Two leaders arrive at the negotiating table carrying different burdens but a shared need: Xi Jinping, steward of an economy showing its age, and Donald Trump, a president hemmed in by foreign wars and domestic turbulence, each require a pause in the conflict more than either will openly admit. In the long arc of US-China rivalry, this summit represents not a resolution but a resting point — a moment when mutual exhaustion may accomplish what diplomacy alone could not. The question history will ask is whether what emerges is a genuine architecture of stability or merely the theater of one.