What America’s allies fear most is not that the United States will back down, but that it no longer knows what it is fighting for, yet refuses to stop.
The summits are not endpoints. They are the mechanism by which two countries, which can neither resolve their differences nor afford to rupture them, manage the interval between crises.
[I]f China can lead by example in helping to maintain or even reshape the international order, it will succeed in filling the void left by the United States.