Trump heads home with America First ringing in Asian ears
Although there were few weighty deliverables from his tour, for Asian nations looking nervously at China’s increasing assertiveness, it may be welcomed as a sign that his administration is still committed to the region.
AS Air Force One took off from Manila on Tuesday at the end of the longest trip to Asia by a US president in more than a quarter of a century, at least two of the region’s leaders had good reason to feel satisfied. At a summit in the Philippines, US President Donald Trump forged a “great relationship” with his counterpart Rodrigo Duterte, who only a year ago had cursed Barack Obama for decrying his administration’s bloody war on drug pushers and addicts.
And Trump flashed a thumbs-up as he shook hands with Cambodia’s authoritarian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who praised him as a kindred spirit for telling countries to put their own interests first. “You’re a great man to me,” the prime minister said, addressing Trump at a meeting with other Southeast Asian leaders, and then referenced the president’s America First policy.
“I’d like to inform you that if you follow your new policy in respect of the independence and sovereignty of other countries, the US will have a lot of friends, and you’ll be much respected and loved.”
But for other leaders across Asia, Trump’s go-it-alone instincts must have represented a puzzling departure from his predecessors, who were — to varying degrees — standard bearers of multilateralism, democracy and human rights. During a tour that took him to Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines, Trump called for joint efforts to tighten the screws on North Korea and its development of nuclear weapons in defiance of UN sanctions.
But at an Asia-Pacific Summit in Vietnam, he declared that redressing the uneven balance of trade between Asia and the US was at the center of his America First policy, which he says will protect US workers. Trump’s vision has up-ended a consensus favoring multinational trade pacts, whose regional champion is now China. On the sidelines of the Vietnam meeting, 11 countries kept alive a transpacific trade deal that he walked away from last year in the name of protecting American jobs.
Trump told reporters before leaving that he had sealed deals of “at least $300 billion, possibly triple that figure.” US businesses signed around $250 billion worth of deals during his Beijing visit, but many of those were nonbinding. Missing was any agreement on market access or reduction in technology-sharing agreements that American businesses have long complained about.
For Trump, dogged at home by low public approval ratings and investigations into Russian links to his election campaign, the deals will be an important prize to flaunt on his return. “The multi-billion-dollar deals he struck in Beijing may not help the US trade deficit,” said a former Japanese diplomat in Tokyo, who declined to be named. “But optically... he can tell people that because he went to China with business leaders, he was able to come back with a gift.”
Although there were few weighty deliverables from Trump’s tour, for Asian nations looking nervously at China’s increasing assertiveness, it may be welcomed as a sign that his administration is still committed to the region. “What regional countries wanted was for him to simply show up, to underscore that America remained at least notionally committed to Asia,” said Shahriman Lockman, a senior analyst at the Institute of Strategic & International Studies in Malaysia.
He also got good reviews at the start of his Asia tour in Japan, which has been currying favor with Trump since right after his election, when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe jetted off to Trump Tower with an expensive golf club as a present. “The most important deliverable is that we can send an almost identical message to the world that we share an identical strategy,” a Japanese government official said.
For Asian leaders, Trump’s off-the-cuff style, freewheeling tweets and rhetorical hyperbole must have been daunting. But one thing they seemed to learn was that he responds well to a lavish reception. “They say in the history of people coming to China there has been nothing like that, and I believe it,” Trump told reporters after his visit to Beijing, where President Xi Jinping extended him the honor of a personal tour of the Forbidden City.
One measure of the Asian trip’s success, he said, was the “red carpet, like I think probably nobody has ever received.” Diplomats say the bonhomie in Beijing probably stemmed in large part from Washington’s expectations that Xi will lean more heavily on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Trump’s pronouncements on North Korea during the trip swung from embracing diplomacy to warnings of military intervention. “Don’t underestimate us, and don’t try us,” he said in a speech to South Korea’s National Assembly.
Days later, after Pyongyang dismissed the speech as “reckless remarks by an old lunatic,” Trump tweeted: “Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me ‘old,’ when I would NEVER call him ‘short and fat?’.” Then he tacked back toward diplomacy. “Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend — and maybe someday that will happen!”
David Pressman, US ambassador to the UN under Obama, said Trump arrived in Asia without a North Korea strategy and left without one. “Short and fat isn’t a nuclear strategy,” he said, adding that Washington’s approach to North Korea was fed by “whim, ego, and theatrical calculations of a fickle and uninformed president.”