{"id":39487,"date":"2018-05-23T14:30:08","date_gmt":"2018-05-23T04:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=39487"},"modified":"2018-05-23T14:40:40","modified_gmt":"2018-05-23T04:40:40","slug":"the-world-according-to-trump-and-xi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-world-according-to-trump-and-xi\/","title":{"rendered":"The world according to Trump and Xi"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

The world\u2019s leading democracy, the United States, is looking increasingly like the world\u2019s biggest and oldest surviving autocracy, China. By pursuing aggressively unilateral policies that flout broad global consensus, President Donald Trump effectively justifies his Chinese counterpart Xi\u00a0Jinping\u2019s longtime defiance of international law, exacerbating already serious risks to the rules-based world order.<\/p>\n

China is aggressively pursuing its territorial claims in the South China Sea\u2014including by militarising disputed areas and pushing its borders far out into international waters\u2014despite an international arbitral ruling invalidating them. Moreover, the country has weaponised transborder river flows<\/a> and used trade as an instrument of geoeconomic coercion<\/a> against countries that refuse to toe its line.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0US has often condemned these actions. But, under Trump, those condemnations have lost credibility, and not just because they are interspersed with praise for\u00a0Xi, whom Trump has called \u2018terrific<\/a>\u2019 and \u2018a great gentleman<\/a>\u2019. In fact, Trump\u2019s behaviour has heightened the sense of US\u00a0hypocrisy, emboldening China further in its territorial and maritime revisionism in the Indo-Pacific region.<\/p>\n

To be sure, the\u00a0US has long pursued a unilateralist foreign policy, exemplified by George\u00a0W. Bush\u2019s 2003\u00a0invasion of Iraq and Barack Obama\u2019s 2011\u00a0overthrow of Muammar el-Qaddafi\u2019s regime in Libya. Although Trump has not (yet) toppled a regime, he has taken the approach of assertive unilateralism several steps further, waging a multi-pronged assault on the international order.<\/p>\n

Almost immediately upon entering the White House, Trump withdrew the\u00a0US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an ambitious 12\u2011country trade and investment agreement brokered by Obama. Soon after, Trump rejected the Paris climate agreement, with its aim to keep global temperatures \u2018well below\u2019\u00a02\u00b0C above pre-industrial levels, making the\u00a0US the only country not participating in that endeavour.<\/p>\n

More recently, Trump moved the US\u00a0embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, despite a broad international consensus to determine the contested city\u2019s status within the context of broader negotiations on a settlement of the Israeli\u2013Palestinian conflict. As the embassy was opened, Palestinian residents of Gaza escalated their protests demanding that Palestinian refugees be allowed to return to what is now Israel, prompting Israeli soldiers to kill at least 62\u00a0demonstrators and wound more than 1,500\u00a0others at the Gaza boundary fence.<\/p>\n

Trump shoulders no small share of the blame for these casualties, not to mention the destruction of America\u2019s traditional role as a mediator of the Israeli\u2013Palestinian conflict. The same will go for whatever conflict and instability arises from Trump\u2019s withdrawal from the 2015\u00a0Iran nuclear deal despite Iran\u2019s full compliance with its terms.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s assault on the rules-based order extends also\u2014and ominously\u2014to trade. While Trump has blinked on China by putting on hold his promised sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports to the\u00a0US, he has attempted to coerce and shame US\u00a0allies like Japan, India and South Korea, even though their combined trade surplus with the\u00a0US\u2014$95.6\u00a0billion<\/a> in\u00a02017\u2014amounts to about a quarter of China\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Trump has forced South Korea to accept a new trade deal, and has sought to squeeze India\u2019s important information technology industry\u2014which generates output worth $150\u00a0billion per year\u2014by imposing a restrictive visa policy. As for Japan, last month Trump forced a reluctant Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe<\/a> to accept a new trade framework<\/a> that the\u00a0US views as a precursor to negotiations on a bilateral free-trade agreement.<\/p>\n

Japan would prefer the\u00a0US to rejoin the now-Japan-led TPP, which would ensure greater overall trade liberalisation and a more level playing field than a bilateral deal, which the\u00a0US would try to tilt in its own favour. But Trump\u2014who has also refused to exclude permanently Japan, the European Union and Canada from his administration\u2019s steel and aluminum tariffs\u2014pays no mind to his allies\u2019 preferences.<\/p>\n

Abe, for one, has \u2018endured repeated surprises and slaps<\/a>\u2019 from Trump. And he is not alone. As European Council President Donald Tusk recently put it<\/a>, \u2018with friends like [Trump], who needs enemies\u2019.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s trade tactics, aimed at stemming America\u2019s relative economic decline, reflect the same muscular mercantilism that China has used to become rich and powerful. Both countries are now not only actively undermining the rules-based trading system; they seem to be proving that, as long as a country is powerful enough, it can flout shared rules and norms with impunity. In today\u2019s world, it seems, strength respects only strength.<\/p>\n

This dynamic can be seen in the way Trump and\u00a0Xi respond to each other\u2019s unilateralism. When the\u00a0US deployed its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system in South Korea, China used its economic leverage to retaliate against South Korea, but not against America.<\/p>\n

Likewise, after Trump signed the Taiwan Travel Act<\/a><\/em>, which encourages official visits between the\u00a0US and the island, China staged war games against Taiwan and bribed the Dominican Republic to break diplomatic ties with the Taiwanese government. The\u00a0US, however, faced no consequences from China.<\/p>\n

As for Trump, while he has pressed China to change its trade policies, he has given\u00a0Xi a pass on the South China Sea, taking only symbolic steps\u2014such as freedom of navigation operations<\/a>\u2014against Chinese expansionism. He also stayed silent in March, when Chinese military threats forced Vietnam to halt oil drilling<\/a> within its own exclusive economic zone. And he chose to remain neutral<\/a> last summer, when China\u2019s road-building on the disputed Doklam plateau triggered a military standoff with India.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s \u2018America First<\/a>\u2019 strategy and\u00a0Xi\u2019s \u2018Chinese dream<\/a>\u2019 are founded on a common premise: that the world\u2019s two biggest powers have complete latitude to act in their own interest. The G2\u00a0world order that they are creating is thus hardly an order at all. It is a trap, in which countries are forced to choose between an unpredictable and transactional Trump-led\u00a0US and an ambitious and predatory China.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The world\u2019s leading democracy, the United States, is looking increasingly like the world\u2019s biggest and oldest surviving autocracy, China. By pursuing aggressively unilateral policies that flout broad global consensus, President Donald Trump effectively justifies his …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":482,"featured_media":39488,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1428,204],"class_list":["post-39487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-donald-trump","tag-xi-jinping"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe world according to Trump and Xi | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-world-according-to-trump-and-xi\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The world according to Trump and Xi | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The world\u2019s leading democracy, the United States, is looking increasingly like the world\u2019s biggest and oldest surviving autocracy, China. 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