President Donald Trump is slated to host Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the White House, and the stakes are sky high — but some China watchers are once again keeping their expectations low.

That’s even as the Iran war could loom larger than ever over the leaders’ talks, in light of a new U.S. plan to aggressively sanction Iran’s business partners — potentially including China, by far Tehran’s biggest trading partner.

But while the war threatens to rattle the superpowers’ fragile relations, it may end up a smaller slice of the conversation, as it appeared to be when Trump and Xi met in Beijing four months ago.

At that summit, Trump and a coterie of corporate leaders were lavishly feted by the Chinese but left with few concrete business deals or clear breakthroughs on the thorniest geopolitical issues, including Iran and Taiwan.

This time, both sides still seem interested in avoiding moves that would risk torpedoing their current trade truce.

“The relationship increasingly produces transactions without trust and stability without settlement,” Craig Singleton, senior director for China at the nonpartisan Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told CNBC.

It’s “a low-expectations summit focused largely on managing the stalemate rather than resolving it,” he said.

Xi’s trip to Washington is slated for Sept. 24, although China has not officially confirmed the visit.

This week’s G20 finance ministers’ summit in North Carolina gave a glimpse at the daylight between the two countries: China was the only member to dissent from a joint statement, objecting to a paragraph urging “countries with excessive and persistent external surpluses” to stop distorting trade.

China also took issue with language about the Iran war, according to the Treasury Department. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Tuesday maintained that the countries have much to agree on when it comes to Iran, but said it’s “incumbent upon China” to find a solution.

The White House is planning to host a formal state dinner for Xi, MS NOW reported Wednesday, citing four sources familiar with the matter. Only Britain’s King Charles III has received similar treatment during Trump’s second term so far, MS NOW reported.

Trump’s top-down style, which favors leader-to-leader dealmaking over the diplomatic “spade work” typical of prior administrations, is also dampening expectations, said Matthew Kroenig, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

“Trump’s going to go in there and have a conversation with Xi and see what comes out of it,” Kroenig told CNBC.

They could emerge with announcements on key deliverables, he said, “But if so, it would be very top line, and then it would be up to the governments to work out the details.”

Nonetheless, the Washington summit is a major moment for the world’s top economies, which are vying for dominance in a highly unstable world marked by multiple active wars and a global economy being reshaped by artificial intelligence.

Bessent confirmed Tuesday that AI will be on the agenda when Trump and Xi meet.

White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales told CNBC in a statement that Trump “has a strong relationship with President Xi and had a great visit to Beijing in May, where he secured important agreements that will drive high-paying jobs and open new markets for American goods.”

“President Trump looks forward to President Xi’s historic visit to the White House in September and will always advance America’s interests,” the statement said.

U.S. Ambassador to China David Perdue in late August said he held talks with his diplomatic counterparts in preparation for Xi’s state visit.

The Chinese Embassy in the U.S. did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on Xi’s upcoming trip.

The Iran war — which Trump initially predicted would wrap up in six weeks or less — will be close to rounding its seventh month by the time Xi is set to arrive for the summit.

The stated intent of the war is to dismantle Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but it has largely centered on the Strait of Hormuz, the vital oil-shipping route that has seen traffic squelched by Iranian threats.

With prospects for a peace deal appearing far out of reach, the U.S. is trying to strangle Iran economically by cutting off its “enablers” through sweeping secondary sanctions.

On paper, that strategy could pose major consequences for China. Indeed, Beijing promptly pushed back on the plan, dubbed “Operation Economic Outcast,” shortly after Bessent unveiled it Aug. 24.

“China has made clear on many occasions its firm opposition to illicit unilateral sanctions that have no basis in international law or the authorization of the UN Security Council,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said at the time.

But even before Bessent’s official announcement, some geopolitics experts questioned how aggressively the U.S. would be willing to go after China.

Targeting Chinese banks or other institutions could invite retaliation that jeopardizes the two superpowers’ testy trade detente, which began last year after a volatile tariff war. It could also threaten U.S. access to China’s large supply of critical minerals.

The U.S. “is finding itself increasingly between multiple rocks and multiple hard places” vis-a-vis China and Iran, said Scott Kennedy, a scholar on China’s business and economy at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“I’m not sure how they easily resolve these various contradictions amongst the different foreign policy challenges that they are facing,” Kennedy said.

Taiyi Sun, an associate professor of political science at Christopher Newport University, said the situation creates a “paradox” for the U.S.

“Every stronger option creates a China problem,” Sun wrote in August in an analysis for the nonpartisan Toda Peace Institute. “The country with the greatest potential economic leverage over Tehran is also the country Washington can least afford to alienate before the September summit.”

To be sure, Bessent signaled as he rolled out the sanctions plan that China would not be exempt, insisting that “no one is above the reach of U.S. sanctions.”

But Sun told CNBC that he doesn’t think the policy will be implemented as the administration has advertised.

Operation Economic Outcast is “Trump’s way of getting out of the [Iran] situation temporarily before the midterms,” Sun said.

He noted that Bessent, when asked why the U.S. was giving countries compliance deadlines instead of just imposing sanctions on the day the plan was announced, replied, “Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?”

The remark shows Bessent “understood clearly that if the actual announcement was implemented, the global financial system could melt down,” Sun said. The Trump administration would therefore rather deal with China behind closed doors, he said.

Singleton concurred. “Iran may come up, but I would expect it to occupy only a small part of the conversation,” he said. “The threshold for Treasury to take major action against a Chinese bank in the run-up to the summit is extremely high.”

While the U.S. average tariff rate on China has fallen since last year, it remains elevated, at 36.5%, as of July, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Trump has long denied that his tariffs, which are taxes U.S. importers pay on foreign goods, raise prices on Americans. But he appeared to tacitly acknowledge the impact of the import duties late last month, when he sought to address high beef prices by allowing up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef to be imported tariff-free.

After the Beijing summit, the U.S. and China both expressed their intention to build a “constructive” relationship of “strategic stability.”

One of the key deliverables that could come out of Xi’s state visit to the U.S. would be an agreement for further meetings between the leaders, Sun said.

“When the two leaders have the expectation of traveling to the other’s country, the pre-meeting time will be less tumultuous,” he said.

The White House also announced in May that the U.S. and China would seek to deepen their economic relationship through the creation of a “Board of Trade” and a “Board of Investment.”

And the two sides each confirmed that China would buy 200 Boeing aircraft, though that was fewer than what some investors were expecting. The U.S. additionally announced China would buy $17 billion worth of U.S. agricultural products, but the lack of specifics reportedly sent U.S. soybean futures trading lower.

Singleton said that several of those deliverables remain unfinished, “including the Boeing deal and the proposed Board of Trade.”

“Neither side appears to believe leader-level diplomacy will change the other’s underlying strategy,” he added.