The World Changed in Beijing. Here’s What That Means for East Asia.

Introducing Dragonometry — and the argument that the era we thought we were living in just ended

Let me begin with a confession.

For a good part of my professional life I have written analysis for institutional investors — people who need to act on geopolitical insight, not merely collect it. That discipline trains one out of certain habits that afflict a great deal of commentary on China: the tendency to mistake narrative momentum for structural logic, to declare turning points that are actually continuations, and above all, to frame the relationship between China and the United States as a game that someone is winning or losing, with the score updated weekly.

I am launching Dragonometry because something has genuinely changed in the global political landscape — and because I think the dominant frameworks for understanding it are falling short for the people who need to understand it most.

This first piece makes the case. It is long. It is specific. …