The meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in South Korea was not about tariffs or soybeans. It was about power, and the quiet admission by both leaders that their nations have reached the outer edges of what coercion can achieve.

After six years of escalating confrontation, the world’s two dominant powers have glimpsed the limits of their strength and the costs of overreach. The result is not yet peace but the first hint of detente in a new age of rivalry.

Trump called the meeting a: “12 out of 10.” Xi described it as: “a reassuring pill.” Behind those theatrics lay a simple truth: both men need a pause.

China’s export controls on rare earths and America’s tariffs on Chinese goods have forced this first glimpse of a possible future detente. Beijing will now delay its mineral restrictions for a year, while Washington will cut tariffs from 57% to roughly 47% and shelve a threatened 100% levy. Each side gives a little, but gains breathing space to manage internal strains.

For Xi, this is a recognition that China’s rare-earth dominance has limits. For Trump, it is a recognition that Western chip dominance also has limits. Both nations will invest billions of dollars in weaning themselves off dependency on the other – and as that happens, the leverage they can exert on each other will also lessen.

The deeper meaning of this truce lies in what it concedes: that the age of unipolar command is over. The United States retains unmatched technological and military reach, but its leverage is constrained by domestic politics, fiscal limits, and fatigue at decades of exporting its military and trade power. China has industrial scale and centralised control, but faces demographic decline, capital flight, and slowing economic growth. Each can exploit these weaknesses to further exhaust the other, but neither can do so sufficiently to attain dominance.

That equilibrium, forced by this exhaustion, may be a very stabilising thing for the world. History’s great detentes – from Nixon’s outreach to Mao in 1972 to Reagan’s thaw with Gorbachev in the 1980s – were born not of goodwill but of similar exhaustion.

If this is indeed the beginning of a period of mutually forced restraint, and that holds, we may be entering a new cold peace – a world in which Washington and Beijing coexist uneasily but accept each other’s permanence. The language of winning will persist, but the calculus of power is shifting from dominance to endurance. As neither empire can remake the other, both must now learn to live with the balance they have created.

For more than a decade, the contest between America and China has defined global politics. The irony is that their first act of restraint – this modest and reversible truce – may prove the most consequential. When power meets its own limits, diplomacy begins.