What Trump is doing has an interesting, and possibly beneficial, side effect.
In real time, and at full global scale, he is demonstrating to China how the world responds to blackmail dressed up as negotiation, to economic coercion masquerading as nationalism, to military sabre-rattling, to the casual threat of walking away from the existing international system while hinting at a parallel order built on brute leverage rather than consent.
Russia barely matters here, except as a nuclear power. Beyond that, it has little to offer as a template. China, on the other hand, is watching carefully. Not the noise, but the response. Not the theatrics, but the consequences.
The Chinese leadership now faces a genuine fork. Either it reads the global reaction to a rampaging United States and decides that hegemonic ambition carries higher costs than anticipated, that tempering its posture preserves more power than it surrenders. Or it reads the same chaos as proof that norms are brittle, alliances transactional, and restraint unnecessary, and is emboldened to act on its long-nurtured fantasies of replacement rather than coexistence.
Which path it chooses will depend less on Beijing than on the rest of the world, on whether institutions hold, whether allies coordinate, and whether democratic systems respond with coherence rather than panic to an erratic superpower.
In that sense, Trump is not merely a disruption. He is a stress test.
And whatever the outcome, whether it ends in Chinese torture (where China gets what it wants, to the world’s detriment) or Chinese walls (where the ancient kingdom shuts up and carries on, to the world’s relief), what is true is that we are indeed living out the old Chinese curse.
We live in interesting times.
