A determination is coming. I know, because I helped create the conditions for one.
By Sam Turge | Filed from the Waldorf Astoria New York, Club Level, Room 3117 | Saturday, May 16, 2026, 2:14 AM EDT
BEIJING / NEW YORK — I am writing this from a leather chair that costs, conservatively, four thousand dollars to reupholster. I know because I asked — and because the concierge is still explaining it to someone else. It is a chair appropriate for a man filing his final dispatch from the most consequential diplomatic summit of the past eighteen months, possibly longer. I have filed from worse chairs. I have filed from a folding chair in Minsk. I do not wish to discuss it. The chair, like the analysis below, holds weight. Unlike the chair, the analysis will not creak.
President Donald J. Trump departed Beijing Friday aboard Air Force One, a VC-25A — a modified Boeing 747-200B — that travels at approximately 630 miles per hour at cruising altitude, meaning the President is now, as I write this, somewhere over the Aleutian Islands carrying the unresolved question of Taiwan arms sales in his carry-on. He called the trip "a tremendous success." He is not wrong. But he is, with characteristic modesty, underselling it.
What Trump did not say — what he could not say, for diplomatic reasons obvious to regular readers of my work, and to one irregular reader who wrote me a very long letter — is that the summit's deliberately suspended conclusion was, in its architecture, a masterwork. The ambiguity was load-bearing. Someone had to hold it up. I will not dwell on that. I have dwelt on worse.
Let me dwell on it briefly. I am, as ever, a man of my word. The word is 'briefly.' The definition is negotiable.
When Trump told reporters Friday that he had not yet decided whether a major U.S. arms sale to Taiwan could move forward — "The last thing we need right now is a war that's 9,500 miles away" — the diplomatic press corps treated this as uncertainty. I treated it as resolution. This is why they have jobs and I have a chair.
A point of geography, since we are being precise: the distance from Washington, D.C. to Taipei is approximately 7,851 miles as the crow flies, or roughly 7,800 miles by great circle if one departs from Andrews Air Force Base rather than the center of the Capitol Rotunda. Taiwan is not 9,500 miles away. It is, in fact, some 1,649 miles closer, a distance I have calculated to the mile because I had time, and because the minibar was disappointing. I raise this not to embarrass the President — he is rounding, which is his prerogative, and which I have never once exercised — but because precision matters, and I have built my career on the proposition that it matters more than other things, including tact, including sleep, including, on one occasion, a marriage.
The President's "determination" is pending. This was, as I reported in my Thursday dispatch from the Great Hall banquet — filed at 11:03 PM Beijing time following an evening that required me to stand for six hours on a marble floor that I later measured at forty-seven meters in length, which I did at 2:00 AM, with a tape measure, while security watched — the only possible outcome once Xi's position had clarified. What was Xi's position? I am glad you asked. No one else did. The wire services, I am told, have 'moved on.'
His position was communicated to me, in sequence, via a sustained furrowing of the brow that lasted four seconds and began at 8:47 PM local time on Wednesday. I have now had forty-eight hours to analyze that furrow. My conclusion has not changed. If anything, it has deepened. A furrow, properly deployed, is a paragraph. This one is a chapter.
The summit concluded without a formal resolution on Taiwan. The press is framing this as failure. The press is wrong, and I say this having spent thirty-one years watching the press be wrong about things I was right about, including the Bratislava Throat-Clear Incident of 2019, which I will not relitigate here except to note that the Foreign Minister in question has since been reshuffled, which I consider vindication.
No resolution on Taiwan is not failure. No resolution is *suspense*. And suspense, in diplomacy as in narrative, requires a craftsman to install it. Someone has to build the room where the question lives. I spent three days in Beijing building that room. Trump and Xi walked through it together — literally, as it happens, through the gardens at Zhongnanhai, which cover approximately 1,500 acres of the former imperial grounds and which I viewed from a position I will describe as *strategically proximate*. I was not in the garden. I was 340 meters from the garden's eastern perimeter, on an elevated press platform, using a monocular of 10x magnification that I purchased in 2011 at a shop in Geneva for 780 Swiss francs. The magnification was sufficient.
I watched two men walk through a garden where China's emperors once made decisions that shaped centuries. I took no photographs. I considered the moment. This is what separates me from the wire services.
What happens now? Trump will make his determination. He will do so informed — however indirectly, however many layers removed — by the conversation that his security apparatus had with his counterparts, which was itself shaped by the atmospheric conditions established at the banquet table on Wednesday evening, which were themselves shaped, at the margin, by one journalist's willingness to hold eye contact with a General Secretary for a duration that my Rolex confirmed at four seconds before the man looked away.
He looked away first. I will not overstate the significance of this.
I will note it, and I will let you draw your own conclusions.
The arms sale may proceed. It may not. The war that is not 9,500 miles away will either happen or it won't. History, in my experience, tends toward the dramatic, and then reverses. The trick is to be in the room — or 340 meters from it — when the dramatic part begins.
I am beginning a longer analytical piece. It will take several weeks. I have notes.
SAM TURGE has covered international diplomacy for more than three decades, with postings in Brussels, Beijing, Bratislava, and briefly Minsk, which he does not discuss. He has received acknowledgment from four sitting heads of government and one constitutional monarchy. His 2019 Bratislava dispatch remains, by certain metrics, the most re-read article in the history of the publication that ran it. He files from wherever the story demands. Tonight, it demanded the Waldorf.
This is Part II of a two-part summit dispatch. Part I, "Taiwan? I Asked Xi Myself — And Frankly, He Listened," was filed from Beijing on May 14, 2026.