The Beijing Summit |
History rarely announces itself in real time. When President Richard Nixon landed in Beijing in 1972 to meet Mao Zedong, the world understood immediately that something foundational had shifted. The United States was opening relations with a revolutionary China it had spent decades isolating. Seven years later, Deng Xiaoping toured America in a cowboy hat, symbolising a China eager to integrate into the global economy rather than overturn it.
Donald Trump’s upcoming meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing will not carry the same theatrical grandeur. No photographs from the Great Hall of the People are likely to enter history textbooks besides Nixon and Mao. Yet dismissing the summit as ordinary diplomacy would be a mistake. The significance lies not in spectacle but in what the meeting quietly reveals about the changing balance of global power — and about which country increasingly appears more disciplined, patient, and strategically coherent.
For much of the post-Cold War era, Washington operated under the assumption that economic dominance and military superiority were permanent features of the international system. China was viewed as a manufacturing platform, not a civilisational rival. American policymakers believed Beijing would eventually liberalise politically as it integrated economically into the Western order. That prediction now looks remarkably naive.
Today’s China is not the weak, isolated state Nixon encountered half a century ago. It is the world’s second-largest economy, the central trading partner for much of Asia, the Gulf, Africa, and Latin America, and a technological competitor capable of challenging American supremacy in areas once considered untouchable. More importantly, China has achieved this transformation without military adventurism on the scale repeatedly pursued by Washington since 2001. That contrast matters.
The United States arrives in Beijing carrying the burdens of strategic exhaustion. Trump’s confrontation with Iran has exposed once again a recurring American weakness: an unmatched ability to start conflicts without a corresponding ability to conclude........