MOSCOW BLOG: Trump eats humble pie in Beijing
US President Donald Trump’s trip to Beijing ends today and he has been forced to eat humble pie after coming out of the gate last year with an extremely aggressive policy on China.
If you remember in the heady days of Trump's first term in office we still lived under the pax Americana. Trump launched a trade war with Beijing back then but since he took over just over a year ago, he became a lot more aggressive. Liberation Day tariffs were primarily aimed at Beijing and ended in a nasty showdown that saw Beijing throttle America's supply to critical minerals and rare earth metals. Trump was forced into a humiliating climb down and an agreement to suspend hostilities for a year – a deal that is about to expire.
However, the war in Iran has changed everything. The emperor's clothes have been stripped away, and the myth of US military supremacy has been debunked. Trump cannot win his war in Iran and was in Beijing partly to ask for Xi Jinping's help -- that will almost certainly not be forthcoming, as why should the Chinese help the Americans out of their self-inflicted imbroglio? For his part Xi has been remarkably consistent in his message. He has called for competitive cooperation and an end to the instabilities caused by America's incessant warmongering. The US tone has changed dramatically. Under the Biden administration both former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen were in Beijing rudely lecturing Xi on the needs to end state subsidies to companies and to open the Chinese market to American goods. The former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock went even further by lecturing China on its human rights record at the lectern in Beijing with no regards to diplomacy whatsoever. She ended up being rebuked by the foreign minister in public for her total lack of diplomacy.
That's what makes the tone of Trump's trip to Beijing so remarkable. It's a complete about face. He talked about “my great friends” and the “great nation of China” as he sought commercial deals and help with the Gulf war. For me all this highlights the end of the pax Americana and looking at previous transitions between empires we are now in at least a decade-long period of confusion and instability while we transition to a new regime. A Pax Sinica? “All under heaven” as the Chinese would say? Not necessarily.
Xi is clearly acutely aware of what is going on. He put his finger on it in his opening remarks, telling Trump to his face that he should not fall into the “Thucydides Trap" – a concept in international relations that says when a rising power threatens to displace an established dominant power, the likelihood of conflict between the two increases significantly.
That should be pretty shocking. What Xi just did was openly threaten the US with war if it tries to interfere with China’s reunification with Taiwan. There is no other interpretation of this.
The reporting has all focused on Trump in Beijing (including what sounds like a very yummy Chinese version of humble pie including lobster soup and Beijing roast duck), but putting this story in a wider context, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was also in New Delhi to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the same day. They talked about trade. It’s pretty obvious this was timed to highlight the strength of the BRICS alliance and the weakness of the US position.
And equally poignant, the Kremlin just announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin will be in Beijing too, his first foreign visit this year, maybe next week, to meet with Xi and reaffirm their Friendship pact signed in 2001. The Kremlin and Beijing are ostentatiously rubbing the White House nose in the weakness of its position and the strength of the growing Global South alliance opposing it.
There were other subtle slights. Trump’s visit was reportedly downgraded to a working visit, although its being reported as a more important state visit and there is some confusion over what the official status was. Xi also didn’t come to meet Trump at the airport when he arrived, which is not a slight, but nevertheless, was an honour Xi chose not to confer.
What is interesting diplomatically about the Putin visit is that Russian and Chinese sources are still referring to it as an official visit rather than a full “state visit”, which is still higher than just a working visit. But as Xi and Putin have met 40 times already – by far the most of either’s meetings – protocol nuances have become a little blurry. The last time Putin was in Beijing, Xi didn’t meet him at the airport either, but that meeting was classed as a state visit – the most important category.
The Taiwan war threat should be taken very seriously. While this week was all about diplomacy and trade, in the background is the growing militarisation of the CRINK alliance (China, Russia, Iran and North Korea) and their cooperation to make sure that Iran doesn’t lose its war with America – basically the same set up as Nato’s support of Ukraine against Russia, another war by proxy. The main take out, and what is new, is if the US goes to war with China it will lose.
Happily, despite his tough talk, it appears increasingly clear that Xi is sincere about his talk of “competitive cooperation” and also that he has little intention of forcing the reunification with Taiwan militarily; he wants a peaceful solution by referendum and is prepared to take his time to get there. Nevertheless, like Putin’s insistence of no-Nato for Ukraine, and the decision to invade when he was rebuffed, Xi also just made it clear that he will use the increasingly powerful PLA to force the issue if he has too.
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