Two encounters: auguries for the future

This weekend President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China will hold their first summit. The meeting, in the 200 acre private Annenberg estate in California, is the first since the Chinese President took office. It is expressly designed to be informal and to enable the two men to get to know each other, as well as allowing them, their ministers and senior officials to consider the trade, economic and security issues that divide and unite the world’s two most powerful nations.

In most respects, the two-day meeting is evocative of the great strategic encounters of the past that shaped the modern world. From the latter part of the Second World War on, and throughout the Cold War, such summits evidenced the way the world was divided, establishing the fault lines and the policies, until the US emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union as the world’s only superpower.

Since then much has changed, new economic powers have emerged and China’s peaceful rise has