The Theater of Two Great Powers

Beijing and Washington are both engaged in a kind of geopolitical theater — announcements designed to signal strength at a moment when the instruments of actual influence are increasingly blunted.

By Moemedi Michael Poncanaglobal3-minute read20 May 2026☆ Save ↗ Share ⎙ Print

Within the span of a single news cycle on 20 May 2026, two announcements arrived that, taken together, tell a story neither of their issuers likely intended. According to reports citing Yonhap and corroborated across regional wire services, Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to visit North Korea as early as next week — the first such visit since 2019. Hours later, US President Donald Trump declared that America was "freeing Cuba." Neither claim can withstand much pressure.

The Xi visit, should it proceed, is not a diplomatic breakthrough. Beijing and Pyongyang have been nominal allies since the Cold War alliance treaty of 1961. Xi has met Kim Jong Un multiple times, most recently in Dandong in 2023. What the visit signals is continuity, not new architecture. North Korea serves a specific function in Beijing's strategic calculus: a buffer state, a testing ground for ballistic technology that complicates US military planning in the region, and a reputational liability the Chinese leadership has learned to manage rather than resolve. There will be banquets, there will be handshakes, and there will be no meaningful change in the relationship's structure. The Chinese foreign ministry, when it speaks on the matter, will use language of "traditional friendship" and "strategic coordination." What it will not say is that Beijing has any real leverage over Pyongyang's nuclear program — because it demonstrably does not.

Trump's Cuba declaration is a different kind of theater, but equally transparent in its mechanics. The US embargo on Cuba has been official Washington policy since 1962. Sixty-four years of sanctions have not toppled the Cuban government, not because the embargo was never tried seriously, but because it was tried relentlessly and produced no regime change. Calling the continued enforcement or modification of that policy "freedom" requires a very particular kind of amnesia. The announcement serves an audience — domestic, electoral, a political performance — and has virtually nothing to do with conditions on the ground in Havana or the wishes of the Cuban people. The phrase "we're freeing Cuba" is a campaign cadence dressed as foreign policy.

What connects these two performances is more instructive than what divides them. Both Washington and Beijing are, in the spring of 2026, managing the perception of strength rather than its substance. The US is announcing it will free a country it could not coerce into submission across six decades. China is reaffirming an alliance with a nuclear-armed state that has, on multiple occasions, conducted weapons tests that ran directly counter to Beijing's expressed preferences in multilateral forums. In neither case is the announcement the beginning of a new policy. It is the continuation of an old one, wrapped in the language of decisive action.

The structural reality is that both great powers are operating in a geopolitical environment where their tools produce diminishing returns. American sanctions have failed to isolate Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba. Chinese diplomatic goodwill has failed to restrain North Korea's weapons program. The instruments haven't worked, but the habit of deploying them hasn't broken. What we're watching is not statesmanship but repetition — the same playbook, with higher production values.

This matters for a specific reason: the countries caught between these two great powers — the states of Southeast Asia, the Gulf, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America — are not passive observers. They are drawing their own conclusions about which commitments are worth banking and which are performance. When Beijing announces a summit with Pyongyang, they note that no Chinese pressure has stopped a single North Korean test. When Washington announces the freeing of Cuba, they note that no administration in sixty years has succeeded in changing that country's government. The audience for great power theater is shrinking, and the actors have not yet noticed.

What remains genuinely uncertain is whether either of this week's announcements signals a shift underneath the performance — whether Trump's Cuba framing accompanies a substantive policy change, or whether Xi's North Korea visit involves actual negotiation over arms or energy. The sources do not yet confirm the substance of what will be discussed. What is confirmed is the form: great powers speaking loudly, with less and less evidence that anyone is carrying a big stick.

The desk noted that both the Xi visit and the Trump Cuba statement received blanket coverage across wire services; few outlets examined the gap between the announcement language and the structural constraints both governments face. Monexus attempts to close that gap.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

https://t.me/bricsnews
https://t.me/wfwitness
https://t.me/bricsnews