TOI correspondent from Washington: If symbolism is the first language of diplomacy, then US President Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing this week amounted to a geopolitical translation of a changing world order: a confident, ascendant China speaking as an equal — if not superior — power to an American president increasingly eager for accommodation rather than confrontation.
The summit between the US President and China’s leader Xi Jinping on Thursday unfolded less like a meeting between a reigning superpower and a challenger than an audience between a cautious petitioner and an imperious host. In carefully choreographed remarks, Xi invoked the “Thucydides Trap” — the theory that war often erupts when a rising power threatens to displace an established one — while pointedly warning Washington against mishandling Taiwan.
