Peking Duck: Xi And The Art Of The Meal

The Great Hall of the People has witnessed many things, but a subdued Donald Trump must rank among the most surreal. During his recent Beijing sojourn, the usual theatricality accompanied by finger-wagging histrionics and the low-grade one-liners that constitute the standard MAGA repertoire was noticeably missing. Instead, the world watched an uncharacteristically muted American President, seemingly weighed down by the architecture, or perhaps by reality. The explanation for this sudden outbreak of gravity may lie not in a new-found appreciation for Confucian restraint but in the gruelling geopolitical hangover of his West Asian misadventure. Having stumbled into an open-ended, bruising, and altogether avoidable conflict involving Iran, a blunder rapidly cementing itself as the mother of all faux pas, Trump appears to have lost some of his stomach for a two-front fight. Consequently, when the conversation turned to Taiwan, Trump did not yap; he purred. His remarks, warning Taipei to cool it and framing defensive arms as negotiating chips, aligned far more closely with Beijing’s desires than with Washington’s previously flaunted commitments. If Trump did not quite eat the crow in front of his host, Xi Jinping, he certainly picked at the Peking duck on offer at the state banquet, which was no doubt served with plum sauce.

How much alignment was achieved on Iran remains wrapped in diplomatic smog. It does not escape notice that Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi managed a quiet huddle with the Chinese leadership just before Trump’s, shall we say, courtesy visit? Behind closed doors, the Chinese may have gently tried to knock a little strategic sense into a bruised MAGA head, trading minor assurances on maritime lanes for major American deference in the Pacific. Even the transactional magic failed to sparkle. Despite Trump dragging a travelling circus of 30 top American corporate honchos across the ocean, the trip yielded few concrete business outcomes, and the President’s telling silence on reciprocal tariffs spoke volumes. Ultimately, the summit did vastly more to inflate Xi’s global stature than the American President's, casting the Chinese leader as an arbiter of global stability. With Vladimir Putin already set to beat a path to Beijing, the Middle Kingdom increasingly resembles the hub of a new geopolitical wheel. For us in India, watching from the sidelines, the spectacle is deeply unsettling. The long-feared G2 is no longer a theoretical construct; it is an unfolding reality. As the American and Chinese elephants begin a cosy, bilateral waltz—slow-dancing to the cynical, melancholic cadence of Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love—New Delhi faces a lonely dance floor. With the Quad relegated to playing faint, ineffective sheet muzak in the background, India may soon find that in this new superpower tango, it is the smaller partners who risk getting their toes stepped on.