What Xi Knows That Trump Doesn’t (Francis Fukuyama)

It was both painful and humiliating to watch 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 he has created for himself. Xi, 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 weak response.

And so it was. Trump returned to Washington with little to show for his visit: only two agreements on opening Chinese markets to U.S. products, and no political help in the Middle East. China did agree to buy 200 Boeing aircraft (fewer than expected), but it has failed to follow through on similar announcements in the past. The White House also claimed that China has agreed to purchase $17 billion of agricultural products, but China has not confirmed this. It 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. 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 effused time and again about how beautiful and impressive China is. 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 revels in. Xi, for his part, failed to reciprocate any of these assertions of friendship, saying merely that the United States and China “should be partners and not rivals.”

The most significant issue arising out of the summit was Taiwan. Trump had held up a $14 billion arms package voted by Congress in advance of the summit, and there is no indication delivery will resume anytime soon. Xi told Trump that future relations with Washington would be conditioned on the level of U.S. support for the island. A light went on in Trump’s head that Taiwan would be a “very good negotiating chip” in trade negotiations with Beijing. Trump made other dismissive remarks about the island, noting that “we’re supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war,” and repeating his assertion that Taiwan has stolen semiconductor chip technology from the United States.

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 its defense.

Donald Trump is a politician who is unable to see the world in anything but 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,” who was in any case “a divider.” The Chinese media has been talking for some time about the United States as a “declining power”; Xi brought it up with Trump by expressing hope that their countries could avoid the “Thucydides trap” if a declining America ceded power gracefully to a rising China. Trump immediately interpreted this as Xi agreeing with him that America was in decline under Joe Biden, but that 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 the opposite: American decline is a direct product of Trump’s rise since 2016. It is as if Trump has decided to do everything in his power to weaken the United States vis-à-vis China. He has polarized an already polarized country like no previous president; he has cut funding for basic scientific research and attacked American universities which were the best in the world; he has gotten the United States involved in an unnecessary war in the Middle East that has depleted stocks of advanced American weapons; he and his colleagues have openly stated that their domestic opponents, the Democrats, pose a far bigger challenge to the future of the United States than either China or Russia.

Trump has also systematically sought to undermine the U.S. alliance system, disparaging allies while heaping tariffs on even the closest traditional friends, and threatening to grab territory from Denmark, a loyal NATO ally. He claims that the United States under his leadership is now respected as never before, when something close to the opposite is true: both friends and rivals agree 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 laughing stock.

Trump has made Xi Jinping’s life enormously easy in a way that was reflected in his behavior during the summit. America under Trump is engaged in such a determined process of self-harm that China does not really have to do much but sit back and watch it unfold. Trump predicted that China would not attack Taiwan while he was president. 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 America finally gets a president who wants to reverse that trajectory.