Asia braces for Trump tour

US President Donald Trump has embarked on his first trip to Asia as president, and his longest foreign tour since he has been in office. Over a week and a half he will visit Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines.

To say the region’s leaders are bracing themselves for potential displays of freakishness, provocation or incompetence is to put it mildly.

Trump has cultivated a reputation for unpredictability — or more often sheer inconsistency — as much as he has cultivated his ignorance or disdain for much of what US diplomacy has traditionally been about. Intense Chinabashing over trade in his campaign was followed by a show of awkward friendship with the Chinese leader in Mar-a-Lago and, more recently, a fawning accolade to the man “some people might call … the king of China”.

It will take more than crude flattery to balance competing interests. North Korea’s firing of missiles and nuclear tests, combined with Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, have placed the push for further co-operation from China at the top of the agenda. He has gone back on his threat to label China as a currency manipulator. Yet he still wants to show he can tackle the “horrible” trade deficit. Talk of a trade war may or may not be something of the past.

Trump likes to cast himself as a deal maker but has spent more time tearing up or weakening agreements than creating new ones. Doubts over US leadership have been a boon to China. Trump arrives as an enfeebled president, laden with scandal; Xi Jinping is fresh from a party congress that further entrenched his personal power and promised a new era of Chinese global leadership.

The region’s leaders know Trump is susceptible to flattery: massaging his ego can go a long way. But that the most maverick of US presidents is about to navigate a highly volatile and strategic part of the world with so much at stake for global stability is worrying them — and it should worry the rest of us, too. London, November 2.