"China could demand that future U.S. presidents issue similar warnings to Taiwanese leaders about independence and consult Beijing on arms sales" [consult Beijing on arms sales]
This quote directly names the ratchet mechanism: concessions extracted from one administration become binding precedents that constrain successors, illustrating how summit diplomacy is used to institutionalize erosion of alliance commitments.
Reasoning from this article
The article describes a deliberate Chinese strategy of using bilateral summits not to resolve disputes but to extract precedent-setting concessions. Each concession redefines 'normal' U.S. behavior, making future rollback politically costly. This dynamic—using great-power diplomacy as a norm-setting tool rather than a conflict-resolution tool—is generalizable beyond Taiwan to any alliance relationship where one party has asymmetric interest in the outcome and the other values the bilateral relationship broadly.