President Donald Trump’s visit to China in mid-May was filled with carefully choreographed photo ops, diplomatic pageantry, and announcements of blockbuster commercial deals. The deeper significance of the summit, however, is that Washington and Beijing are beginning to accept that neither side can force the other into submission. After years of trade wars, technology controls, and military competition, the two countries are discovering the limits of coercion.

This does not mean the two superpowers will reconcile or that they will turn back the clock to policies based on engagement. It means the beginning of a new G-2 world—a world in which the United States and China can restrict, punish, and disrupt each other, but they cannot dominate or exclude each other. The United States remains the world’s military powerhouse, but China can now push back on Washington’s power projection in the western Pacific. And Washington and Beijing can cause substantial damage to each other’s economies, yet neither can prevent the other from being a major economic and technological player.

The summit in Beijing confirms that the idea of a G-2, which Trump casually floated last year in South Korea, is becoming a reality. In this new G-2 world, the United States and China are not jointly governing the globe, but they are structurally bound by competitive coexistence—a relationship in which neither side can triumph on its own terms nor afford to be drawn into sustained conflict. After failed attempts by both sides to “win,” the conditions are in place for a more stable and productive rivalry between Washington and Beijing.

BEYOND MUTUAL DESTRUCTION

During the Cold War, the relative stability between the United States and the Soviet Union rested on mutually assured destruction. Each side had the capacity to destroy the other with nuclear weapons, and each understood that a full-scale war would leave no real winner and cause irreparable harm. Mutually assured destruction did not end the ideological rivalry or geopolitical competition between the two superpowers, but it forced them to recognize the limits of coercion. It helped preserve an uneasy cold peace.

The U.S.-Chinese relationship today is not a replay of the Cold War. The two countries are not separated into rival economic and political blocs, as the United States and the Soviet Union were. Despite ongoing efforts to decouple and reduce interdependence, Washington and Beijing remain embedded in the same global economy, technology ecosystem, financial networks, and supply chains. Those connections are producing a type of competition unlike that of the U.S.-Soviet contest, but which could promote stability in different ways.

For the past decade, many policymakers in Washington believed that the United States could outcompete China or at least constrain its rise. Presidents of both parties worked to maintain a technological and economic edge over China. They imposed tariffs, export controls, and investment restrictions, and they sought to coordinate with allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific as they realigned critical supply chains away from China.

Each side can hurt the other but cannot reduce it to strategic irrelevance.

In Beijing, meanwhile, confidence has been growing that time is on its side. In official speeches, state media reports, and policy commentary, the idea that “the East is rising and the West is declining” has gained influence. Some Chinese strategists believe that the United States’ political polarization, institutional dysfunction, and internal chaos are signs that American decline is no longer a prediction but a process already underway.

Recent developments have proved that both positions were unrealistic. China has made major advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, advanced manufacturing, and military technology. The launch of DeepSeek, the large language........

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