Chinese President Xi Jinping never warmed to Barack Obama, whom he found too spartan, principled, and imperious. It was hardly an accident that the Chinese failed to provide a stairway capable of reaching the front door of Air Force One when Obama arrived at the APEC summit in 2016, forcing the sitting president to humiliatingly exit through a fold-down rear service door. And while the Chinese now may be bewildered by how an ostensible great power like the United States could have heaved up a leader as base as Donald Trump, they also comprehend an important aspect of him. After experiencing the garish glitziness of Mar-a-Lago, Xi Jinping immediately understood his guest’s weakness for the affectations of wealth and power.
Trump’s recent trip to China, the highlight of his 12-day tour of Asia last November, was so grand as to be considered a “state-visit plus.” As Air Force One touched down in Beijing, the president and Melania Trump were greeted not only by a proper staircase, but were treated to a full measure of Chinese pomp and ceremony, including a special banquet in the Forbidden City. At a welcome reception at the Great Hall of the People, a Stalinist relic from the era of Sino-society amity in the 1950s, Xi officially greeted his guest with a brace of antiphonal buglers; acres of red carpeting; a sword-wielding drillmaster; two military bands; a goose-stepping honor guard; a phalanx of rouge-cheeked, flag- and flower-waving elementary-school students; and a 21-gun salute from artillery pieces lined up in Tiananmen Square, right where demonstrating students had camped out in 1989.
As Trump and Xi proceeded along the maze of red carpeting, there was no greater visual emblem of the U.S.-China divide than the contrast between Trump’s cotton-candy hair (whose carotene-orange hue appeared to have been color corrected to off-white for the occasion) and the shoe-polish black, lacquered helmet that is Xi Jinping’s tonsorial signature. Always obsessed with appearances, Trump strode, with jaw jutting forward, like a prizefighter trying to play the part of the tough guy as he marches to the ring. As they progressed, Trump made occasional nervous comments, and Xi gave no hint of what was within, allowing only his signature Mona Lisa smile to cross his impassive face. But, then, he and the Chinese government are to transparency what anti-matter is to matter: the very antithesis of the self-indulgent, histrionic, and tweet-crazed Trump. If the latter is the product of American reality-TV kultur, the former is a product of ruthless Leninism and the ancient Chinese legalist philosophical tradition of Han Feizi, who counseled rulers of old: “Be empty, still, and idle, and from your place of darkness observe the defects of others.”
A press briefing unfolded in an ornate salon inside the Great Hall behind two matching lecterns festooned with funereal-like bouquets of flowers arrayed before a frieze of American and Chinese flags. Xi’s remarks included American-style “win-win cooperation” platitudes that took little account of the myriad thorny issues actually dividing the two countries. Trump, too, indulged in similar bromides about how “respective success serves the common interests of both.” It was as if neither leader wanted to publicly touch the hot rails of all that actually divided them.
But what Trump really wanted was assurance from Xi that China would help keep North Korea and its errant leader in check. “The entire civilized world must unite to confront the North Korean menace,” he said in his remarks, stressing it would “require collective action, collective strength, and collective devotion” to solve this intractable challenge. Nowhere did he note that over the past few decades, China has been the Kim dynasty’s greatest enabler.
Donald and Melania Trump visit the Forbidden City with Xi Jinping in Beijing, November 8, 2017; Trump gestures toward Xi as Melania and Xi’s wife, Peng Liyuan look on in the Great Hall of the People, November 9, 2017.
Top, by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters; Bottom, by JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images.
It was a remarkable moment to witness firsthand, having accompanied Trump on his trip. I have covered China summits with presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, when they all sallied forth to Beijing armored with policy studies, cadres of expert advisers, and, crucially, commitments to pursuing democratic principles. But what seemed to animate Trump most was not policy, but the theatrics of the popularity contest he felt thrust upon him, in which his top priority was winning over counterparts to make them like him. “It was red carpet like nobody, I think, has probably ever received,” he warbled towards the end of his trip, clearly ego-gratified by all the superficial pageantry, as if it was the majesty of his being that had precipitated such honors.
It was clear from the moment Trump touched down that the Chinese had recognized in him a man of supreme vanity who would be easily manipulated. It is a psychological syndrome with which they, too, have had no small amount of historical experience. And it is one that makes it possible to understand Trump, even when his actions seem incompressible. In Beijing, as in Washington, Trump’s January 2 tweet taunting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un over the size of his “nuclear button” was variously interpreted as Trumpian umbrage at the imputation that the manhood of an overweight, Oriental potentate had trumped his own. It was also a crass repudiation of that U.S. tradition of presidents refusing to stoop to the same rhetorical level as Pyongyang; another sign of Trump’s propensity to personalize everything; and a demonstration of the shameless way Republican loyalists excuse the president as “Trump being Trump.” But there is another interpretation, one that should trouble Trump’s detractors and supporters alike: Our president’s chest beating is a recognition that his plan to isolate the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has failed, and that he and his administration now find themselves backed into a corner with just two options: A) Eat crow. B) Launch a pre-emptive strike.
Xi Jinping, who was once naïvely seen by Trump as the kind of fellow plutocrat he could beguile into squeezing Kim into submission, has proven a less-than-pliable partner. Making matters worse, South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, is now set to engage in direct talks with the North and has committed to marching together with the North at the Olympic parade, moves that further strain Washington’s already tense relationship with Seoul. (Nonetheless, even as he has charged Moon with trying to appease North Korea, Trump wasted little time in claiming credit for bringing the two sides to the table.)
With his trip to China having produced limited returns and his isolation strategy flailing, Trump now seems to have no choice but to boast of his nuclear arsenal and raise the specter of war. The more ominous danger, however, is that a spurned Trump may feel his manhood so imperiled that he will opt for a pre-emptive military strike. It’s an option that most Washington policy hands understand would be catastrophic. In August, Trump’s now-cashiered strategic adviser, Steve Bannon, blurted out what others within the administration surely recognized, but dared not say: “Forget it,” he told American Prospect. “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about! There’s no military solution here! They got us!”
But Bannon is now an affront to Trump and, in recent talks with Washington officials and cognoscenti, one gets the sense that despite President Moon’s efforts to halt the spiral of rising tensions on the 38th parallel, military options are still far from off the table.
As I watched Trump woo his way across Asia, the biggest question was whether his inexperience would lead him to mistake the pageantry that invariably accompanies such diplomatic visits (no matter whom you are!) as special deference—even as a unique sign of friendship. For what seemed most important to this callow man was to imagine that where all his predecessors had struggled, he alone could seduce other heads of state with his divine deal-making powers—especially Xi on critical issues such as trade, rule of law, and, yes, North Korea. Indeed, his courtship was so ardent, it did not even seem to occur to him that perhaps he himself would end up being taken for a ride. Or, worse, that a shrewd politician like Xi might run the table on him entirely.
Ri Son Gwon, chairman of North Koreas Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland and Cho Myoung-gyon, South Korea’s unification minister, shake hands during a meeting at the Peace House in the village of Panmunjom in Paju, South Korea, January 9, 2018.
From KPPA/Pool/Bloomberg/Getty Images.
Because Xi had already long since nixed taking questions from the press in the Great Hall of the People, once the two leaders had unburdened themselves of their prepared statements, they simply shook hands, turned away from the hundreds of attending journalists, and left. “This is a milestone!” fumed an American correspondent. Trump hadn’t strenuously protested the absence of a Q&A period, and why would he? Not only did Xi deliver the ritual adoration Trump craved, but he eliminated the insubordinate questions from the press that he loathes. Relieved of the confrontational media, raucous demonstrators, tenacious investigators, and the need to constantly defend himself, Trump did seem more composed—even more presidential. How ironic that the leader of the U.S., the most durable democracy on the planet, seemed to feel more at home in the People’s Republic, where the press is largely the megaphone of a Communist Party, than in the free world!
Indeed, Trump’s embrace of Xi, and his unwillingness to engage with Beijing on democratic issues such as human rights, was not surprising, but nonetheless disorienting for anyone accustomed to American presidents in China. When Clinton held his summit in Beijing less than a decade after the 1989 Beijing massacre, he publicly raised the issue of Tiananmen Square with President Jiang Zemin. “I believe, and the American people believe, that the use of force and the tragic loss of life was wrong,” Clinton candidly proclaimed. “If you are so afraid of personal freedom because of the abuse that you limit people’s freedom too much, then you pay.”
Some citizens, who’ve seen the fallout from Trump’s tweets, may be wondering: What damage has a Trump presidency done to the U.S.’s diplomatic aims in China, which go far beyond promoting American values? One could argue that he missed an opportunity to advocate on behalf of the U.S. business community—a key constituency—for the loosening of protectionist measures that shut U.S. investors out of whole sectors of the Chinese economy. He seems unlikely to use his bully pulpit to challenge China’s excessive maritime claims in the South and East China Seas. And now, increasingly petulant that his bromance with Xi hasn’t gone as planned, Trump seems poised to launch a trade war with China, a move that could hurt some sectors of American business, notably agriculture and airlines, as much as it would help others.
No one denies that the U.S.-China playing field is out of level and needs to be re-balanced. But with Trump daily eroding American influence, our ability to counterbalance growing Chinese wealth and power is melting away like a block of ice in the hot sun. The question isn’t simply whether Trump has changed the U.S.-China dynamic (though he has not helped it), but how is China going to re-write the rules? When Xi first ascended to the top of China’s leadership pyramid, in 2012, one of the first things he did was declare “the China Dream,” an expression of his own deep desire to see China restored to greatness. It was also an invitation for China to take a much more active, even aggressive, stance in the world, sometimes even to economically browbeat neighbors or provoke the U.S. and its allies. Xi’s quest for greatness has also led to aggressive expansionism (see the aforementioned South and East China Seas), and a more unyielding posture toward the U.S. and everything for which it has traditionally stood. It has tarred the Western media, civil society, academic freedom, and other liberal ideas as “hostile foreign forces” while unapologetically denying visas to American scholars, journalists, and others whom it finds politically unsavory.
Xi is unabashed in his belief that China will emerge not only as the world’s biggest economy, but as its de facto leader. At his recent 19th Party Congress, he proudly declared that China was globally moving ever “closer to center stage.” While Beijing is selective in its battles and did join in another round of United Nations sanctions against North Korea just before Christmas, Xi is unwilling—and perhaps even unable—to exert the kind of pressure that might actually bring North Korea to heel.
Can the U.S.-China relationship be saved? Sadly, the one area where the two countries were once actively cooperating, namely on climate change, has now been unceremoniously abandoned by Washington, leaving the U.S.-China arch deprived of any keystone feature emphasizing cooperation. Perversely, North Korea’s nuclearization has long presented a perfect joint project for the U.S. and China because we are both manifestly threatened by North Korean nuclear weapons.
These global challenges and others—terrorism and cybercrime, to name a few others—are only worsening, and the world would benefit tremendously if the U.S. and China could find a way to be more collaborative. Alas, Trump’s unpredictability and Xi’s authoritarianism render hope of such collaboration increasingly unlikely. When it comes to formulating sensible policy with this most crucial of nations, the U.S. not only has a China problem, it has a Trump problem. Beleaguered U.S. diplomats now confront a paradox: the impediments to finding a workable China policy remain as much in Washington as Beijing.
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