US President Donald Trump’s departure from Beijing on Friday afternoon marked the conclusion of a whirlwind two-day summit that was as visually spectacular as it was substantively hollow. While the visit succeeded in cooling the heated rhetoric that has defined the relationship for long, it failed to produce high-value trade breakthroughs or any diplomatic concessions. Trump returns to the US with a store of personal goodwill and a new framework for "strategic stability," but with almost no progress on the structural issues of trade, technology, and geopolitics.
The summit showed that while personal chemistry can lower the temperature, it remains an insufficient substitute for a formal resolution of the fundamental rivalries between the world's two largest economies.
