On: Trump-XI summit aims to head off an AI arms race

Treaties between giants have a familiar floor plan. At Tordesillas in 1494, two crowns drew a line across a world neither had seen and called the partition peace; the peoples living on it were not consulted, being reckoned part of the estate. As at Tordesillas, so in 2026.

Two sovereigns meet to head off a race for the new power. I do not doubt the sincerity; I have read too many communiqués to trust it. What endured from Reagan and Gorbachev was not rapport - rapport evaporates with its owners - but the inspection regime raised afterward: the counting, the verification, the institution that outlived the handshake. A covenant is architecture. Friendship is paint.

Here is the difficulty. Missiles can be counted. Foundations cannot. The new power is not a warhead in a silo, visible from above; it is poured nightly in private, in structures whose blueprints are themselves secrets. What does one inspect? Who inspects? The treaty will limit what is declared. Nothing limits what is built below the declared ground.

Mark, too, who sits at the table and who is the table. Two states, holding between them command of the most consequential instrument since gunpowder, undertake to settle its governance; the rest of the world is not a party but the terrain. The Congress of Vienna mapped Europe without asking Europe. The map held for a hundred years, and every year of it was mortgaged to the mapmakers.

Who answers for a race suspended between two, when the capacity to resume it belongs to neither’s successor? The summit will produce a communiqué; excavators in a century will find the ceremonial stone at the surface and the true foundation elsewhere. Peace between the strong is not restraint. It is a deed of partition.