I’ve just sent out a piece called The Hug and the Circumpunct: The US, China, and Russia. I wrote it on the back of speeches I gave to HSBC in China and to a group called CEO in Washington, DC, as well as from conversations with Chinese and American business leaders and policymakers.
I’ve seen all the press coverage on the Trump-Xi Summit. The journalists are focused on old-fashioned deals like sales of planes and chips. But they missed the larger story entirely.
There is immense symbolic significance in the leaders meeting at the Temple of Heaven. Rather than a signing ceremony, China opted for something mythic because this isn’t about a transaction or a contract. It’s about allowing for humanity to make a civilizational step change. If it works, the White House will need the new ballroom for celebratory state dinners. If it doesn’t, it’s going to need the upgraded Sit Room (which is really what the new “ballroom” is) for managing a war with weapons that can end humanity in a heartbeat.
This moment is about heartware. We are upgrading our hardware. With it comes the power to light the world or plunge it into darkness. We are upgrading our software. With it comes AI and supercomputing that may soon outthink and outperform us all, regardless of nationality. What we have not yet upgraded is our heartware (see my Substack on Heartware here) — the inner operating system of humanity – with the meaning, empathy, wisdom, and moral imagination that must match these god-like powers of creation and destruction.
That is exactly what we are witnessing right now. So, instead of thinking in terms of who won and who lost the Trump-Xi meeting, we should be thinking about the Win: Win here for humanity. By remaining stuck in the Win: Lose axis or the Right: Left axis, we miss the opportunity to join the new Axis Mundi that the superpowers are trying to establish. That evolves around the realization that we are on the brink of
