When Xi Jinping stood at the entrance — rock solid, flat-footed, waiting — Lawrence Wilkerson knew the summit was already decided. Not who would say what, not what terms might emerge from two hours and fifteen minutes of closed-door conversation, but the deeper choreography: who walked toward whom, who extended a hand first. Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, had been going to China since 1984, had sat through policy-planning sessions where Taiwan was the first item every time, had even received an invitation to visit the Central Party School when Hu Jintao was consolidating his position. He knew what a Chinese mise en scène looked like when it had been carefully set. “The Chinese have choreographed this to the last word, the last gesture,” he told Glenn Diesen, watching the footage from Beijing. The summit, in his reading, was over before it began — and what it revealed about the state of American power was considerably more than what the communiqué said.
↑ N° 10 · Continues themes from N° 10 · Karaganov argued that Western decline was structural and irreversible; Wilkerson, from inside the American foreign policy apparatus, offers the same diagnosis in reverse — not what Russia must do, but what the United States has already lost.The summit China owned
Trump flew to Beijing needing things. Xi stood still and waited. The gap between those two postures tells most of the story.
What came out of the May 14–15 meeting was, by the standard of what Trump arrived needing, thin. A commitment to purchase soybeans — an echo of the October 2025 Busan agreement, still only partially honored as China continues buying cheaper Brazilian alternatives. A 200-jet Boeing order that puzzled observers given China’s own C919 aircraft rolling out at home with considerable fanfare. Promises of agricultural and energy purchases of unspecified scale. Marco Rubio held a press conference afterwards to insist the United States had not asked China for anything, had sought no assistance, needed none. Wilkerson dismissed this as campaign positioning: Rubio is running for president, and everything he says now has to be parsed in that light.
Scott Bessent was in the delegation, but Wilkerson — whose diplomatic years taught him what a formidable treasury interlocutor looks like, his counterexample being Ken Dam, deputy secretary under Powell, multilingual Asia specialist — didn’t think Bessent added weight. “The Chinese are leagues ahead of him in terms of economic matters.” What struck Wilkerson more was the composition of the delegation as a whole: business-led, businessman-fronted. A council of industry rather than diplomats. That framing, he argued, told you more about American ambition in Beijing than the soybean figures did.
Taiwan came up first, as it always does. Wilkerson has watched it function for decades as the price of admission for any substantive conversation — almost a rubric, he said, something the Chinese side has to get out of the way before anything else. What was different in May 2026 is that the stakes around it had shifted. China has reached the point, in his read, where it knows it is winning. Not any particular confrontation — the longer game. Xi does not want the United States to collapse catastrophically; he wants the decline managed. “He would like to see us stop it before it impacts China adversely. He’s willing to help up to a point that keeps us afloat — but doesn’t increase our power, and in fact slowly diminishes it even more.” That is the Chinese strategic interest, and the Beijing summit served it adequately.
What Kagan wrote and why he wrote it
When the co-founder of the Project for the New American Century declares checkmate, it is worth asking what he hopes the declaration will do.
Robert Kagan’s essay “Checkmate in Iran,” published in The Atlantic on May 10, caused the kind of reaction that follows when someone who helped design a doctrine publicly acknowledges its wreckage. Kagan, who co-founded the Project for the New American Century in 1997 and was among the most consequential intellectual architects of the Iraq War, argued that the United States had suffered a total defeat in its confrontation with Iran — a setback, he wrote, that was unprecedented in American history and “could be neither repaired nor ignored.” The Strait of Hormuz, he argued, would never simply revert to being open as it once was. Iran had survived 37 days of sustained US and Israeli air strikes, lost significant portions of its leadership, and still extracted no concession. Tehran had not capitulated. It had transformed its control of the chokepoint into a permanent strategic position — one that reshaped not just the Gulf but global confidence in American staying power.
They are losing, and they really do not like losing after so many years of painstaking work. They didn’t think it was hell they were driving America into. They thought it was joyous and triumphant. — Lawrence Wilkerson
Wilkerson read the essay not as a genuine reckoning but as a provocation — Kagan trying to alarm the foreign policy establishment into action by naming the failure loudly. “He’s angry and trying to stoke people into action by telling them dire things.” A colleague of Wilkerson’s who has made a scholarly study of neoconservative intellectual history offered the sharper formulation: they are losing not because the strategy was abandoned, but because it was carried out. Imperfectly, in Kagan’s view — but faithfully enough to arrive at this point.
Glenn Diesen raised what made the essay significant beyond its conclusions: in most Western foreign policy discourse, acknowledging setbacks requires a kind of loyalty performance that frames any admission of loss as taking the opponent’s side. Kagan, by naming the failure explicitly and in The Atlantic, had stepped outside that constraint. Wilkerson agreed it was extraordinary. “This is the co-founder of the Project for a New American Century.” The king of the neocons, Wilkerson called him — and the king had written the obituary notice.
A nuclear arms race without treaties
Nine states with nuclear weapons, two or three more aspiring to join them, and no arms control architecture left to manage any of it.
The Beijing summit produced language about the Strait of Hormuz that both sides could read as they wished: the two leaders agreed it must remain open, which committed neither to anything specific. Wilkerson’s read was that the practical route to keeping it open ran through Iranian control, probably with Chinese backing — the implication, though unstated, of the Chinese position on the war. What the summit did not produce was any serious discussion of the nuclear question.
Wilkerson is working on a piece for the Eisenhower Media Network about the American nuclear buildup. What he has found has alarmed him sufficiently that he describes what is now underway as a nuclear arms race that may match or exceed the Cold War version in scale. The structural difference from that era: then there were two states in the core confrontation. Now there are nine states with nuclear weapons, and two or three more positioned to acquire them, and no treaty structure to constrain the escalation. New START expired in February 2026 without a successor. The INF Treaty was gone before that. There is, currently, no bilateral or multilateral arms control agreement governing nuclear weapons between the major powers.
China is building out, in Wilkerson’s assessment, reluctantly but necessarily. The traditional Chinese nuclear doctrine — dating to Mao’s formulation that a nation of a billion people can absorb devastating losses and still retaliate, and therefore needs only enough weapons for deterrence — is eroding under the pressure of an expanding American arsenal and a doctrine that has stopped pretending to be purely defensive. Xi has reportedly raised concerns internally about where the trajectory is heading. He will match it nonetheless.
Classified killings and the empire's ledger
194 people killed at sea without warning, arrest, or trial. The legal justification is classified. The drugs keep coming.
When Wilkerson wanted to illustrate the state of the republic beneath the summit, he reached for a statistic from the New York Times. Since September 2025, the United States has carried out 58 military strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific — Operation Southern Spear — killing 194 people. No warning shot. No boarding. No arrest. No trial. No identities released by the US government. The Department of Justice legal justification for the program is classified. And the drug flow, Wilkerson noted without editorializing further, continues.
Brad Cooper, the admiral commanding Central Command, has told Congress that civilian casualties have been minimal — that the people killed were narco-terrorists. Wilkerson called this lying through his teeth. The New York Times and the Washington Post have reported otherwise. Trump, in response, dispatched Cash Patel to investigate who within the intelligence community leaked to the Times that Iran’s ballistic missile capability remained largely intact — a story that cut against the official narrative of a crippled, defeated foe. In Wilkerson’s framing, Patel is being sent after a major newspaper in the way Dan Ellsberg was pursued after the Pentagon Papers, but with more executive power behind the effort and less institutional resistance in front of it. Katharine Graham’s Washington Post stood firm in 1971. Wilkerson was not confident the same resolve exists now.
Then there is the delegation composition. Trump brought to Beijing the people who build what Elon Musk wants to build: AI infrastructure, surveillance capacity, supply chains for a technological order that doesn’t map onto national borders. Wilkerson acknowledged that what he was describing — a tacit offer to sympathetic Chinese elites to participate in a global technocracy — sounded like a conspiracy reading. He was finding it increasingly difficult to dismiss as one. Samuel Huntington had written about the American elite’s detachment from national life in a 2004 National Interest essay called “Dead Souls.” Glenn Diesen, in the conversation, sharpened the formulation: “denationalized elite.” Wilkerson wrote it down. More direct than “globalists,” he said. More insidious.
Caesar, Octavius, and what the analogy implies
Wilkerson kept returning to the Roman parallel — not as metaphor, but as structural precedent.
The conversation ended where conversations of this kind tend to end, in the long historical view — but Wilkerson reached for it with unusual precision. The Roman republic’s final decades, Caesar crossing into the Senate despite the portents, the assassination, the civil wars that followed. Six weeks in, he said, you could have identified who was going to win. Octavius had the loyalty structures, the forces, the political genius. He became Augustus. The Pax Romana followed: years of relative peace, administered by a single ruler, and thereafter always would be. What Wilkerson was saying was not that this was the American trajectory. He was saying it was not impossible, and that the structural conditions that made it possible — a constitutionally disabled removal mechanism, an executive with demonstrably worsening psychological stability, a military being assembled around personal loyalty rather than institutional mandate — were already in place.
Dr. John Gartner, the psychotherapist who taught for thirty years at Johns Hopkins, has been arguing across interviews that Trump’s psychological state meets every diagnostic profile of worsening malignant narcissism, and that the trajectory points further in that direction. Wilkerson found this persuasive. He also found the founders’ failure to build a workable removal mechanism alarming. The 25th Amendment, he argued, was crafted by its designers to never function. Impeachment has been demonstrated a political theater across two centuries. “How do you get rid of a megalomaniac?” was Gartner’s question. Wilkerson did not have a confident answer.
Pete Hegseth is, in Wilkerson’s reading, constructing a military component that could serve the structural role of a Caesarian force — loyal to a person rather than to institutions. The midterms are eighteen months away. The instability, in his assessment, could concentrate around them. He did not think this was a certainty, or even a probability he was prepared to quantify. He was saying it had entered the range of the imaginable in a way it had not before.
The conversation closed without resolution. “I just hope it isn’t catastrophic,” Wilkerson said. That was the full extent of his optimism.
What remains genuinely uncertain: whether the Iran ceasefire holds, whether any diplomatic framework can bridge Iranian sovereignty claims, Israeli maximalism, and American domestic political constraints simultaneously. Wilkerson doubts it. His working hypothesis is that the current pause is a subterfuge and that full-scale conflict resumes. The Strait of Hormuz will not simply reopen; the terms of any reopening will be Iran’s, and those terms will confirm what Kagan wrote.
What is not uncertain: the Beijing summit revealed the power asymmetry it was meant to manage. Xi stood still. Trump walked toward him. The Chinese produced a carefully prepared welcome with non-negotiable talking points; the Americans produced purchase commitments of uncertain enforceability and a delegation of businessmen. That is not a meeting between equals. Wilkerson read the choreography and knew immediately what it meant. He had seen the same configuration before, across four decades of American diplomacy — usually applied to smaller countries, usually with the Americans on the other side of the gap.
What the reader is left with: Wilkerson is a specific kind of voice. He was inside the system at its operational height and has spent the years since then watching what it has become. He is not dispassionate — his critique has a moral charge to it, shaped by the Iraq War, by the things he helped do and later concluded were catastrophic errors. What he brings is the insider’s ability to recognize when institutional capacity is genuinely degrading rather than merely constrained. The Roman analogy may or may not hold. The choreography in Beijing has already settled.