Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing last month confirmed what much of Asia has long suspected.

Instead of any grand deal, there emerged a new diplomatic vocabulary revolving around the forging of a ‘constructive relationship of strategic stability’.

The two nations have accepted that rivalry will continue for the foreseeable future. For the rest of Asia, the situation is now clear: its waiting period is over. Dithering must end, and an era of autonomous statecraft needs to evolve.

The view, forged at the end of the 20^thcentury, that China would eventually be integrated into an American-led international order has been foundering now for many years.

But no Western democracy has yet been able to define exactly what China is. The pigeon- holes of dictatorship and human rights repression no longer hold.

In short, this is a rising superpower offering alternative values and systems of government that are alien to Western concepts, but attractive to much of the developing world.

Trump’s visit brought these truths into focus.

What is unfolding is not partnership, nor a new Cold War, which implies structure, predictability and rules.

This new situation of managed rivalry is fresh, unknown territory where structure will only be forged after time.

Until then, the risk of miscalculation and misinterpretation is high, and most Asian nations sit uncomfortably between the two.

For example, trade between the ten countries of ASEAN and China comprised more than its trade with the US and the European Union combined.Yet while ASEAN’s growing economies rely on the US security umbrella, they also know that American commitment has become conditional, shaped by electoral cycles.

The region needs American security and China trade, but few Asian governments can fully align with one power or can fully afford genuine neutrality.

The region, therefore, needs to evolve into a strategic actor or become furniture moved around in great-power confrontation.

As the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney famously declared at this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) summit in Davos, ‘Middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.’

Vigil needs to be kept in a number of critical areas.

By building military island bases in the South China Sea, China now effectively controls that trade waterway through which passes some $3.4 trillion of global trade annually.

Two ASEAN members, the Philippines and Vietnam, have found themselves on the front lines of Chinese maritime aggression,while three other ASEAN memberscontrol chokepoints between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea such as the Malacca Strait between Malaysia and Singapore and Indonesia’s Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra.

The closure of these straits would spark a crisis for China, striking at the core of its economic model, bringing in energy and shipping out manufacturing. The Strait of Hormuz has shown us how much maritime trade can leverage geopolitical balance.

Similarly, technology, in the form of semiconductors, artificial intelligence and quantum computing, has become an instrument of national power.

Too often, Taiwan is viewed through the prism of Chinese military aggression and its need for American protection. Yet it produces some 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors. Any invasion of Taiwan would seize up the world’s ability to communicate and compute, and cripple China’s economy.

In a similar vein, South Korea, constantly threatened by China’s ally North Korea, supplies 60 per cent of global memory production. Japan oversees indispensable precision manufacturing equipment.

Experts in last month’s Democracy Forum Debate on the US-China relationship agreed that Beijing was decades away from a head-to-head battle with Washington, giving Asia a window to build leverage.

Three principles should now drive regional policy.

Asia should engage both China and the US wherever interests genuinely overlap, such as in trade, climate and financial stability, without accepting either’s framing of the other as an existential enemy.

It should build regional institutions resilient enough to survive fluctuations in American commitment and Chinese coercion.

And Asian governments must invest in domestic resilience, national institution-building, technological capacity, energy security, making Asian states indispensable partners rather than contested terrain.

Trump’s Beijing visit did not resolve the defining contest of this century. But it clarified something of equal importance: Asia is no longer merely the arena in which this struggle unfolds. The region can now determine the terms on which it is conducted.