Secretary of State Marco Rubio says Mr. Xi’s warnings of a conflict over Taiwan have not altered the U.S. policy of supporting the island democracy. The secretary said during an appearance Thursday on NBC News that the Chinese always bring up Taiwan in discussions, and this week’s summit was no different.

Mr. Xi told Mr. Trump in talks Thursday that his regime views dealing with the self-ruled island of Taiwan — which China has vowed to annex using force if necessary — as the most important issue for U.S.-Chinese relations. If not handled properly, the two countries will have “clashes and even conflicts” said Mr. Xi, who urged Mr. Trump to use “extra caution in handling the Taiwan question.”

Upon departing from Beijing Friday, Mr. Trump declined to reveal whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan if China invaded the democratic island.

In Taiwan, meanwhile, Taiwanese Executive Yuan spokeswoman Michelle Lee responded to Mr. Xi’s comment by saying, “China’s military threat is the sole source of insecurity in the Taiwan Strait and the broader Indo-Pacific region.”

CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a secretive visit to Cuba Thursday and met with high-level officials from the island’s communist-run government. The Associated Press cited official Cuban reports saying the meeting was a platform for Havana to present evidence it poses no threat to U.S. national security.

The Cubans said the meeting aimed to foster political dialogue between the two long-strained adversaries and that Havana believes there are no legitimate grounds for its continued inclusion on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.

The Trump administration has threatened tariffs on any country that sells or supplies oil to Cuba. Mr. Trump also has threatened to intervene in Cuba, a close ally of Venezuela, whose former president, Nicolas Maduro, was arrested in a U.S. Special Forces raid on Caracas in January.

A ship docked off the coast of the United Arab Emirates was seized by “unauthorized personnel” and spotted heading toward Iranian waters Thursday, while another vessel was attacked and sunk near Oman. The developments further inflamed tensions in the Strait of Hormuz amid the ongoing U.S. military operation to control the strait.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center said the first ship, which has not been identified, was seized about 40 nautical miles north of the key UAE oil export city of Fujairah. Indian authorities, meanwhile, said one of their cargo ships sank off the coast of Oman after an attack sparked a fire aboard the vessel.

“The attack on an Indian-flagged ship off the coast of Oman yesterday is unacceptable, and we deplore the fact that commercial shipping and civilian mariners continue to be targeted,” India’s Ministry of External Affairs wrote in a statement. It reported no injuries, saying crew members were rescued by Omani authorities.

The eye-popping $1.2 trillion cost estimate that the Congressional Budget Office cited this week for the proposed Golden Dome missile shield is deeply flawed because it focuses on past missile-defense capabilities and does not account for massive leaps forward in technology that would drive down the price, the Trump administration’s point man for the project said Thursday.

Gen. Michael A. Guetlein, the Space Force’s vice chief of space operations and the top decision-maker on the Golden Dome, pushed back against the CBO, which said in a report that the ambitious missile shield could cost $1.2 trillion over 20 years.

Gen. Guetlein has previously said the Golden Dome, which aims to protect the continental U.S. from potential ballistic and hypersonic missile attacks by adversaries such as China or Russia, would cost about $185 billion over three years. According to the digital media platform Payload, the general told an audience at the “Inside the Dome” event in Washington on Thursday that the CBO did not analyze the project correctly.

Finding common ground is hard enough with allies, but it is “extraordinarily difficult with Communist China,” an adversary closely allied with Russia, Iran and North Korea, writes Daniel N. Hoffman, who adds that “these high-level meetings are also an opportunity to express concerns, which form the basis for follow-on, expert-level negotiation, deterrence and, if necessary, future countermeasures.

“Mr. Xi made this summit all about doing nothing to upset his outwardly productive personal relationship with Mr. Trump because he wants to induce our side to back off from holding China accountable for its nefarious actions around the globe,” writes Mr. Hoffman, a retired CIA Clandestine Services officer and opinion contributor to Threat Status.

“Mr. Trump,” he writes in an op-ed in The Washington Times, “focused to a great extent on bilateral trade, but lurking in the background are China’s aggressive efforts to militarize the South China Sea, threaten Taiwan, steal U.S. intellectual property, hack into U.S. critical infrastructure and massively expand its nuclear arsenal.”

• May 15 — What Did the Trump-Xi Summit Achieve? Center for Strategic & International Studies

• May 15 — Decoding the Trump-Xi Summit: What’s Next for U.S.-China Relations, Stimson Center

• May 18-21 — Special Operations Forces Week 2026, Global SOF Foundation

• May 19 — Environmental Agendas, Geopolitical Ends: Climate Policy and Great Power Competition, Hudson Institute

• May 20 — Sen. Bernie Moreno, Ohio Republican, on Colombia’s 2026 elections, Atlantic Council

• May 20 — A Conversation with Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah B. Rogers, Hudson Institute

• May 21 — Fatih Birol, International Energy Agency Executive Director, on the Strait of Hormuz Crisis and Global Energy Security, Chatham House