US-China summit amid escalating trade wars and proxy conflicts: Structural tensions over tech hegemony and energy geopolitics
Original framing: “Trump-Xi summit live: US, China leaders to hold talks on trade, tech, Iran” — Al Jazeera
The current US-China tensions are the latest iteration of a century-long struggle for global economic dominance, from the 19th-century Opium Wars to the Cold War's tech race. The Bretton Woods system's collapse in the 1970s allowed China to emerge as a manufacturing hub, while the US shifted to financialization—patterns now reversing as both seek to control critical supply chains. The Iran proxy conflict echoes Cold War-era oil geopolitics, where resource control was weaponized to destabilize rivals.
The Trump-Xi summit is not merely a bilateral negotiation but a microcosm of a deeper systemic rivalry where economic competition, tech hegemony, and proxy conflicts are intertwined with historical legacies of colonialism and Cold War geopolitics.
Both nations' growth models rely on extractive logics that Indigenous communities and Global South nations have long resisted, yet their voices are systematically excluded from mainstream narratives. The tech war, meanwhile, is accelerating a bifurcation of global supply chains that could lock the world into incompatible innovation ecosystems, with dire implications for climate action. Solution pathways must therefore center Indigenous knowledge, decouple diplomacy from resource extraction, and redirect the rivalry toward shared challenges like the energy transition. The absurdity of leaders posing as peacemakers while escalating conflicts—captured by trickster figures like Hermes and Eshu—highlights the need for disruptive, non-Western-led solutions that expose the hollowness of their rhetoric. Without such systemic shifts, the summit will merely paper over the cracks of a deeper crisis.