Trump main spanner in works: Bolton
President’s re-election focus stymies China policy, former national security adviser says
Edward Wong and Michael Crowley
As national security officials and some trade advisers in the Trump administration tried crafting get-tough-onChina policies to address what they viewed as America’s greatest foreign policy challenge, they ran into opposition from an unexpected quarter.
President Donald Trump himself was undermining their work.
That has been the underlying tension of the last 3 ½ years, bluntly laid out in the new memoir by John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser. The book supports what administration officials have said in interviews and private discussions since 2017, and what, in many ways, had been out in the open in Trump’s fawning statements about China’s authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, many made on Twitter.
Taken together, the accounts reveal there has been no coherent China policy, despite efforts early in the administration by senior aides to frame foreign policy around what they labelled “great-power competition,” outlined in their own nationalsecurity strategy document.
Administration players on China have been divided by factional feuding and irreconcilable policy goals, with security hawks and religious-freedom crusaders butting heads with Wall St advocates and free traders.
Overseeing it all has been a president whose main aim with China has been to secure a trade deal — using overt pleas to Chinese leaders — that would help him get re-elected, according to the accounts.
Trump, who has never shown any interest in human rights and has an affinity for dictators, had no qualms about negotiating openly on those terms with Xi and ignoring other issues. He even told Xi repeatedly to continue building internment camps that Chinese officials have used to detain more than a million Muslims — “which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do,” Bolton wrote.
Bolton’s account reveals transgressions that not only break norms but also could increase the risks to US national security: Trump intervening to end sanctions against a Chinese technology company as a favour to Xi; offering to end a Justice Department case against a Huawei executive in exchange for trade concessions; and “pleading with Xi to ensure” China would buy American farm products to help Trump win re-election, as Bolton put it.
“Make sure I win,” Trump told Xi, according to unredacted pages seen by Vanity Fair.
As the new coronavirus spread from its initial outbreak zone in China across the globe, Trump kept praising Xi in an effort to preserve a trade deal signed in January. The virus has now infected more than two million Americans and killed about 120,000.
The details in Bolton’s book provide ample ammunition for Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate, to rebut efforts by the Trump campaign to paint the former vicepresident as soft on China. And Senate Republicans orienting their own re-election efforts around the same message will run into similar pitfalls.
“Bolton’s account will be difficult for Republicans to dismiss,” said Susan Shirk, chair of the 21st Century China Centre at the University of California, San Diego. “It helps explain why the administration has actually accomplished so little in its pressure campaign against China, namely that it was undercut by President Trump himself, who fawned over Xi Jinping in order to get personal political and perhaps commercial favours . . .
“Chinese leaders have learned how to manipulate autocrats in other countries who are just out for themselves, and they applied these lessons
to the way they manipulated President Trump.”
Trump denounced Bolton’s book yesterday, saying on Twitter it was all “lies and made-up stories, all intended to make me look bad”.
Bolton resigned in September over major policy clashes with Trump, though the president has said he fired Bolton, a contention he repeated in the tweet: “Just trying to get even for firing him like the sick puppy he is!”
Trump also asserted a tough tone toward China yesterday, negating a claim made the previous day by Robert E Lighthizer, the US trade representative, that Washington would not seek to “decouple” the US economy from China’s. “That was a policy option years ago, but I don’t think it’s a policy or reasonable policy option at this point,”
Lighthizer told the House Ways and Means Committee.
In a tweet, though, Trump said that Lighthizer was mistaken and “the US certainly does maintain a policy option, under various conditions, of a complete decoupling from China”.
Trump did not define “decoupling,” and economists say a significant separation would be difficult.
Critics of the administration’s actions on China say hawkish officials have overreached or adopted misguided measures — for example, pushing a trade war that has resulted in mainly American companies paying about US$55 billion in tariffs and caused suffering among farmers, or starting tit-for-tat punishments against Chinese media organisations that have resulted in the expulsions of American reporters from China.
In a charitable sense, Trump’s willingness to cut deals with Xi can be
seen as a corrective to that. But Trump’s approach is rooted only in his concerns about his political future and not in any understanding of foreign policy or US interests, Bolton says.
“Trump’s conversations with Xi reflected not only the incoherence in his trade policy but also the confluence in Trump’s mind of his own political interests and US national interests,” Bolton wrote. “Trump commingled the personal and the national not just on trade questions but across the whole field of national security. I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations.”
The administration has generally been divided between those who see China as a national security threat and those who see it as a business opportunity. Bolton was in the former camp, as are Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser; and Peter Navarro, a White House trader adviser. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who Bolton calls a “panda hugger,” and Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, have advocated moderate policies to preserve commercial ties.
Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a senior adviser, also has. In December 2018, when Trump told Xi and other Chinese officials at a dinner in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that Kushner would take part in trade negotiations, “all the Chinese perked up and smiled,” Bolton wrote.
Though Navarro is aligned ideologically with Bolton on China, he defended Trump’s policies yesterday.
“My take on him is it’s Big Lie Bolton; it’s Book Deal Bolton,” Navarro said. “He is doing it for the money . . . it’s the Washington swamp’s equivalent of revenge porn.”
Behind the scenes, Navarro has clashed with administration officials — and with Mnuchin in particular — over the trade talks.
Embracing the language of economic populism, Trump denounced China’s trade practices during his 2016 campaign. But as president, he assumed the role of dealmaker and moved to develop a personal bond with Xi, hosting him at his Mar-a-Lago resort in April 2017.
Trump started a trade war 16 months later, raising tensions. During trade negotiations, his desire to reach a quick deal sometimes undercut advisers such as Lighthizer, who wanted to press for deeper changes to China’s economic structure.
This year, the Trump campaign has spent millions in advertising dollars trying to drum into voters a message that Trump is tough on China. But Biden aides pointed to polls that show Trump has struggled to gain traction with that argument. And Biden has embraced the details of the Bolton book in his messaging.
“If these accounts are true, it’s not only morally repugnant, it’s a violation of Donald Trump’s sacred duty to the American people to protect America’s interests and defend our values,” he said in a statement.
New York Times