When Vladimir Putin arrived in Beijing days after Donald Trump had left, Xi Jinping did not merely host another summit. He staged a geopolitical statement. Trump had come to China believing that personal diplomacy if not transactional pressure could still bend the world to Washington’s will. Xi answered by standing beside Putin, as if to declare that the age of unquestioned American dominance is nearing the end.

The Xi-Putin summit was a calculated performance. By signing a declaration on a multipolar world, China and Russia were mounting a direct challenge to the central assumption of Trump’s foreign policy that the US can still define the global order, decide which wars are legitimate, determine who is to be punished and expect others to fall in line.

Trump’s worldview has chronically overestimated US leverage. He has banked on America’s ability to coerce other nations — China, Russia, India, Iran, even NATO allies — to cooperate or pay a price. Sanctions, tariffs, military strikes, theatrical summits and Truth Social ultimatums have become US strategy. But where some powers like India have capitulated in the face of bullying, China and Russia and more recently Iran have pushed back and successfully called his bluff.

These countries and their leadership read Trump’s vulnerabilities. Xi has never confronted Trump with reckless gestures. Instead, he steadily accumulates leverage. He receives Trump with courtesy, keeps economic channels open, avoids unnecessary rupture, and then immediately hosts Putin to show that China will not be trapped inside a Washington-designed international order. This is the essence of Xi’s challenge, careful in tone, forceful in substance.

The condemnation of US and Israeli military strikes on Iran gave the summit its sharpest edge. By framing these strikes as violations of international law and basic norms of international relations, Xi and Putin placed Washington in the dock, not Tehran. This was not only about Iran. It was........

© National Herald