A festival of flattery in Asia
This appeared in Saturday’s Washington Post: Presidential trips abroad are often more about pageantry and rhetoric than substantive policy-making, but President Donald Trump’s long tour of Asia is looking particularly lightweight. In stops so far in Japan, South Korea, China and Vietnam, Trump has heaped flattery on his hosts — particularly Chinese President Xi Jinping — and largely avoided provocative tweets.
Overall, however, the tour is looking like a missed opportunity for Trump to spell out more detailed and workable formulations of his security and economic policies. He has delivered a couple of set-piece policy speeches, one on the nuclear threat of North Korea and another on U.S. economic and trade relations with Asia. Yet they were studded with unrealistic goals and rhetoric more suited to the campaign trail than the diplomatic arena. Trump’s speech in the Vietnamese city of Danang on Friday read as if lifted from one of the rallies he stages in the United States. He denounced “chronic trade abuses” that he said “stripped … jobs, factories and industries,” and vowed that “we are not going to allow the United States to be taken advantage of anymore.” But he offered no specific remedies, other than a vague willingness to “make bilateral trade agreements with any Indo-Pacific nation.”
In Seoul, Trump delivered an address that admirably spelled out the horrors of North Korea — not just its relentless pursuit of a nuclear arsenal but also its tyrannical enslavement of its people. But the terms Trump publicly reiterated — that the regime of Kim Jong Un accept “total denuclearization” at the beginning of the process — are unrealistic.
The president’s notion of how to achieve this breakthrough sounds equally far-fetched. According to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Trump told Xi that “you’re a strong man” and “you can, I’m sure, solve this for me.” Xi’s government has repeatedly rejected the idea that it can or would deliver Kim. Trump’s excessive public flattery of the Chinese ruler, whom he called “a very special man,” and his ready acquiescence to autocratic practices such as the prohibition of press conference questions, offered an unseemly spectacle of obeisance to a dictator.