The world’s top two economies are devolving, and there is a desperate need to rebuild ties, both politically and economically with the rest of the world as stakeholders. To that point, a carefully orchestrated meeting between Xi Jinping and Joe Biden at the APEC Summit was held on November 17 in San Francisco, and the world now wonders what difference it made. If China and the USA continue to separate, the global economy will fragment – and this will inevitably lead to slower growth and more inequality, and geopolitical instability. In the worst case, the spiraling events could potentially cause a true world war. On this episode of STRAT the hosts see the threat of this divergence from a multi-polarity norm, per their previous discussions, as having potentially catastrophic consequences. Hope is that Xi considers that he has miscalculated. Mark Mansfield and Hal Kempfer discuss this and more in examining what is the biggest threat to the global order since the end of the Cold War.