There is a debate underway in the US about the rise of China under the Chinese Communist Party. Is it 1936 Germany, pre-World War II? Or is it 1987, with the stage being set for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc?

My money is on the first outcome.

Today in China we have Xi JinPing aspiring to rule with the power of Mao and working to get that power through the strategy of Putin. Yet while Mao was content to be the third wheel in the US/Soviet Union stand-off. Xi, with 1.4 billion people behind him, seeks his place as leader of a super power dominating Asia and surpassing the US globally.

However, as Xi marches off on his Belt & Road initiative to charm and conquer the world, it is becoming obvious that Xi and his team are also having a debate, well, maybe more of a dilemma. The Donald Trump dilemma.

Chinese leaders are asking do they now face a United States of 1938, it's lumbering and unwieldy policies of power now rising to meet the CCP threat? Or is the US remaining on the cruise control of "trade is king" set by the first President Bush's 1989 white washing of Tiananmen Square and continued through Obama's appeasement of CCP expansionism in the South China Sea? The jury is still out.

Xi is still just consolidating power internally and the US does not know what a Xi regime will fully develop into. So outcome is unknown. At the same time Xi does seem to be pressing North Korea towards a solution the US can live with. As such, it would appear Trump is currently content to overlook all of the sins of China's communist regime, with the exception of a bit of chest pumping over trade. But the just announced planned talks between Trump and Kim Jong-un are just plans, and if nothing comes of the talks then Trump will be back on Xi once again.

I have been wrong about more than my fair share of politics since the emergence of Donald Trump, but I have never been wrong about one thing. Donald Trump plays hardball from every angle at every single minute of every single day. He is the most ruthless and unrepentant political force in the White House in modern history.

I think Xi shares this view of Trump. Xi also knows he is an unelected leader who just tore up the system of succession that keeps his Party and China stable, as such he does not need to have a US President breathing down his neck. Especially a US President who thinks Tweets are diplomatic cables.

The CCP is not stupid, they know full well they are not moral equals with a democracy in the eyes of our modern and mostly free world. President Xi entering a public debate with Trump is like ice-cream entering a warm oven. The billions of US dollars the CCP is spending abroad in an image building campaign to secure China a place as an equal on the world stage are evidence enough of this fact.

When Trump meets Kim in a couple of months there may be no picture of Xi JinPing at the table, but be assured Xi is in the room. Trump put him there with every over indulgent comment of praise and his unbridled shoe shinning of President Xi for the last year.

Xi knows Trump's game, and knows that if the US can't get the security it needs out of any agreement with North Korea then Xi will have to deal with an unsatisfied President Trump who finally does start to set the lumbering and unwieldy policies of the United States on a containment course of China and a confrontational path with the ideology and rational of the CCP.

As such, my money here is that "Rocket Man" makes a deal.