How to avoid fistfights and DNA leaks at a world leaders summit

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Xi Jinping had just finished a lunch of herbed-ricotta ravioli at a secluded estate outside San Francisco in 2023 when his security agents sprang into action.Their mission: ensuring no trace of the Chinese leader’s DNA fell into foreign hands. The agents—measuring about 6-foot-3, dressed in identical dark suits—were observed grabbing Xi’s utensils and plate and spraying them with an unidentified liquid.Welcome to the unseen theater of great-power diplomacy, where a meeting of the two most powerful leaders on earth can hinge on the slightest missed protocol, an unexpected miscue or even a bit of saliva left on a fork.

It is a ritual that is at once deeply absurd and deadly serious. The length of a red carpet can say more about the state of the world than official statements.“These visits are traumatic for those of us who have to organize them,” said Rick Waters, a former State Department official who helped organize President Trump’s visit to Beijing in 2017.Ahead of a May 14-15 summit between Trump and Xi in Beijing, hundreds of government officials on both sides are racing to make sure the two leaders say the right thing, go to the right place—and don’t get poisoned.It will be the first state visit by a U.S.

president to China in nearly a decade, and it comes at a moment of deepening distrust between the two countries over trade, technology and Taiwan. Neither side can afford the wrong signal from a stray gesture or a misplaced staircase.The idea is that nothing goes wrong.

The challenge is that so many things can. And U.S.