The optics were the policy. Donald Trump arrived at Beijing Capital International Airport on May 13, accompanied by Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Larry Fink, Jensen Huang and the chief executive of Boeing. The next morning he was received at the Great Hall of the People by Xi Jinping, walked through an honour guard of the People's Liberation Army, and within hours of the opening ceremony agreed a joint position on Iran's nuclear programme and the Strait of Hormuz. Xi reciprocated with the warmest welcome accorded any Western leader since the founding of the People's Republic. The summit ran two days. The aftershocks will run longer.

From outside the room, the visit looked less like a stabilisation exercise than what Bonny Glaser of the German Marshall Fund called, before Trump boarded the plane, the risk of "a tacit or explicit bargain in which Washington appears to concede a sphere of influence to Beijing over Taiwan" in exchange for concessions elsewhere. That formulation, reported by CNBC on May 11, has since become the lens through which the Trump visit is being read across four continents. In Taipei, in Riyadh, in Moscow, in Warsaw, in Brasília and in Astana, the question being asked is not whether Trump struck a grand bargain. It is whether he sold something that was not his to sell.

Begin with the Middle East. The White House readout of May 14 confirmed that Trump and Xi had agreed "Iran can never have a nuclear weapon" and that "the Strait of Hormuz must remain open." Xi, on the same readout, made clear "China's opposition to the militarisation of the Strait and any effort to charge a toll for its use," and expressed interest in purchasing more American oil to reduce Chinese dependence on Hormuz crude. Al Jazeera's analysis on May 15 noted that the Chinese statement, by contrast, omitted any explicit reference to Iranian nuclear weapons, instead calling for "political settlement" and "dialogue and consultation."

For the Gulf monarchies, watching from Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, the spectacle of Washington and Beijing co-announcing the terms on which their region's principal waterway would be reopened, without any Gulf state present in the room, confirmed every suspicion that has been building since the Iran war began on February 28. The American-led security order, the one for which Saudi Arabia and the UAE pay through arms purchases and which the Trump administration has spent fifteen months actively dismantling, is now being negotiated bilaterally with China over their heads.

Iran's interpretation was sharper. Chinese state media circulated Xi's softer language and Iranian officials briefed regional outlets that Beijing had not in fact endorsed the American position. The Soufan Center's May 13 brief observed that China had "defended Iranian sovereignty and security concerns" and "resisted US-backed efforts at the United Nations to pressure Iran over the Strait of Hormuz." Tehran's working assumption is that Xi will pocket whatever trade and rare-earths concessions Trump delivered, and continue to buy Iranian crude at the discounted prices Beijing has paid since March. The Iranian leadership has, in effect, been told it has no patron, only a buyer. The Gulf monarchies have been told the same thing. Neither will forget.

In Moscow, the calculation runs in the opposite direction but reaches the same conclusion. The Conversation, in a May 14 analysis subsequently republished by Asia Times, observed that Vladimir Putin will have watched the Trump-Xi summit nervously. Dennis Wilder, a former US intelligence official quoted by CNBC on May 11, put it plainly: "Russia would be nervous about an overall improvement in US-China relations." Putin's relevance to Beijing has rested on three propositions: that the Sino-Russian partnership is "no limits," that Russia provides China with discounted hydrocarbons and strategic depth against the West, and that Trump and Xi cannot do business directly. Each is now under strain.

Xi did not accept Trump's invitation to pressure Russia on Ukraine, on CSIS's reading, and Beijing will continue to prop up the Russian war economy. But the symbolism of the summit, the warmth of the welcome, and the fact that Putin's own Beijing visit was scheduled to follow Trump's rather than precede it, have signalled to the Kremlin that it is now the junior partner not just of China, but of an emergent China-led arrangement to which Washington has been admitted as an interlocutor rather than excluded as an enemy.

For the post-Soviet states of Central Asia, the implications are immediate. The Kazakh, Uzbek and Kyrgyz governments have spent the past three years balancing China's Belt and Road infrastructure with American security partnership and Russian inertia. The Trump-Xi summit, occurring in the same month as ongoing C5+1 ministerial discussions, suggests that the American leg of that triangle has been quietly redefined. Astana now has to plan for a world in which the United States and China coordinate at the strategic level on questions affecting Central Asian transit corridors, critical minerals and trans-Caspian logistics. The Soufan Center's January reading of the Iran-Russia-China axis, that Western alliance-system analysis no longer fits the region, applies with equal force to the CIS.

In Latin America, the visit lands on already-frayed ground. Caracas, since the US naval blockade of Venezuelan ports earlier this year, has assumed Washington will not negotiate. Brasília and Mexico City, both of which sent senior delegations to the EU-CELAC summit in Santa Marta last November where Trump was conspicuously absent, now read Beijing's diplomatic graduation as confirmation that Latin America's most consequential strategic relationship is no longer with the country to its north. Argentina's Milei government, the only Latin American capital genuinely aligned with Trump, finds itself isolated within the region. The Council on Foreign Relations, in its May 8 preview, noted that Trump's new China policy has been reduced to "not fighting," and that the structural agenda, Taiwan, technology controls, and Beijing's "active support of US adversaries such as Iran and Russia," has been quietly shelved. Latin Americans, watching their Chinese trade lifelines deepen as US engagement thins, have drawn the obvious conclusion.

Eastern Europe is the most exposed. Warsaw, Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn have spent the post-2022 period rebuilding their security architecture on the premise that American commitment to NATO's eastern flank was non-negotiable. The Greenland crisis of January, the Pentagon's withdrawal of 5,000 US troops from Germany on May 1, and now the Beijing summit have compounded into a single message. Polish prime minister Donald Tusk's earlier post on X about "the ongoing disintegration of our alliance" reads, in retrospect, as the first European acknowledgement of what the Trump-Xi visit has made unavoidable. If Washington is now coordinating with Beijing on the terms of Middle Eastern security, the working assumption in Warsaw must be that a similar coordination on the terms of European security is not far behind. The Eastern flank cannot afford to discover otherwise too late.

The Council on Foreign Relations editorial of May 8 captured the deeper problem. "Not fighting" is now the north star of American China policy, which means that the structural issues, China's support for Russia, its position on Iran, its mercantilist trade model, and its designs on Taiwan, have been relegated. What the rest of the world saw in Beijing was not a stabilisation but a transactional alignment between the two powers most able to reshape the international order without the consent of those affected by it. Graham Allison, the Harvard scholar quoted by CNBC on May 14, predicted Trump would emerge with announcements of "an additional $1 trillion of American goods" purchased by China. The world's response is that the bilateral arithmetic of US-China trade is not what matters. What matters is what the rest of the international system was traded for.

That is the diplomatic damage Trump has done. The visit was sold as an act of statesmanship. It has been received, from Riyadh to Warsaw and from Caracas to Astana, as an act of betrayal. The grand bargain may not exist. The suspicion that it does will outlast the summit by years.