Trump, Xi, and the Theater of Power Without Teeth

Two princes sit in Washington while the rest of the world gathers in New York. That detail alone tells me what sort of meeting this is. The announced subject is the surreptitious copying of American work in advanced computational systems. In my day it was cannon‑casting and fortress design; now it is the training of mechanical brains. Then as now, whoever commands the sharper instrument commands the field. When the most powerful actors pull away from the great assembly to speak alone, they are not doing theology. They are measuring power, testing each other’s nerves, and probing for advantage, just as the Visconti and the Venetians did while Christendom amused itself with councils.

I always begin from the effectual truth, not the imagined one. The sermons say such a conversation is about fair rules, intellectual property, mutual trust. I have read too many dispatches to credit that. Each man sits there with one question: how do I maintain and enlarge the power of my state, and my own hold on it? If Chinese copying of American designs occurs, it is not because one people is more wicked than another, but because it serves their interest and they calculate the risk is bearable. When W. K. Marriott renders my thought that men act more from necessity than choice, he captures exactly this sort of bargain.

Here the “arms” in dispute are not legions but algorithms and the machines that obey them. This changes the costume, not the plot. In my time we feared mercenary captains who sold their prowess to the highest bidder and then turned on the weak; you fear engineers and firms that can be tempted, stolen, or imitated until no border can keep your secrets home. The quarrel over copying American designs is a quarrel over who will enjoy arms of his own and who must live by borrowed strength. I taught that princes who rely on auxiliaries are ruined when those auxiliaries decide to send a bill. States that lean on foreign code and foreign chips are in the same position, only less honest about it.

The stage matters. These men meet in Washington while the General Assembly sits in New York and watches from a distance. It is as when great Italian princes met in secret villas while the formal councils convened in some solemn city. The public venue says “we are partners in a global order”; the private room says “we are rivals settling our account.” Most people, as I noted again in The Prince, judge by the eyes rather than the hands, by appearances more than the underlying causes. So each leader must emerge seeming strong. One must not look like a thief hauled before a judge, the other not like a landlord begging his tenant to pay.

Fortune supplies the occasion. The world already trembles over who will dominate these new instruments. Allies grumble, markets fret, lesser powers try to guess which master to flatter. None of this was chosen by the two men at the table, any more than the flooding of the Arno was chosen by my Florentines. But as I wrote in that same book, in the image Marriott renders as a raging river, fortune is only mistress of half our actions; the rest belongs to virtù. The question is whether either side used the years before this meeting to raise dykes and barriers: secure supply chains, loyal talent, laws with teeth, alliances that actually bite.

From what is publicly known, I see much theater and little steel. There is talk that the copying will be discussed; I hear nothing of what happens to the copyist tomorrow morning. A prince who merely reproaches a rival for theft, without preparing costs that fall automatically on the thief, practices the middle course I most despise. He hopes that words will do what only power can achieve. Renaissance Italy was full of such meetings: eloquent speeches, noble toasts, and then, when the wine was cleared away, the same raids and betrayals resumed because no one had changed the balance of arms. Where no enforcement follows, language is decoration.

A prudent leader would treat this encounter not as a sermon against espionage, but as a chance to fix the future battlefield. He would emerge having quietly arranged which technologies will be guarded like fortresses, which alliances will lock in common responses, which dependencies will be unwound so that retaliation, if needed, does not rebound on himself. He would remember, as I argued in the Discourses on Livy in the English of Ninian Hill Thomson, that enduring orders come from good laws backed by good arms, not from good intentions alone. If these two leave Washington with nothing but sharpened talking points and a few applause lines in New York, then they have yielded half their fate to fortune with a smile. The river will rise, and it will not ask whether the speeches were handsome.

The effectual truth is that this meeting is necessary but, unless hardened into real instruments of power, insufficient; what remains uncertain to me, given the thin public record, is whether either side has quietly forged those instruments or whether we are watching princes console themselves with words while the flood gathers.