese “don’t want to be on the wrong side” on the Iran issue. “It’s really important for China to have the strait of Hormuz open,” Greer said. Earlier, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the US hoped “to convince [China] to play a more active role in getting Iran to walk away from what they’re doing now and trying to do now in the Persian Gulf”. …