Biden just gives a press conference like, “We would like to thank our comrade President Xi for showing us that there are viable alternatives to liberal democracy, and more efficacious paradigms of development than the neoliberal model we’ve been pushing. We would like to congratulate President Xi on ending abject poverty in China, and for his innovative, forward-looking Belt-And-Road Initiative; we would like to join in helping to develop the over-exploited ex-colonial states we damaged through centuries of merciless pillage and racist imperialist programs. Let’s all join forces and start working to mitigate the harm we’ve done in the past, and start building inroads to a sustainable and just future.”

That’s literally all it would take. And it would be objectively the right thing to do. And yet the world is in such a state of imposed misery that this seems like the most far-fetched reality I can possibly imagine. It’s sad.