U.S. President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping might refer in their talks to a basic accounting formula that former Chinese party and state leader Jiang Zemin once cited in an exchange with Bill Clinton as a sign of economic liberalization: assets equal liabilities plus equity. In geopolitical terms, this equation is understood as suggesting that what one side sees as an advantage can become a burden for the other, and that in conflicts assets and liabilities can easily be mistaken for one another.
Trump, along with America’s Arab allies and partners, would in this sense have viewed themselves as mutually reinforcing strategic supports, but Iran would have shifted this relationship so that they no longer regarded each other as advantages, but as reciprocal liabilities.
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