On the morning of 14 May 2026, Air Force One landed at Beijing Capital International Airport for the first state visit of an American president to the People's Republic of China since November 2017. The president stepped down the stairs onto a red carpet. He shook the hands of the Chinese receiving delegation. He drove into the city. The agenda of the two days of meetings that began the next morning ran to thirty-seven separate items. The published highlights, in the briefing papers released to the international press, were trade, the rare-earth supply chains that feed the global semiconductor industry, advanced-chip export controls, Taiwan, the Strait of Hormuz, the Iran war, artificial intelligence regulation, and the global agricultural and energy commodity trade.

The arrangement the two presidents were arriving to negotiate had a name in the previous century. The British and Russian Empires had called it the Great Game.

The Great Game was the strategic rivalry between the British Empire and the Russian Empire over central Asia, the buffer states between Russian Siberia and British India, from approximately the 1810s to 1907. At its widest the contest covered Persia, Afghanistan, the khanates of central Asia, Tibet, Xinjiang, the Caucasus, and the approaches to the Indian frontier. Officers of the two empires, often disguised, mapped the passes, bribed the khans, and competed for the loyalty of cities whose names most Britons and Russians would never hear: Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand, Herat, Khorasan, Lhasa. The Great Game produced extensive literature (Rudyard Kipling's Kim), at least two formal wars (the First and Second Anglo-Afghan Wars), and the chronic possibility of a third.

In 1904 Britain and France signed the Entente Cordiale, ending several centuries of Anglo-French rivalry. In 1905 Russia was defeated by Japan at the Battle of Tsushima and immediately faced its own constitutional revolution. The Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Izvolsky, appointed in 1906, was a reformer who wanted to reset relations with London. The British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, in office since December 1905, agreed. King Edward VII, an Anglophile cousin of the Tsar, offered diplomatic cover. Across 1906 and 1907 the British ambassador to Saint Petersburg, Sir Arthur Nicolson, and Izvolsky negotiated a multi-track convention.

On 31 August 1907, in Saint Petersburg, they signed it. The Anglo-Russian Convention was a single document with three substantive sections, each covering a third country whose government had not been at the table.

Persia was divided into three zones. The north, including Isfahan, Tabriz, and Tehran, became a Russian sphere of influence. The south-east, especially Kerman, Sistan, and Baluchistan, became a British sphere. The middle was declared neutral. Persia was in the second year of its Constitutional Revolution, and the Persian parliament, the Majlis, was not informed before the convention was signed. The convention specifically refused to consult the Persian government. The neutral middle would, in 1908, be the location of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company concession that became, after 1935, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company that Mohammed Mossadegh nationalised in 1951, that the Central Intelligence Agency and the British Secret Intelligence Service together overthrew in Operation Ajax in 1953, that produced the Iran the Islamic Revolution overthrew in 1979, that is fighting the United States in May 2026.

Afghanistan was placed in the British sphere. Russia recognised that London had the dominant interest in Kabul. Britain in turn promised not to annex Afghan territory, and agreed that Russia could communicate with Afghan officials on commercial matters. The Afghan emir, Habibullah Khan, was not consulted.

Tibet, for the first time in modern European diplomacy, was acknowledged to be under "Chinese suzerainty." Both empires promised to refrain from direct dealings with Lhasa. The 13th Dalai Lama, exiled in Mongolia at the time, was not consulted. China was not consulted either, but Beijing was pleased.

The convention had a fourth feature, less explicit and more important than any of the three named. By dividing the third world between them, Britain and Russia were freeing each other to focus on a fourth party. That fourth party was Germany. The British and Russian general staffs began, in late 1907, the coordination that would produce the Triple Entente in 1907-1908 and the Allied alliance that fought the First World War. The Convention of 31 August 1907 was the document on which the alliance system of 1914 rested.

Seven years and three days after the Saint Petersburg signature, on 3 August 1914, Britain and Russia were at war with Germany together.

The 2026 agenda in Beijing is multi-track. The American negotiating priorities, briefed to the Wall Street Journal and the South China Morning Post in advance of the summit, are: a rare-earth supply guarantee that allows continued US semiconductor manufacture; Chinese movement on Iran (China buys 90 percent of Iranian oil exports and could, if it chose, close Iran's economy in a week); a softening of Chinese pressure on Taiwan; and a bilateral artificial-intelligence framework that would govern how the two largest AI economies handle frontier systems. The Chinese priorities are mirror images: a roll-back of US restrictions on advanced semiconductor exports; American restraint on arms sales to Taiwan; political guarantees against Taiwanese formal independence; and a bilateral trade architecture that would manage the global market for rare earths, agricultural products, aerospace, and energy.

None of the countries the United States and China will be discussing are in the room. Iran will not be in the room. Taiwan will not be in the room. The Philippines will not be in the room. The European Union will not be in the room. Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia, India, the Gulf states, the African oil and rare-earth producers from Niger to the Democratic Republic of the Congo: none in the room.

Iran was the country in the room least, and most consequentially, in 1907. The Anglo-Russian Convention put Iran into a position from which it could not extract itself for the next century. The neutral zone allowed Britain to develop the oil concession that became the modern Iranian state's principal economic asset. The Persian Constitutional Revolution, the 1953 coup, the 1979 revolution, the 1979-81 hostage crisis, the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, the 2002 axis-of-evil speech, the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2018 American withdrawal from it, and the 2026 war that is now in its tenth week are all, in different ways, the continuing legacy of an agreement signed in Saint Petersburg in 1907 by two men whose primary interest was Germany.

The 2026 question is what the equivalent fourth party is.

Britain and Russia in 1907 thought they were ending a rivalry. They were also setting up a new alliance against a third great power they could see was rising. The United States and China in 2026 think they are ending a rivalry. The two countries that the United States and China both currently regard as the next rising threat are India and, in a different sense, themselves: each is the other's primary frontier-AI competitor.

In 1907 the third party was named Germany and the convention took seven years to mature into war. The 2026 convention is being signed in May. There is no requirement that it take seven years.

The Great Game ended in 1907. The new Great Game just began.