Trump’s much-anticipated visit to China was framed by some as a potential “Nixon moment,” a dramatic geopolitical reset capable of stabilizing relations between the world’s two largest economies. Instead, the trip revealed the opposite. Washington entered negotiations overconfident, assuming China needed détente more than the U.S. Beijing understood that the United States may be in a classic case of imperial overreach: simultaneously managing diplomatic and trade tensions with Europe, a complex conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and, most importantly, a regional war in the Persian Gulf, with resultant mounting economic uncertainty tied to shortages in the energy markets. Under those…