Trump in China: American ‘decline’ on display?

“He came, he saw, he left without much to show for it,” said David Smith in The Guardian. Throughout his state visit to Beijing two weeks ago, President Trump slathered compliments on Xi Jinping, praising China’s president-for-life as a “great leader” who is “very tall.” But Trump’s flattery got him nowhere. After 43 hours, he flew home having secured only the “vague outlines” of a few commercial deals, no agreement to slow the AI arms race, and no help on Iran, which China could pressure to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. In fairness, Trump did extract a promise from Xi to send him seeds from some rosebushes he admired.

Trump reciprocated with a far more valuable gift, said The Economist: doubt over U.S. support for Taiwan. Despite a Reagan-era commitment to never negotiate with China over arms sales to the island nation — which Beijing considers a rogue province — Trump said he was delaying approval of a $14 billion weapons sale to Taiwan, calling it a “good negotiating chip” in talks with Beijing. As for America’s long-standing posture of strategic ambiguity on whether U.S. forces would defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack, Trump told reporters on the flight home: “The last thing we need right now is a war that’s 9,500 miles away.”

“Not so fast,” said Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal. Trump says a lot of things, particularly in the “afterglow” of a state visit. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio quickly clarified that our Taiwan policy is “unchanged,” and U.S. law requires Washington to give Taiwan the means to defend itself. But the change in China’s posture was unmistakable. An emboldened Xi warned of looming “clashes and even conflicts” over Taiwan and cautioned Trump to avoid the “Thucydides trap,” whereby a declining power’s fear of a rising one draws both into war. Once the classical reference was explained to our president, Trump insisted Xi had been slighting America’s decline under “Sleepy Joe Biden.” But Xi’s meaning was plain, as is China’s new “confidence.”

It’s easy to overlearn the lessons of history, said Lydia Polgreen in The New York Times. In his chronicle of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.), the ancient Greek historian Thucydides charts the violence that erupted when Athens — an ambitious power much like Xi’s China — “challenged the pre-eminence of Sparta.” That scenario has repeated throughout history, “with the ambition and aggression of the challenger almost always ending in bloodshed.” But the current threat to the U.S.-led global order is not China so much as the chaos Trump has unleashed with his bullying of allies, his self-sabotaging tariffs, and his epic miscalculation in Iran. “America is overthrowing America.”

Xi should check his hubris, said Ross Douthat, also in the Times. For the record, Sparta defeated upstart Athens in the Peloponnesian War, and the post-Covid U.S. economy has actually outpaced China’s in recent years. Longer term, China’s “crashing” birth rate — now one child per woman and falling — will make it “incredibly difficult” to sustain economic growth. As for the Thucydides trap, “China shouldn’t worry,” said Paul Krugman in his Substack newsletter. America is declining, but we’re not about to “lash out at a rising China” while we’re led by a self-absorbed, “pathetic” president whose main message to Americans, upon returning home, was that Xi has nice ballrooms and therefore he deserves one, too. If you want classical analogies, “think of America right now as the Roman Empire under Caligula, although Caligula didn’t do anything like as much damage.”

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