Hosting President Donald Trump on a state visit to China in November 2017, President Xi Jinping threw out the red carpet. He did so both figuratively and literally. Trump was subject to a lavish display of deference and praise. He was feted by Chinese media and Communist Party activists. But these theatrics were not motivated by Xi’s personal affection for the American president. Instead, they represented a bold effort to stroke Trump’s ego and earn his enabling of Xi’s foreign policy agenda.

To Trump’s credit, he showed only a temporary impulse to provide Xi with policy rewards in return for the Chinese leader’s pomp. On defense, trade, and diplomacy, the first Trump administration abandoned the Obama administration’s thinly veiled appeasement of Beijing, instead setting the United States on a necessary multi-generational struggle to counter China’s ambition for global hegemony. Xi’s ultimate ambition is to supplant the U.S. democratic capitalist rule of law-based international system with a Chinese-led order of feudal mercantilism. That is to say, an order in which prosperity, peace, and political sovereignty exist only at the whims of the Chinese Communist Party.