The photograph released on X shows two men in dark suits at a mahogany table in JPMorgan Chase’s New York headquarters: Scott Bessent, former hedge fund chief turned Treasury Secretary, and He Lifeng, the engineer-bureaucrat who runs China’s economic apparatus. The caption speaks of “focused, fulsome and constructive talks” on AI, tariffs, and critical minerals ahead of the Trump-Xi summit. But the image captures something older and more revealing than diplomacy — it captures the theater of necessity. Two nuclear-armed economies, each dependent on the other’s markets and materials, performing the rituals of cooperation while systematically dismantling the architecture of interdependence. This is not negotiation. This is the choreography of decoupling. The Signal What most coverage misses is the asymmetry of urgency. Bessent arrives with a balance sheet problem: the United States runs a goods trade deficit with China that exceeded $279 billion in 2025, even after three years of tariffs that...