How successful was last week's summit in Beijing? President Trump said it was a "great success." Xi Jinping, China's supreme ruler, merely called the meeting "constructive."
Perhaps Mr. Xi thought: "Trump is cunning and unpredictable, so I'd better keep our relations on an even keel while he's in office."
But it's also possible he thought: "I know how to play Trump. Vladimir Putin is also paying me a visit in a few days. I'll tell him, Kim Jong Un, and those now calling the shots in Tehran what they need to do next."
If you watched the summit on television, you saw the pageantry: a military honor guard, flag-waving children, and an elaborate red-carpet ceremony.
What you might not have noticed: All that was staged in the shadow of Tiananmen Square, where in 1989 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) massacred hundreds, and possibly thousands, of peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators.
Nine years later, the blood long since scrubbed from the square, President Clinton arrived in Beijing to toast China's rulers. He soon began pushing for China's admission into the World Trade Organization. That came about in 2001.
"Bringing China into the WTO is a win-win decision," Mr. Clinton said. "It will protect our prosperity, and it will promote the right kind of change in China."
It was a noble experiment. And it failed.
Since then, the CCP has waged a relentless campaign against American interests — stealing intellectual property on an industrial scale, infiltrating critical infrastructure through cyber operations, and flooding American communities with fentanyl while its state media and an algorithm with 179 million American users floods American minds with disinformation.
Last week, President Trump announced that the summit had resulted in agreements on Chinese purchases of American agricultural products and Boeing jets.
He said Mr. Xi agreed that the Strait of Hormuz should remain an international waterway and that Iran's rulers should not have nuclear weapons.
Will Mr. Xi stop providing Tehran with satellite intelligence for use in targeting American forces? As Reagan didn't quite say: Distrust and verify.
Xi Jinping is a Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist. Among his titles: General Secretary of the CCP, President of the People's Republic of China, and chairman of the Central Military Commission.
But beneath this framework lies something older and no less dangerous: the imperial conviction that China is not merely a great power but the rightful center of civilization itself, the Middle Kingdom, the literal center of the world, surrounded by less civilized peoples who must pay tribute to the only legitimate ruler of the planet.
Mr. Xi's long-term goal is nothing less than a new world order, one in which China displaces the U.S. as the world's dominant nation.
During the summit, he invoked the "Thucydides Trap" – the idea that a rising power challenging an established hegemon risks conflict. The implication was clear: If the U.S. refuses to accommodate Beijing's ambitions, war is all but inevitable.
He's made such arguments for years to his roughly 100 million CCP comrades. His speeches and articles have been carefully read in Mandarin by Matt Pottinger, an incisive China expert who served as deputy national security advisor in the first Trump administration and now chairs the China program at my think tank.
For example, this observation by Mr. Xi in a CCP textbook: "Our state's ideology and social system are incompatible with the West. This determines that our struggle and contest with Western countries is irreconcilable, so it will inevitably be long, complicated, and sometimes even very sharp."
Where it may be sharpest soonest: Mr. Xi is determined to seize and subjugate the Taiwanese – free, self-governing, and prosperous people who would prefer not to be ruled by communists on the other side of the Taiwan Strait.
Mr. Xi also is keenly aware that the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., TSMC, fabricates about 90% of the world's most advanced chips – vital for the development of artificial intelligence. Whoever controls such chips controls the commanding heights of the AI-driven world to come.
At the summit, Mr. Xi warned that a clash with the U.S. over Taiwan could create "an extremely dangerous situation."
President Trump didn't backtrack from the long-held U.S. position of "strategic ambiguity" – declining to say whether or not the U.S. would help defend the Taiwanese if they were attacked. He also didn't say whether he will approve a pending $14 billion sale of arms that the Taiwanese need for deterrence and, should that fail, defense.
Those who characterize this summit as signaling détente cite a toast offered by Mr. Xi during a state banquet at the Great Hall of the People. The U.S. and China, he said, "should be partners rather than rivals."
I would remind you of two maxims from "The Art of War" by the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu: "All warfare is based on deception" and "Hold out baits to entice the enemy."
Within the foreign policy establishment and the media, we repeatedly hear that the U.S. and China are engaged in a "strategic competition." That sounds like an Olympic table tennis match which may mislead people to believe we can sit back and let the best "ideology and social system" win.
It's imperative to understand that the American experiment, now 250 years old, is being stress-tested by what is, by almost every measure, the most powerful communist party in history.
If our goal is to pass on our way of life to our children, serious efforts and real sacrifices will be required.
If instead we allow CCP algorithms to disinform us while Beijing arms and emboldens its allies in Moscow, Tehran, and Pyongyang, we will have squandered what took two and a half centuries to build. Mr. Xi is counting on it.