Great Powers, Small Ambitions

Three leaders, two summits, one week in Beijing. The choreography was extraordinary. The ambition - for the wars unresolved, the climate emergency unaddressed, the global energy crises unchecked - was nowhere to be found.

Donald Trump arrived at Beijing Capital International Airport on May 13 to a reception calibrated for maximum symbolism: a state banquet, a stroll through the Temple of Heaven and the Zhongnanhai compound, the full ceremonial splendour of a China that believes its moment has arrived.

 Vladimir Putin touched down just days after Air Force One departed, welcomed with only marginally less pomp, but a notably lower-ranking welcoming party.

 Both visits were heavy on symbolism and light on substance. Trump called the relationship "the G-2." China got something it had long sought: the optics of equal footing with Washington. Putin, arriving under the banner of the 25th anniversary of the 2001 Treaty of Good-Neighbourliness, received reassurance that the relationship with Beijing is in good shape, and another confirmation that the once proclaimed "no limits" partnership now operates on China's terms.  The diplomatic choreography was impressive. The silence on the world's most pressing challenges - wars, climate, a fracturing global economy and AI upheaval – was deafening.

Three Trajectories

What this week illustrated is divergence: three powers on fundamentally different trajectories, each pursuing a distinct self-centred vision of how the global system should be ordered.

The United States has travelled a remarkable distance since 1945. From the architect of the liberal international order and leader of the free world to hegemon and globalisation's rule-maker, to - today - the most powerful player in a world it no longer confidently leads.

Trump's "G-2" framing is telling precisely because it is simultaneously grandiose and diminished. It acknowledges China as a peer and abandons the pretence of unipolar American leadership, without offering a coherent vision of what comes next. The US is not retreating from the world, but renegotiating its terms of engagement on the fly.

China's trajectory moves in the opposite direction - from cautious and strategic integration into the global economy under Deng Xiaoping, through the nationalist assertiveness and global ambition of Xi Jinping's era, toward its declared goal of regional dominance, multipolarity and a reordered international system shaped around Chinese preferences. Beijing's hosting of both Trump and Putin this week was not about neutrality, but strategic centrality - the world's indispensable interlocutor, dealing on its own terms with both Washington and Moscow, and making sure the world noticed.

Yet for all its confidence, China is watching wearily the fates of its two visitors. Russia's overreach in Ukraine and America's ongoing and increasingly unwinnable clash with Iran, as well as its costly campaigns of the past - from Iraq to Afghanistan, are not abstract lessons for Beijing, but are live warnings about the limits of military power and the perils of hubris. On Taiwan, China's leadership seems to have chosen to play a long game, determined not to repeat the mistakes of the two powers that arrived, in succession, at its door this week.

Russia's path is the most precarious of the three. Putin's project - to restore Russia's great-power status after the decline and chaos of the 1990s - has first produced a capable and engaged Russia, a rising power of the 2000s, only to descend to a protracted conflict in 2022 that has drained the country's economic and military capacity, isolated it from the West, and locked it into an asymmetric dependency on Beijing.

A Coalition That Cannot Govern

Three major powers on such divergent trajectories share one thing in common: a dismal record of collaboration on the challenges that actually require their leadership.

What was most conspicuously absent from Beijing this week was any serious engagement with the challenges that genuinely require coordinated great-power leadership: conflicts, climate change, pandemic preparedness, AI governance, the fracturing of the global trading system. Powers that cannot agree on Ukraine, Gaza or Iran are nowhere near the collaborative threshold required for civilisational-scale governance challenges. The leadership vacuum at the top of the international system is now structural –  a product of precisely the divergent trajectories described above.

In fact, the three powers in question are actively undermining what has been left of the multilateral system. The UN Security Council, where all three hold permanent seats and veto rights, has been functionally paralysed on the two most consequential conflicts of the decade - Ukraine and Gaza. Global arms control frameworks, painstakingly constructed over half a century, have collapsed without replacement: the INF Treaty, New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), and the broader architecture of nuclear risk reduction is either dead or on life support, with nothing being built in their place.

When COVID-19 arrived, the three most powerful states competed for advantage and traded accusations rather than coordinating a response. The result was a fragmented global recovery whose costs fell disproportionately on the countries least responsible for the failure. At every climate summit since Paris, the gap between great-power rhetoric and great-power action has widened - and the three powers gathered in Beijing bear considerable responsibility for that gap. On artificial intelligence - the technology most likely to define this century - there is no serious multilateral governance architecture at all, and precious little appetite among Washington, Beijing, or Moscow to build one – only tepid attempts to limit the most damaging aspects of the new technology.

No amount of ceremonial summitry, however lavishly staged, changes the underlying reality that these three powers are more capable of blocking each other than leading the world.

The Triangle That Cannot Close

Three powers on such divergent trajectories cannot form a stable triangle or even a fragile balance of power. The structural fault lines are too deep.

On nuclear weapons, all three are modernising arsenals that unsettle each other's security calculus. On trade and technology, US decoupling from China accelerates even as Trump declares a G-2 moment. On Iran, where the conflict is reshaping energy markets and disrupting the global economy, the three powers are impotent or pulling in incompatible directions. The triangle does not close because the interests do not converge.

Nor is the world reducible to three players. The rise of India, the growing agency of the Gulf states, Africa and Southeast Asia, the assertiveness of middle powers from Ankara to Jakarta are reshaping the international system in ways that no great-power triangle can capture. Iran, Ukraine, and Gaza are not only humanitarian tragedies, but also demonstrations of the limits of Chinese, American, and Russian power. That is the defining feature of the emerging order.

The world is not heading toward a stabilising balance of great powers. It is heading into a chaotic, fragmented, loosely ordered system in which China and the US are dominant, but not omnipotent, Russia is declining in relative power, and the rising powers and regions from India, ASEAN and the Gulf to the disillusioned members of the West, such as Australia, Canada or Japan, are asserting their own agency.

This week's Beijing summit season was a spectacle that produced pageantry, bilateral transactions, and mutual reassurance. What it did not produce - and what the world most needs from these three powers – was global leadership.

The views and opinions expressed in this paper are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official views or positions of any entities he is employed by, represents and advises. 

Images: Kremlin.ru; WhiteHouse.gov