Donald Trump visited Beijing alongside the billionaire CEOs of a dozen top US corporations. His failure to pressure China to meet his demands demonstrated how Washington lost the trade war.
Trump is just the symptom of the failures of American foreign policies across the globe. From Vietnam, Iraq contra, Iraq, Ukraine, Nord Stream pipelines sabotage and now the war in Iran. China like all members of the global south, they have been watching closely.
America has become an empire that demonstrates a lack of understanding of the wider world and how that world is swiftly charging. These changes are also visible among Europeans.. A long time group of allies who are now rethinking their commitment to the American project.
Like it or not, the empire is in decline. Better to accept those facts and make the appropriate adjustments in order to mitigate the fall.
Europe is rethinking their commitment to the US? Say what? The EU are more obviously complete vassals of the US than ever before having been made dependent on US LNG and taking over the proxy war against Russia.
The "China holds the cards" conclusion is correct as far as it goes, which is precisely where it stops being useful. Rare earth dominance, chip war blowback, supply chain dependency, the trade deficit chart — Norton has read the hand accurately. What the analysis cannot see from inside the bilateral frame is that the most consequential leverage in the AI technology contest is not held by either government at the table, and the table itself was assembled in rooms neither flag governs.
The memory allocation hierarchy sits in Seoul. Three corporations control ninety-two percent of global DRAM supply and have already committed the majority of their high-bandwidth memory output through multi-year agreements to a small number of hyperscaler tenants. In January 2026, procurement officers from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI were living in long-stay hotels near Samsung and SK Hynix facilities, waiting for allocation meetings that would determine whether their employers could build the infrastructure both governments spent three days in Beijing pretending to control. Beijing's chip self-sufficiency narrative does not dissolve this geometry. It adds Huawei to the waiting room.
The finishing constraint sits in Penang. Advanced packaging — the discipline that converts laboratory silicon into deployable systems through chiplet integration, 3D stacking, and thermal management — is increasingly the binding bottleneck on AI deployment, not the wafer itself. The 2021 auto-chip shock demonstrated this with $210 billion in collateral damage: fabs kept producing throughout the shortage, yet global automakers bled because finished, tested, packaged components were unavailable. The armory seemed peripheral until it closed. Then nothing else mattered.
China holds significant cards, and Norton is right that Washington has spent a decade misreading the hand. The question the bilateral frame structurally cannot ask is whether either government negotiating in Beijing last week controls the rooms where the actual constraints live — and if not, what exactly changed when they shook hands?
I'm not an academic, but its obvious that firms like Blackrock and most others in Trump's corporate delegation to China (mostly paid for by public funds) have reach well past America. Dominant destructive US capitalism is international. For instance in Australia Blackrock
"manages approximately AUD $280 billion in Australia, partnering with the Federal Government, multiple state governments, and superannuation funds to provide investment management and software.". Musk's SpaceX partners with Telstra, a major telecommunications company in Australia which used to be nationalised but is now privatised. And that's the tip of the iceberg.
And I guess that's how US operates as "mafia" boss with its "protection" housed in US bases t/out the world.
Every economic weapon reveals the true dependency map when its actually deployed, and sometimes the map shows the opposite of what the strategy assumed. Sanctions on Russia revealed European energy dependency was deeper than anyone in Brussels had priced. The trade war on China has revealed that American corporate dependency on Chinese markets and manufacturing was deeper than Washington had priced. Economic weapons function simultaneously as instruments of coercion and instruments of disclosure, and the disclosure part is the one strategists consistently undervalue.
The CEO delegation is itself the disclosure. When the executives of your largest companies physically accompany the president to a rival capital, the dependency structure is no longer theoretical, its visible on the tarmac. And the strategic implication compounds because every year of Chinese domestic substitution reduces the leverage that technology restrictions were supposed to provide. The trade war accelerated exactly the self-sufficiency programme it was designed to prevent, which means the negotiating hand weakens between summits rather than strengthening. the next president who flies to Beijing will have less leverage than this one, regardless of who it is or what they promise.
Nothing Musk does is especially wise and in the realm of etiquette I think it's fair to say he's demonstrated not only ignorance but willful defiance. If the kid was young enough he might have been the best behaved, most interesting human the US delegation brought. I certainly wouldn't want to have to sit in a room with that coterie of selfishness.
Yikes those BigTech/GAFAM/... corporations and Trump more and more look like a text-book definition of fascism. It is more and more evident and urgent we need to stop using US-based technology and switch to alternatives. Best to something like the example of free/libre and opensource when it comes to software (see FSF and OSI definitions). When it comes to tech this means things like Linux operating system, LibreOffice office suite, RISC-V processors, Mastodon for true independent uncensored social networking, Lemmy, Firefox.....
The capacity for publuc shame to force action is sorely lacking these days. It feels often like the only people who feel it are the ones who truly shouldn't have any.
Yes. Most of those in control of govt and big business seemingly have no social conscience at all. Also it seems pressure groups active in the past on human rights, environment, economic distribution etc are being silenced more in the MSM. So we're losing our connection to each other.
America is being ruled by the biggest criminals: the Luciferians Vatican. they control politicians and the rich and famous using secret cults the Freemasons and Jesuits. they are the biggest deceivers and are oppressing humanity with their printed monopoly debt money. Americans need to arrest them, redistribute their ill gotten wealth, then nationalize the Federal Reserve central bank now!
Look at these pristine, empty suits occupying the top-floor mahogany cages today, a pack of hyper-credentialed parasites who wouldn’t know the smell of a mailroom if you rubbed their noses in it.
We are living through the final, decadent collapse of the great American corporate empire, where businesses built on generations of blood, sweat, and genuine mad-genius and innovation have been handed over to an entitled aristocracy of fail-upward sons, daughters, and network-bred tech-bro grifters.
They don’t understand the "brand" because they didn't build it, they inherited it like an unearned trust fund, and now they are driving these multi-generational behemoths straight into the ditch, completely oblivious to the fact that the wheels have already come off and the engine is on fire.
Trump & his US billionaire beggars all FAIL in China. What a pack of idiots! What did they expect?!
Trump is just the symptom of the failures of American foreign policies across the globe. From Vietnam, Iraq contra, Iraq, Ukraine, Nord Stream pipelines sabotage and now the war in Iran. China like all members of the global south, they have been watching closely.
America has become an empire that demonstrates a lack of understanding of the wider world and how that world is swiftly charging. These changes are also visible among Europeans.. A long time group of allies who are now rethinking their commitment to the American project.
Like it or not, the empire is in decline. Better to accept those facts and make the appropriate adjustments in order to mitigate the fall.
Europe is rethinking their commitment to the US? Say what? The EU are more obviously complete vassals of the US than ever before having been made dependent on US LNG and taking over the proxy war against Russia.
The "China holds the cards" conclusion is correct as far as it goes, which is precisely where it stops being useful. Rare earth dominance, chip war blowback, supply chain dependency, the trade deficit chart — Norton has read the hand accurately. What the analysis cannot see from inside the bilateral frame is that the most consequential leverage in the AI technology contest is not held by either government at the table, and the table itself was assembled in rooms neither flag governs.
The memory allocation hierarchy sits in Seoul. Three corporations control ninety-two percent of global DRAM supply and have already committed the majority of their high-bandwidth memory output through multi-year agreements to a small number of hyperscaler tenants. In January 2026, procurement officers from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI were living in long-stay hotels near Samsung and SK Hynix facilities, waiting for allocation meetings that would determine whether their employers could build the infrastructure both governments spent three days in Beijing pretending to control. Beijing's chip self-sufficiency narrative does not dissolve this geometry. It adds Huawei to the waiting room.
The finishing constraint sits in Penang. Advanced packaging — the discipline that converts laboratory silicon into deployable systems through chiplet integration, 3D stacking, and thermal management — is increasingly the binding bottleneck on AI deployment, not the wafer itself. The 2021 auto-chip shock demonstrated this with $210 billion in collateral damage: fabs kept producing throughout the shortage, yet global automakers bled because finished, tested, packaged components were unavailable. The armory seemed peripheral until it closed. Then nothing else mattered.
China holds significant cards, and Norton is right that Washington has spent a decade misreading the hand. The question the bilateral frame structurally cannot ask is whether either government negotiating in Beijing last week controls the rooms where the actual constraints live — and if not, what exactly changed when they shook hands?
They are learning that they can't push anyone around anymore except Europe
and several Asian nations like the Philippines.
I really like this analysis
I'm not an academic, but its obvious that firms like Blackrock and most others in Trump's corporate delegation to China (mostly paid for by public funds) have reach well past America. Dominant destructive US capitalism is international. For instance in Australia Blackrock
"manages approximately AUD $280 billion in Australia, partnering with the Federal Government, multiple state governments, and superannuation funds to provide investment management and software.". Musk's SpaceX partners with Telstra, a major telecommunications company in Australia which used to be nationalised but is now privatised. And that's the tip of the iceberg.
And I guess that's how US operates as "mafia" boss with its "protection" housed in US bases t/out the world.
Good summary, Ben.
Every economic weapon reveals the true dependency map when its actually deployed, and sometimes the map shows the opposite of what the strategy assumed. Sanctions on Russia revealed European energy dependency was deeper than anyone in Brussels had priced. The trade war on China has revealed that American corporate dependency on Chinese markets and manufacturing was deeper than Washington had priced. Economic weapons function simultaneously as instruments of coercion and instruments of disclosure, and the disclosure part is the one strategists consistently undervalue.
The CEO delegation is itself the disclosure. When the executives of your largest companies physically accompany the president to a rival capital, the dependency structure is no longer theoretical, its visible on the tarmac. And the strategic implication compounds because every year of Chinese domestic substitution reduces the leverage that technology restrictions were supposed to provide. The trade war accelerated exactly the self-sufficiency programme it was designed to prevent, which means the negotiating hand weakens between summits rather than strengthening. the next president who flies to Beijing will have less leverage than this one, regardless of who it is or what they promise.
like Trump, Musk also brought (some of) his family to the high-level US business meeting in China - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcT0si8qTGQ
not sure if it's wise to bring one's children to such a politically-laden meeting between two world leaders.
Nothing Musk does is especially wise and in the realm of etiquette I think it's fair to say he's demonstrated not only ignorance but willful defiance. If the kid was young enough he might have been the best behaved, most interesting human the US delegation brought. I certainly wouldn't want to have to sit in a room with that coterie of selfishness.
Gracias por su análisis
Yikes those BigTech/GAFAM/... corporations and Trump more and more look like a text-book definition of fascism. It is more and more evident and urgent we need to stop using US-based technology and switch to alternatives. Best to something like the example of free/libre and opensource when it comes to software (see FSF and OSI definitions). When it comes to tech this means things like Linux operating system, LibreOffice office suite, RISC-V processors, Mastodon for true independent uncensored social networking, Lemmy, Firefox.....
Never thought I'd be wishing I lived in the good old days of Nixon's administration.
Right?
The capacity for publuc shame to force action is sorely lacking these days. It feels often like the only people who feel it are the ones who truly shouldn't have any.
Yes. Most of those in control of govt and big business seemingly have no social conscience at all. Also it seems pressure groups active in the past on human rights, environment, economic distribution etc are being silenced more in the MSM. So we're losing our connection to each other.
We were onto something!
https://aaronrupar.substack.com/p/trump-china-summit-failure?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=xr3cf
The whole Trump China trip reeks of "this could have been an email" lol
America is being ruled by the biggest criminals: the Luciferians Vatican. they control politicians and the rich and famous using secret cults the Freemasons and Jesuits. they are the biggest deceivers and are oppressing humanity with their printed monopoly debt money. Americans need to arrest them, redistribute their ill gotten wealth, then nationalize the Federal Reserve central bank now!
Look at these pristine, empty suits occupying the top-floor mahogany cages today, a pack of hyper-credentialed parasites who wouldn’t know the smell of a mailroom if you rubbed their noses in it.
We are living through the final, decadent collapse of the great American corporate empire, where businesses built on generations of blood, sweat, and genuine mad-genius and innovation have been handed over to an entitled aristocracy of fail-upward sons, daughters, and network-bred tech-bro grifters.
They don’t understand the "brand" because they didn't build it, they inherited it like an unearned trust fund, and now they are driving these multi-generational behemoths straight into the ditch, completely oblivious to the fact that the wheels have already come off and the engine is on fire.
https://substack.com/@aaronruby/note/p-188961420?r=7jhui4