Iran is standing defiant in the face of Trump and Israel's threats, leaving Trump gambling the entire US economy and its global strategic standing on conjuring up a decisive "win" over Iran — however deceitful and Pyrrhic that "win" might prove to be.

Trump has now arrived for the summit in China (reportedly with little groundwork preparation ahead of the visit). Possibly he relies on his usual hubristic notion — that China needs the US more than the US needs China — and he will tell Beijing that "you (Xi) have to instruct Iran" that time is moving on, and that it should capitulate to the US.

Well that's not going to happen. China supports Iran's fight for sovereignty and shares with Russia the Iranian objective of seeing the US gone from the Middle East. They want instead a Gulf-led security architecture to replace the American one. Moscow concurs.

Maybe Xi — in politest of language, of course — will tell Trump, rather, that it is Washington that should concede to Iran. The longer he delays, the harder any US course correction will prove to be.

In any event, despite the innate Trumpian hubris, the US President arrives in Beijing bereft of "big wins" (if Venezuela is counted as a gimmick, rather than a strategic victory). Contrarily and more significantly, Beijing understands that the US hovers at the brink of an economic inflationary catastrophe, whereas China largely is insulated from the coming global energy shock and is in price deflation, rather than experiencing inflation.

Put bluntly, there is almost nothing that Xi wants from the US, but in the interests of harmony, they may buy some soya beans (to save US farmers) and perhaps some airplanes. (Even though soya beans are not really required by China which has been purchasing them easily from Brazil).

Trump has taken with him to China an entourage of US oligarchs — presumably in the expectation that China will give him business valued in several "billions"; but China's response may be somewhat scant. They are angry, reportedly, at the games the US Treasury Secretary has been playing with sanctions on Chinese firms, the seizure of Chinese oil tankers, and the obvious attempt by Trump to squeeze China out from the Western Hemisphere.

What looms in the backdrop however, is darker: America's collapsing standing as the unipolar hegemon — and the consequential global instability. The Iran war has provided the world with an object lesson of a major world power stuck in a conceptual rut from the Cold War era. One that refused to see the writing on the wall of a tectonic change that required it to "move on" from its "end of history" complacency, though all the signs of a shift to another "way of war" had been present since early this century.

The turning point came with the abundance of cheap and easily available tech components.