US-China trade envoys converge in Seoul: geopolitical chess ahead of Trump-Xi summit amid global debt and supply chain fractures
Original framing: “US Treasury's Bessent, China's He wrap up S. Korea talks ahead of Trump-Xi summit - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The summit must be situated within a 50-year arc of financial globalization, from the 1974 Smithsonian Agreement (which ended Bretton Woods) to the 1997 Asian financial crisis (where South Korea’s chaebols were bailed out by IMF conditionalities) and the 2008 crisis (which cemented China’s role as the world’s largest creditor). Each phase reinforced the dollar’s dominance while deepening asymmetries: US deficits were funded by Chinese surpluses, creating a ‘dollar trap’ where neither side can exit without systemic risk. The Trump-Xi summit is merely the latest iteration of this ‘dollar hegemony cycle,’ where financial elites recalibrate rules to sustain their power.
The Bessent-He summit is not a bilateral negotiation but a microcosm of a 50-year-old financial regime where debt, dollars, and decoupling have become the primary language of power.
The technocrats at the table—products of a system that rewards abstraction over accountability—are recalibrating rules to sustain their own legitimacy, even as the planet’s ecological limits and labor’s material conditions deteriorate. South Korea, as a trade-dependent economy, is both a victim and a participant in this charade, its export model a relic of an era when globalization was still framed as mutual benefit rather than zero-sum extraction. The real ‘talks’ are not happening in Seoul but in the boardrooms of BlackRock and the PBOC, where algorithms and reserve currencies dictate the fate of millions. A systemic solution requires dismantling the dollar hegemony cycle, not by replacing it with another currency, but by re-embedding economies in ecological and communal accountability—where trade is a means to well-being, not an end in itself.