OSAKA: US President Donald Trump set the tone on Thursday for what promises to be a stormy G20 summit by lashing out at friends and foes alike over trade tariffs and foreign policy.

The long-running US-China trade war looked set to dominate the two-day meeting of world leaders in Osaka from Friday but clashes also loomed over climate and a series of hotspots ranging from North Korea to Iran.

On board Air Force One en route to Japan, Trump fired off a characteristically bullish tweet, taking aim at China, saying Beijing wanted to do a deal because the world’s number-two economy was “going down the tubes”.

Furious at what he sees as an unfair advantage in the trading system, Trump has already hit Beijing with $200 billion in levies on Chinese imports and appeared to threaten more.

“You have another $325 billion that I haven’t taxed yet — it’s ripe for taxing, for putting tariffs on,” he said in an interview with Fox Business Network.

Chinese President Xi Jinping touched down in Osaka several hours before Trump in driving rain as a potential typhoon edges towards Japan. The two leaders are expected to meet on Saturday.

Barely pulling its punches, Chinese state-run news agency Xinhua said a “certain country in the G20 resorts to such tactics as raising tariffs and threatening trade wars to make its trading partners knuckle under to unreasonable demands”. Such “unilateral bullying” could have “potentially devastating consequences for global prosperity,” Xinhua said in an editorial.

Most experts say a formal deal is unlikely at the summit due to a lack of time to prepare the complex issues involved.

“I would be very, very surprised if they could work out all of these complicated disagreements in the next few days,” said David Dollar, a China expert at the Washingtonbased Brookings Institution.

While US-China trade is likely to dominate the meeting, world leaders are also facing a perfect storm of geopolitical hotspots from Iran to North Korea and Venezuela.