It was a masterpiece of diplomacy in a very difficult moment. The summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping was above all an exercise in damage limitation — an attempt to prevent a further deterioration of bilateral relations rather than a serious effort to improve them. Little room for the latter was in evidence.
The two sides’ readouts diverged on many points, but perhaps the most telling signal lay in what was absent. Neither communiqué mentioned artificial intelligence or rare earths — the two most combustible bilateral issues of recent months — suggesting that on these dossiers the gulf between Washington and Beijing remains very wide indeed. For the first time in the history of such visits, an American president brought his defense secretary with him. And looming over all of it: Vladimir Putin arrives in the Chinese capital on May 20th.
That context matters. Seen against it, stabilization is no small achievement. Yet beneath the thin layer of diplomatic ash, the embers are still glowing.
There was an elephant in the room throughout the summit, and it was the rest of Asia. The region’s countries are caught in a bind: frightened of China, they have no desire to submit to it, yet they are equally anxious about being abandoned by America. Were they to perceive a genuine rapprochement between Washington and Beijing, many would almost certainly accelerate their own defense build-ups — and, more alarmingly, their nuclear rearmament programs.
China has never conquered Japan. Over the past century Japan has been Asia’s true great power, and the memories of the Second World War that burn so fiercely in China, ravaged by Japanese forces, carry a very different charge elsewhere in the region. In Vietnam, Indonesia and India, many local factions sided with Japan against French, Dutch or British colonial rulers. Parts of today’s ruling elites retain ties to that history — and all of them share a wariness of China’s new assertiveness.
Japan has been quietly capitalizing on this. It is steadily deepening military, economic and intelligence ties with these countries, explicitly as a counterweight to Beijing. Those relationships could consolidate and accelerate rapidly in the event of a partial or full American withdrawal from the region.
Here lies the flaw in a certain Chinese illusion. The American presence in Asia does not tilt the balance against China — it stabilizes it. Without the United States, these countries would not bend to Beijing; they would coalesce against it. Far from accelerating Chinese dominance, an American retreat could trigger precisely the regional arms race and confrontation that Beijing claims to want to avoid.
What exists today is a precarious and fragile equilibrium, one that could shatter at any moment. This is the true fault line of global tension — and if mismanaged, it could drag the world into territory without precedent.
In that sense, the friction that persists between China and the United States may, paradoxically, be serving a stabilizing function in the region at this particularly delicate moment in the global balance of power. How long that precarious equilibrium holds will be tested in the days ahead.
