A president is winning. China’s.
BANGKOK – “We’re going to win so much,” Donald Trump said last year, “you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning.” And “you’ll say, ‘Please, Mr. President, we beg you sir, we don’t want to win anymore.’ ” He was right. We just didn’t know that “Mr. President” would be President Xi Jinping of China.
As Trump makes his diplomatic tour of Asia, the West faces a simple and unfortunate reality. Four powers in the world are strong enough to meaningfully shape global affairs: the United States, the United Kingdom/European Union, Russia and China.
Europe and Britain are turning inward, battling the self-inflicted wound of Brexit and trying to minimize the damage from illiberal populism in Hungary and Poland. America under Trump has taken a transactional, short-term view of diplomacy that willfully cedes U.S. influence and leverage — except on a narrow band of issues dear to Trump.
These trends mean the West is smashing its geopolitical might on the anvil of its own foolishness. The authoritarian regimes in China and Russia are gleefully picking up the pieces.
Here in Bangkok, it’s striking how everyone I talk to — from generals in the country’s ruling military junta to liberal-minded political party leaders — says the same thing off the record: China is the new power. Trump’s America is waning. And we can extract what we need from him using flattery, without giving up anything meaningful.
China moves in
A former Thai foreign minister told me Trump sees Thailand exclusively through the lens of helping to pressure North Korea. So Trump’s message to the military junta was simple: Help us isolate North Korea. The problem? Thailand already was happy to do so.
Even though Thailand’s military regime has recently arrested journalists and forced an elected head of state into exile, Trump gave the regime international legitimacy and a full visit to the White House last month. That is worth a huge amount to Thailand’s generals. It was a major bargaining chip. Trump threw it away in exchange for Thailand agreeing to buy an infinitesimal 155,000 tons of U.S. coal — 0.02% of production. Quite the Art of the Deal.
Thailand is drastically ramping up military purchasing and infrastructure deals with China. Bangkok is eyeing more long-term trade engagement with Beijing, particularly since Trump decided to scrap the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. In the past, Bangkok might have worried more that these moves would alienate Washington. After all, Thailand is America’s oldest ally in the region. But under Trump, Beijing is accelerating a long-term shift as it peels Bangkok away from the orbit of Washington.
Unthinkable ignorance
Thailand is only a mid-level player, but it’s a microcosm of a broader longterm trend across Southeast Asia. And with Trump, can we really be surprised? Xi is seasoned, capable, calculating. Trump is inexperienced, incompetent, impulsive. Xi thinks 10 years into the future; Trump thinks 10 seconds ahead.
This part of the world is being exposed this week to Trump’s unthinkable ignorance of its politics. According to a Japan Times report on the North Korea threat, Trump “could not understand why a country of samurai warriors did not shoot down the missiles.”
Aside from being ignorant of Japan’s overtly pacifist political culture, the samurai warrior line is cringe-worthy. Perhaps Trump could also inquire about geishas using their fans to blow away the missiles, or whether Prime Minister Shinzo Abe could find the right Pokéball to contain Kim Jong Un?
Xi doesn’t make such idiotic comments. And there are clear signs that Xi, like Thailand’s government, has figured out that China can keep chipping away at U.S. diplomatic power so long as he indulges Trump’s ego.
I fear that historians are going to use this week’s Asia trip to explain how America lost Asian allies on the geopolitical chess board, and how China turned them into pawns.