Instapundit Glenn Reynolds
quotes at length from a
Financial Times article (behind paywall) authored by
European Council of Foreign Relations President Mark Leonard. Leonard went to China and asked their views of President Trump.
I have just spent a week in Beijing talking to officials and intellectuals, many of whom are awed by his skill as a strategist and tactician. . . .
They think Mr Trump feels he is presiding over the relative decline of his great nation.
Presumably reflected in his slogan “Make America Great Again.”
In Chinese eyes, Mr Trump’s response is a form of “creative destruction”. He is systematically destroying the existing institutions — from the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement to Nato and the Iran nuclear deal — as a first step towards renegotiating the world order on terms more favourable to Washington.
Once the order is destroyed, the Chinese elite believes, Mr Trump will move to stage two: renegotiating America’s relationship with other powers. Because the US is still the most powerful country in the world, it will be able to negotiate with other countries from a position of strength if it deals with them one at a time rather than through multilateral institutions that empower the weak at the expense of the strong.
That tells you the Chinese view of the United Nations and the WTO. About Trump’s meeting with Putin in Helsinki:
Even Mr Trump’s sycophantic press conference with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, in Helsinki had a strategic purpose. They see it as Henry Kissinger in reverse. In 1972, the US nudged China off the Soviet axis in order to put pressure on its real rival, the Soviet Union. Today Mr Trump is reaching out to Russia in order to isolate China.
Because of course the Chinese style themselves our “real rival” in this century. I admit nostalgia for the good old days when we just had one real rival, I count three at the moment: China, Russia, and jihadi Islam.
