Feel strongly about these letters, or any other aspects of the news? Share your views by emailing us your Letter to the Editor at [email protected] or filling in this Google form. Submissions should not exceed 400 words.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. This maxim, attributed to French emperor Napoleon, has been applied to Sino-US relations at a time when the United States seems unable to secure an off-ramp from the Iran war.

Yet this narrative, promoted by some media outlets, betrays a rigid zero-sum world view that Beijing has repeatedly rejected. It is a dangerous oversimplification that risks triggering the very Thucydides’ trap the world’s two largest economies must steer clear of.

US President Donald Trump’s military interventions in Venezuela and Iran have drawn warnings of international law violation. With no end in sight to the Iran war, Trump looks increasingly like a rider unable to dismount a tiger.

Among ordinary Chinese, from taxi drivers to retirees in parks, this has sparked talk of li beng yue huai: the collapse of ritual and music, literally, and of the shared norms that keep civilisations from plunging into chaos.

Chinese President Xi Jinping also expressed the sentiment during his meeting with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez in Beijing on April 14, when he described the international order as li beng yue huai. Xi also said: “How a country treats international law and the international order reflects its world view, its vision of order, its values and its sense of responsibility.”