Transcription
It was both painful and humiliating to watch the media coverage of Donald Trump's recent visit to Beijing because it amply demonstrated America's decline as a great power relative to China. Prior to the summit, expectations were very low. Trump was in a weakened position, beset by inflation and declining popularity while seeking Chinese help in getting out of the Iran trap that he had created for himself. She, on the other hand, had forced Trump to back down in his trade war the year before with China showing strong export growth in the face of Washington's relatively weak response. And so it was.
Trump returned to Washington with very little to show for his visit. Only two agreements on opening Chinese markets to US products and no political help in the Middle East. China did agree to buy 200 Boeing aircraft, fewer than expected, but it failed to follow through on similar promises in the past. The White House also claimed that China had agreed to purchase 17 billion in agricultural products, but China has not confirmed this. This did not prevent Trump from claiming that they did "great trade deals" and that the meeting was "a great success."
It was the optics of the meeting that demonstrated how far Trump has fallen in Chinese eyes. Trump was not met at the airport by Xi, but by a lower-ranking official. He was seated on the podium in a chair that made him look smaller than Xi, a slight that could have been avoided had Trump's State Department not sidelined the protocol officials whose job it is to look after these things. The worst part of the visit was Trump's constant sycophancy, exclaiming that Xi was a great leader, really a friend, someone from central casting. He fawned again and again about how beautiful and impressive China was. As in previous interactions with various dictators, Trump seems to have thought that they would be impressed by the same kind of praise and flattery that he himself reveled in. Xi, for his part, failed to reciprocate any of these assertions of friendship, stating merely that the United States and China should be partners and not rivals.
The most significant issue arising out of the summit was obviously Taiwan. Taiwan had just, uh, been promised a 14 billion arms package voted on by Congress earlier in the year in advance of the summit. Uh, it was held up, and there's no indication that delivery will resume anytime soon. Xi told Trump that the future relations with Washington would be conditioned on the level of US support for the island. A light seems to have gone on in Trump's head that Taiwan would be what he called a "very good negotiating chip" in trade negotiations with Beijing. In other words, you trade an ally's security for economic advantage. Trump made other dismissive remarks about the island, and he so repeated his assertion that Taiwan had stolen semiconductor technology from the United States, something that is simply not true. His failure to say anything about Taiwan's security stood in sharp contrast to Joe Biden's clear assertion that the United States would act in the defense of that country.
Donald Trump is a politician who is unable to see the world in anything other than personal and self-interested terms. He was furious after his return at the suggestion that Obama was treated with more respect than he was, using the occasion to assert that, "Nobody respects Obama," and that in any case, Obama was a divider. The Chinese media has been talking for some time about the United States being a declining power. Xi apparently brought this up with Trump directly by expressing the hope that the two countries could avoid the Thucydides Trap, in which a declining America tried to block the rise of a rising China rather than seeding power and world leadership gracefully. Trump immediately interpreted Xi as agreeing with him that America was in decline under Joe Biden, but it was great again now that he was president. As usual, Trump reserves his greatest anger and hostility for his domestic opponents and not the leaders of the world's great dictatorships.
The truth of the matter, which the Chinese understand very well, is something of the opposite. American decline is a direct product of Trump's rise since 2016. It is as if Trump had decided to do everything in his power to weaken the United States vis-à-vis China. He has polarized an already polarized country as no previous president. He's cut funding for basic scientific research and attacked American universities, which are the best in the world. He has gotten the United States involved in an unnecessary war in the Middle East and has depleted stocks of advanced American munitions which could be useful in a conflict in East Asia. He and his colleagues have openly stated that their domestic opponents, the Democrats, are a far greater threat to the future of the United States than either China or Russia.
Trump has also systematically sought to undermine the US alliance system, disparaging allies while heaping tariffs on even the closest traditional friends and threatening to grab territory from Denmark, Greenland, a loyal NATO ally. He claims that the United States under his leadership is now respected as never before. Actually, something close to the opposite is the truth. There is agreement among America's friends and rivals that the United States has become something of a rogue state that is contributing to global instability and disorder, as well as something of a laughingstock. Trump has made Xi Jinping's life enormously easier in a way that was reflected in his behavior during the summit. America under Trump has been engaged in such a determined process of self-harm that China does not really need to do anything other than sit back and watch it unfold.
Trump predicted that China would not attack Taiwan while he was the president, and he may be right about this. Xi does not want to get in the way of a declining United States. But he may be forced to act quickly if the United States finally gets a president who wants to reverse this long-term trajectory.
Thanks for listening. Please subscribe to the Frankly Fukuyama YouTube channel. You can also see the written version of this on the Frankly Fukuyama blog on American Purpose, which is part of the persuasion family of online media. Thanks a lot for listening.