After years of casting China as an economic adversary and political foil, Donald Trump is now extending diplomatic courtesies to Xi Jinping — a shift that places one of history's most consequential bilateral relationships at a new and uncertain crossroads. Whether born of strategic wisdom, political calculation, or changing circumstance, the gesture reminds us that in great-power relations, the distance between confrontation and engagement is often shorter than the rhetoric suggests. The world watches to see whether warmer words will yield substantive change, or whether the underlying competit