00:00President Trump has rolled out the red carpet for Chinese leader Xi Jinping who's making his first
00:04state visit to the U.S. in more than a decade. In a notable departure from protocol, Trump even
00:10personally welcomed Xi on the airport tarmac. Shortly after that, Treasury Secretary Scott
00:15Besant also announced on Fox News that Washington and Beijing have agreed to a two-month extension
00:20of their trade truce. We have agreed today that we will extend what we call the Busan Agreement,
00:31the detente, economic detente between the two countries that was scheduled to end on November
00:3810th. That is going to be extended until January 10th to give us more time to see what we can
00:43do
00:44on the economic front. For more, let's get to our Chief North Asia Correspondent Stephen Engel
00:52joining us live now from Washington. So, Steve, under the circumstances, as a trade truce extension
00:58pretty much the best we could have expected here.
01:04Yeah, I think expectations have been ratcheted down quite a bit here in the lead-up to Xi Jinping
01:09arriving today, simply because there hasn't been a lot of time, or at least publicly, there hasn't
01:16been a lot of revelations about progress since the May summit. Let's face it, the Trump administration's
01:24been fairly preoccupied with a war in Iran that's gone longer than they had expected
01:28from the onset, and also the midterm elections are coming up. And also, you know, this is why this
01:34two-month extension is understandable right now, because dates are piling up pretty fast. So, if you think
01:42May to today came quickly with very few deliverables already in the cannon lined up to fire,
01:49you know, the next possible summit between these two gentlemen could be just in a couple months'
01:55time in November 18th and 19th at APEC in southern China, Shenzhen. And then there's another opportunity
02:01that Trump has talked about in December for G20 in Florida. So, the dates of meeting and finding
02:08common ground, if you will, and deliverables are stacking up and compressing on the Trump
02:15administration, because we heard from Jameson Greer just a couple of days ago. And, you know,
02:20he was kind of lukewarm on any kind of extension, because they want to make sure that there are
02:26incremental extensions, not one year, not two years. He was talking three months, at most six months,
02:33so they can kind of keep the fire under the feet of the Chinese to comply with previous commitments.
02:40Anyway, I think this was something that Scott Besant and his counterpart, He Lee Fung,
02:47this morning met again at the World Bank headquarters just to the west of the White House. They met for
02:53about an hour, and I think they both kind of realized things are stacking up on each other right now.
02:59We
02:59need more time. We need some sort of deliverable. So, I think the compromise was reached for a two-month
03:05extension.
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