The massive display of American military might during Xi Jinping’s visit underscores the shift from a unipolar world to a new reality in which the U.S. is compelled to engage with China as an economic and industrial rival of equal standing—one whose influence cannot be overcome by military force alone.
Two B-1B Lancer bombers roared over the welcoming ceremony for Chinese President Xi Jinping. Donald Trump, standing with his hand raised in salute, looked upward, ducked slightly, gritted his teeth and visibly winced at the noise.
Xi, standing beside him, barely moved.
Trump then appeared to remark that it had been really loud.
The moment immediately travelled around the internet for obvious reasons. The choreography had been designed to display American military power to the leader of its principal strategic competitor.
Instead, the most visibly startled person on the tarmac was the President of the United States.
A reflexive reaction to two extremely loud bombers says precisely nothing about the balance of power between nuclear states. As political theatre, however, the scene was almost too convenient.
And the bombers were only the beginning.
Xi received a red carpet, a 21-gun salute, a guard of honour and the unusual gesture of being personally greeted by Trump at Joint Base Andrews. The following day brought another military spectacle at the White House, culminating in a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber flying overhead with four F-22 Raptors.
Washington was not merely welcoming the Chinese president.
It was staging power.
The more interesting question was why it appeared to feel such a need to stage it.
Nobody Does This for an Irrelevant Rival
There is no serious argument that the United States has ceased to be a superpower.
Its military reach remains extraordinary. The dollar remains central to the international financial system. American companies dominate important areas of advanced technology. The United States maintains an alliance network China does not possess.
But China is hardly a minor economic power standing opposite an overwhelmingly superior American military machine. It possesses nuclear weapons, a vast missile arsenal, increasingly sophisticated air and naval forces and, crucially, an enormous industrial base behind them.
American power remains global in a way China’s is not. Chinese capabilities, particularly close to China itself, create a very different strategic equation.
What is much easier to establish is that China can no longer be treated as a subordinate power whose behaviour Washington simply dictates.
Trump received the leader of a country whose decisions can move commodity markets, disrupt industrial supply chains, affect American manufacturers and complicate US policy from the Western Pacific to the Middle East.
For much of the post-Cold War era, Washington established the broad parameters of the international system while other powers calculated how best to function within them.
China increasingly complicates that arrangement.
The ceremonies demonstrated American strength. The negotiations demonstrated why strength no longer automatically produces compliance.
A Spectacle Without a Settlement
The summit was not devoid of substance.
Washington and Beijing extended their trade truce until January 10 and agreed to tariff reductions covering roughly $30 billion in non-sensitive goods in each direction. China made commitments concerning purchases of American coal, while new mechanisms for economic dialogue and discussions on artificial intelligence were established.
There were pandas too.
Two of them.
After bombers, fighter aircraft, salutes and the assembled grandeur of the American presidency, Washington could at least report that Zoo Atlanta would be getting new residents.
The problem was the relationship between the scale of the spectacle and the scale of the settlement.
There was no comprehensive trade deal. Technology restrictions survived. The struggle over advanced semiconductors continued. Critical minerals remained a source of leverage and Taiwan remained unresolved.
The result looked less like a grand bargain than a managed stalemate wrapped in extraordinarily elaborate ceremony.
For Beijing, even that carried significance. If American pressure could no longer automatically force structural concessions, then the relationship itself had changed.
Washington does not need to lose its power for the old hierarchy to weaken.
It merely has to discover that power no longer produces obedience.
Trump had not capitulated to China, and Xi had not displaced the United States. The more important development was subtler: the world’s most powerful state had spent several days demonstrating its strength while negotiating the terms of coexistence with a rival it has discovered it cannot economically isolate at acceptable cost.
The Dependence Washington Cannot Bomb Away
This is where military theatre encounters industrial reality.
A B-2 is among the most sophisticated weapons ever constructed. Four F-22s flying beside it make for an impressive photograph.
But military hardware cannot manufacture supply chains.
In 2024, China accounted for approximately 60 percent of global mining of the rare earths used in high-performance magnets, 91 percent of global refining and 94 percent of the production of sintered permanent magnets.
These are not obscure materials sitting outside the national-security equation. Rare-earth permanent magnets are used across advanced defence systems, including aircraft, missiles, radar and unmanned systems. The Pentagon has consequently invested heavily in developing an American “mine-to-magnet” supply chain.
American weapons are not simply “made in China”. The deeper issue is that modern military power rests on an industrial pyramid extending far beneath the final weapons platform, and China has accumulated enormous influence over some of its most difficult-to-replace layers.
That creates a striking contradiction.
Washington can fly some of the most advanced military aircraft ever built over the Chinese president while simultaneously spending heavily to reduce supply-chain vulnerabilities involving materials needed by those same categories of weapons.
The imbalance extends beyond rare earths. In 2025, China produced more than 80 percent of the world’s battery cells, around 85 percent of cathode active materials and more than 90 percent of anode active materials used in electric-car batteries.
This goes far beyond ordinary trade. It is industrial architecture, and industrial architecture cannot be tariffed out of existence overnight.
It has to be rebuilt somewhere else.
Washington is trying. It is imposing tariffs, subsidising domestic production, restricting technology transfers and encouraging allies to diversify supply chains.
Diversification can reduce exposure. Recreating an industrial ecosystem built over decades is much harder.
Scale, infrastructure, expertise and supplier networks do not disappear because dependence has become strategically inconvenient.
That leaves Washington in an awkward position. It wants to reduce its dependence on China while repeatedly returning to Beijing to negotiate the conditions under which that reduction can occur.
Competition and dependence now exist in the same relationship.
That is not simply a policy choice.
It is a structural condition.
A G2 in a Multipolar World?
Taiwan demonstrates the limits of this transactional relationship.
Xi pressed Washington over the issue, while American military support for Taiwan remains one of the most sensitive points between the two powers. No amount of ceremonial warmth resolved that contradiction.
The summit therefore should not be mistaken for the birth of a Sino-American condominium.
Yet the scale of Xi’s reception inevitably raises the old idea of a G2.
Perhaps Washington and Beijing are simply learning to occupy the centre of the international system together.
There is an obvious attraction to this interpretation. They are the world’s two largest economies, and their leaders discuss trade, technology, military stability, artificial intelligence, Taiwan and conflicts far beyond their borders.
But reducing the emerging order to another bipolar system risk repeating the mistake of the unipolar moment: assuming that everyone else will organise their policies according to the preferences of the largest powers.
India pursues its own ambitions. Gulf states increasingly balance relationships across competing centres of power. Governments across the wider Global South show little enthusiasm for reducing every foreign-policy decision to a binary choice between Washington and Beijing.
Multipolarity does not require every pole to possess equal power.
It requires that no single centre can reliably determine the choices of all the others.
This is what made the spectacle in Washington so revealing.
The United States displayed weapons capable of projecting force virtually anywhere on Earth.
China brought something less photogenic to the meeting: industrial scale.
One form of power photographs better than the other.
Both matter.
The emerging order is not a clean transfer of hegemony from Washington to Beijing. It is the erosion of the conditions that allowed one centre to assume that its preferences would eventually prevail.
The View from Warsaw
For Poland, the lesson is not that Washington has ceased to matter. Security realities make the United States exceptionally important to Warsaw, and nothing during Xi’s visit changed that.
But alliance relationships do not require pretending that the global economy has remained frozen in 1995.
China matters as a manufacturing centre, market, technological competitor and central participant in global supply chains.
For Warsaw, the relevant distinction is between genuine security vulnerabilities and the broader assumption that economic engagement with China is inherently incompatible with close relations with Washington.
The United States itself competes with China, sanctions Chinese entities, restricts technology transfers and attempts to rebuild strategic supply chains.
And then it negotiates with Beijing.
That is not so much hypocrisy as reality catching up with rhetoric.
Washington itself understands that China is too important to ignore and too deeply embedded in the global economy to isolate cheaply.
Smaller states should at least notice.
Beneath the Bombers
Perhaps the most revealing moment of Xi’s visit lasted only a few seconds.
Two B-1 bombers crossed the sky above Joint Base Andrews.
Trump winced.
Xi did not.
Again, the reaction itself meant nothing.
The enormous diplomatic machinery surrounding it did.
Washington assembled bombers, stealth aircraft, fighter jets, soldiers, bands, salutes and red carpets to demonstrate American power to the Chinese president.
Nobody organizes such a demonstration for a country they consider subordinate.
The age in which Washington could assume that Beijing would eventually accommodate itself to an American-designed order is fading.
The United States can resist that transformation. It can manage it. It can negotiate within it. And it can rebuild parts of the industrial capacity whose disappearance now constrains American policy.
What it cannot do is make China’s accumulated economic and industrial weight disappear through ceremony.
The bombers over Washington were real.
So was the power they represented.
But so was the reason Washington felt compelled to put them in the sky.
Adrian Korczyński, Independent Analyst & Observer on Central Europe and global policy research
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