Why Trump gave Xi an eagle statue at White House state dinner

Today, the practice of giving lavish gifts mostly exists in Gulf states and autocratic governments.

“Autocracies like China give much more expensive gifts,” says Morten Skumsrud Anderson, who co-authored a study on diplomacy and gifts with Sending.

In the West, Anderson says, the tradition has been watered down by democratic guardrails and restrictions.

For example, the US Constitution has an emoluments clause that puts a dollar-value limit on gifts a president can receive from a foreign government.

Currently, the limit is $525 (£397). Anything higher and it becomes federal property, unless the president chooses to buy it back with his own money.

Also, when giving a gift beyond a certain amount, a US president would have to go through Congress, unless he was paying for it personally.

“There are a lot of rules and protocols involved,” Sending says, “A lot of thought and process relating to what type of gift to to give, where should the gift exchange happen? How should it happen? When?

“All of this is highly scripted, and involves negotiation at lower levels that goes on for weeks and weeks in advance,” Sending says.

Anderson adds: “This is not a last-minute purchase at the airport.”

During Xi’s state visit to the US in 2013, then-President Barack Obama gifted him an inscribed bench made of redwood, native to California where the two had met. They sat on it together afterwards, smiling for cameras.

It was a more shining example than in 2009, when then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown gifted Obama an ornamental desk pen holder made from the timbers of a historic anti-slave ship; while Obama gave Brown a set of DVDs, which reportedly were not formatted for UK DVD players.

“That’s one example of a kind of an embarrassing exchange,” Sending says.

Fortunately, Brown and Obama were allied leaders and not deep rivals looking to resolve seemingly intractable differences.

“You don’t want to mess up,” Sending says, adding that the wrong gift could potentially derail any larger objectives.

In this case, there is potentially a lot at stake between Trump and Xi.

Their third face-to-face encounter since the start of Trump’s second term, this summit is happening amid growing fears of an AI-led apocalypse as both countries race for dominance in the quickly growing industry.

It’s also taking place in the wake of a bitter US-China trade war that has only been resolved by a temporary truce, extended on this trip.

So, do the military plane flyovers, cue the performances, fill the wine the glasses, Kritenbrink says. Exchange the gifts.

“It’s protocol and it’s optics and it’s gift giving all as a means to an end, which is stable US-China relations,” Kritenbrink says.

“I’ll take a fragile truce over a white-hot trade war any day of the week.”