By Luis Manuel Arce Issac on May 15, 2026 from Camagüey, Cuba
Trump’s visit to China highlighted Xi Jinping’s rise and the United States’ global decline in the economy, technology, and international leadership. If there is one high-level visit needed at this time of global tension, it is the one President Donald Trump has just made to his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, as it was intended—at least on the part of the Asian giant—to pour water on a powder keg that could ignite given that it is surrounded by fire on all sides.
The meeting opened with a significant statement: it was not Xi who crossed the oceans to go to Washington, but Trump who flew 16 hours and 55 minutes to sit across from his main rival—in every aspect that defines a world power—in the Great Hall of the People, near Tiananmen Square, and not in the Oval Office of the White House.
Nor was it the visitor who proposed the agenda, but the host, and the central issue was not Iran, but Taiwan, which China considered the most important matter. Xi Jinping was the one who set an agenda focused on managed stability, strategic cooperation, and Chinese territorial interests.
All of this to prevent commercial rivalry from escalating into open conflict; partners rather than rivals, in order to coexist peacefully and manage strategic stability.
Technological independence and a trade truce, along with market access to lift U.S. restrictions on advanced chips.
Additionally, cooperation on Global Security (Middle East) to open the Strait of Hormuz and respect
Iran’s positions so it fulfills its commitment to peaceful nuclear use without developing it as a weapon—a key issue for the U.S. on which China is willing to moderate.
Reopening communication channels: Xi promoted better use of diplomats and the military to manage differences and prevent tensions from spiraling out of control.
The immediate impression shared by many observers, and even several U.S. media outlets, is that Donald Trump’s visit laid bare a more visible shift in the global balance in China’s favor in its competition with the U.S., which has been losing economic, technological, and diplomatic ground since Trump launched his offensive on January 20, 2025—a devastating move, not only for the world but primarily for its architect.
There is a consensus that Trump’s visit and his counterpart’s dominance of the conversation made clear Beijing’s dominant position over Washington, and that, in a year and a few months as president in his second term, the Republican leader set his country back on all fronts with his failed goal of weakening China.
Experts observed results contrary to his objective in the economy, technology, diplomacy, and even in the realm where the United States traditionally felt almost untouchable: military strength, global image, and the ability to set the global agenda—which is gradually passing into China’s hands.
China’s strategy has extraordinarily outperformed the U.S. strategy due to a degree of effectiveness that ideologues and political and economic leaders allied with Trump never foresaw or imagined: while they filled the world with wars of all kinds to achieve their goals through brute force, Xi Jinping did the opposite by prioritizing peace and mutually beneficial collaboration, with surprisingly positive results.
That flawed strategy led the Republican leadership to intervene in Iran, spread the conflict throughout the Middle East, and commit itself militarily, politically, and morally to a war criminal like Benjamin Netanyahu, adopting his goals, failures, and crimes as their own, rather than focusing on constructive competition with China to avoid falling so far behind the Asian giant’s scientific and technological progress.
For China is not merely the world’s factory for goods, but the hub of Artificial Intelligence and the architect of a new era marked by the greatest expansion of human knowledge across all fields and high levels of social well-being.
China has demonstrated that the nuclear weapon, no matter how much it continues to be modernized, is destined for museums, not for world conquest, and that it is science and technology that are defining the core of power, not the old attributes of military might as backward-looking
Americans still believe—including the network of bases, aircraft carrier fleets, and radars, which are increasingly a burden rather than an advantage. Iran is the proof.
Harvard University professor Stephen Walt believes that since Trump entered the White House for the second time in 2025, he has done practically everything someone would do who consciously wished for China to displace the United States from its position of global leadership, and his country continues to move backward, not forward.
For example, while the world is racing toward clean energy, Trump clings to oil, which should have already been phased out for the sake of the environment.
China, on the other hand, is the international epicenter of alternative energy and is moving very firmly toward ceasing to be the major consumer of fossil fuels that it still is.
But it has long been the world leader in the manufacture of solar panels and batteries, as well as technologies from other alternative sources, including wind, marine, and bio-gas.
In other fundamental aspects, such as influence and impact on the international stage, China has become the focal point for both the major urban centers of the developed world and the Global South, thanks to a policy of good neighborliness and commercial and financial cooperation—to the point that the de-dollarization seen in markets for some time now projects the yuan as a highly secure currency for trade.
This does not imply an explicit desire on the part of the Central Bank of Beijing to become a dominant currency.
Meanwhile, the United States remains tied to trying to maintain the dollar by any means as the benchmark currency, and its public debt piles up mountains of paper with no intrinsic value—value largely bestowed by holders of that currency such as Japan, parts of Europe despite the euro, and China itself.
Beijing has achieved what the Treasury and Commerce departments never imagined: that trade be conducted in national currencies driven by the yuan, and that the petrodollar disappear as the sole currency for hydrocarbon transactions.
The major difference between the two countries is that, while the United States generates violence, threats, wars, and deaths—nine conflicts in recent times—China avoids them.
While Trump is addicted to tariff and trade wars, Xi Jinping has achieved enormous success with his policy of zero tariffs and trade cooperation, setting aside asymmetries and proposing mutual benefits on an equal footing while respecting the sovereignty and independence of the parties.
The U.S. threatens and disregards sovereignties. China respects them, proposes solutions, engages in dialogue, and facilitates agreements.
While Xi Jinping builds factors of balance and dialogue, Trump destroys what little the U.S. had left, and speaks on equal footing with only three countries: China, Russia, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—all of which are also nuclear powers.
Outside that narrow framework, it treats even its European allies with contempt, and points its guns and missiles at the heads of others, or surrounds them with its destroyers and aircraft carriers.
In short, the U.S. is a power in decline, while China is on the rise.
Luis Manuel Arce Issac is a Cuban journalist with more than six decades of uninterrupted professional experience. He served as a war correspondent in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Nicaragua, and as a correspondent for the Prensa Latina news agency in countries such as Venezuela, Uruguay, Spain, and Mexico. He served as spokesperson for Commander Ernesto “Che” Guevara when Guevara was Cuba’s Minister of Industry, and was part of the group of journalists who covered the overseas trips of the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro. He has received awards and honors for his journalistic work in Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, and Mexico.
Source: Cuba News – Daily Summary, translation Walter Lippmann