Analysts will scrutinize every handshake, communiqué, and trade announcement for signs that Washington is either "standing up" to China or "conceding" ground to its principal rival.

But the more important reality is that the summit will likely underscore just how much the balance of leverage has shifted over the past several years—and how little appetite Beijing has for rescuing Washington from the consequences of its own strategic blunders.

The prevailing assumption in Washington remains that China is an aggressive revisionist power poised to overturn the international order through military expansion and economic coercion. Yet the actual picture is considerably more complicated. Beijing's posture today looks less like that of a state eager for global confrontation and more like that of a rising commercial empire patiently exploiting American overextension.

That overextension is now impossible to ignore.

Washington's latest entanglement in Iran has once again demonstrated the limits of American power projection. Years of interventionism, sanctions escalation, proxy commitments, and military signaling have produced precisely what critics of U.S. foreign policy long warned about: another unstable regional crisis with no clear off-ramp and no coherent strategic objective.

And notably, China has shown almost no interest in helping Washington navigate the mess.