Xi Sets the Terms for Everyone Now

You won’t get a better snapshot of a world in transition than two recent great-power summits in Beijing. Last week, Chinese leader Xi Jinping hosted US President Donald Trump for a meeting heavy on atmospherics and light on outcomes. This week, he welcomed Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin to reaffirm the “back to back” strategic partnership through which Moscow and Beijing take on the US-led world.

Together, these meetings highlight four key facets of our moment — and showcase powerful figures pulling the globe into deep disarray.

First, Xi has become a commanding world statesman. Since January 2025, he has dealt effectively and authoritatively with Washington — out-coercing Trump in a high-stakes trade war, issuing stern warnings about America’s ties to Taiwan, and recalibrating the US-China relationship on Beijing’s terms. All the while, Xi has hosted a parade of global leaders who trekked to China in hopes of stabilizing their relations with his empire. Xi’s China now acts with the assurance, if not yet the capabilities, of America’s great-power peer.

The Putin meeting reveals Xi as the senior partner in that relationship, as a war-exhausted Russia plunges deeper into dependence on China. Putin seeks, as one prize from his trip, decisive progress on the planned Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, which would turbocharge energy exports to China. He would love for Xi to end Chinese exports of drone parts to Ukraine.

The two countries remain mutually indispensable: They shield each other’s rear areas amid intensifying confrontations along Eurasia’s eastern and western margins. But China can drive a hard bargain on trade, energy and other issues, because the balance within the autocratic entente increasingly favors Xi.

Second, the two meetings are proof of where China’s true objectives and loyalties lie. Sure, the US-China summit produced pledges to pursue “constructive strategic stability.” Trump calls Xi his “good friend” and touts a China-America G2 to run the world.

But Xi’s core alliance is with Putin, that other massive autocracy that seeks to destroy the US order. “Right now there are changes — the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years — and we are the ones driving these changes together,” Xi told Putin at a 2023 meeting, one of more than 40 between the two leaders. This week, they declared that an old, US-dominated order rooted “in the spirit of the colonial era” has failed.

Xi’s diplomacy with Trump is thus a tactical ploy. It gives China time to build its “fortress economy” by stockpiling food, fuel and other vital materials. It offers an opportunity to weaken competitive impulses in Washington that would hinder China’s advance, such as semiconductor export controls or arms sales to Taiwan. But Xi understands that China’s path to greatness, like Russia’s, ultimately runs straight through the global architecture of US power.

Yet if Xi and Putin are Trump’s rivals, they’re also his bizarre allies, because a third theme is that they’re all plunging the world into turmoil.

Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and his continual pressure against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are parts of a systematic campaign to destabilize Europe. His assaults on borders and democratic political processes are attacks on key global norms; his assistance to Iran and the Houthis in recent conflicts has intensified an international onslaught against freedom of the seas.

China, for its part, is challenging the territorial integrity of its neighbors, from the Himalayan borderlands with Bhutan to the reefs of the South China Sea. Its civilian fleets ravage fishing grounds as distant as the African and South American coasts.

Beijing’s military buildup portends conflict in the world’s most vibrant region, the Western Pacific. Its flood of manufactured exports threatens to swamp developing and industrialized countries alike. When Xi talks about changes not seen for a century, he’s envisioning a messy, potentially violent transition from America’s age to the next.

Trump’s approach is more ambiguous. Some initiatives, such as pushing for rearmament of allies or punishing rogue regimes in Iran and Venezuela, could strengthen the US and its friends. But Trump’s administration explicitly disdains the idea of a positive-sum global system based on US leadership. Trump’s ethos is unilateral and acquisitive, not based on common purpose.

His dreams of territorial expansion, his efforts to fracture the European Union by supporting the likes of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, and his mishandled war with Iran have strained alliances that help contain Putin and Xi. In Beijing, he reportedly mused that the US, Russia and China should combine to cripple the International Criminal Court, which has issued an arrest warrant for Putin.

All this has created a growing fear in other democratic societies that America, too, is now a chaos agent — perhaps even a tacit co-conspirator of revisionist autocracies trying to tear down the existing order.

The fourth theme, then, is that a period of dangerous volatility awaits us — and what comes next depends on whether the US remembers where its interests lie. Fights with allies, over trade and burden-sharing for example, are sometimes worth having. Diplomacy with rivals can be a useful safeguard in stormy times.

But the US built a flourishing world and made itself an unmatched superpower by working with democratic allies. Its principal rivals have long been the sort of leaders who gathered in Beijing this week: aggressive tyrants who aim to impose their brutal visions on the globe.

Today, Xi and Putin believe that the constraints on their power and ambition are crumbling. If America doesn’t recognize those designs for what they are — and if it doesn’t find a way of locking arms with worried allies — the determined tyrants may, this time, be proven right.

 

Source: https://www.aei.org/op-eds/xi-sets-the-terms-for-everyone-now/