The Trump–Xi summit closed without a thesis

Two weeks after the Beijing meeting — the first sitting-US-president visit to China since 2017 — the readout is that Taiwan arms sales are held "in abeyance," Boeing got 200 jets instead of the 500 floated, and the Council on Foreign Relations is calling the result "a decent peace." The processing is anti-climactic: markets shrugged, the punditry is reading the absence of breakthrough as itself the news, and Xi is now scheduled to visit Washington in autumn.

The gap is the signal — a summit that produced stabilization without resolution is the new shape of great-power contact. Nobody expects synthesis anymore. Nobody is grieving its absence either.