22 United States The EconomistJune 27th 2020
A
t two ralliesthis week President Donald Trump really let
China’s Communist Party have it. Fully three times he referred
to covid-19 as the “kung flu”. This was a significant escalation of his
more tentative (though still shocking at the time) reference to the
“Chinese virus” in March. Forewarned by the president’s terrific
build-up (“It’s a disease, without question, has more names than
any disease in history...”), the unmasked magacrowds loved it. For
many others, however, the case for Mr Trump’s fabled toughness
on China has rather fallen apart.
The main service of John Bolton’s White House tell-all, “The
Room Where It Happened”, is to describe this disintegration in
meticulous, largely dispassionate and thus credible detail. Mr
Trump’s expressed commitment to pegging back a more assertive
China was timely—even if less agenda-setting than often suggest-
ed, his former national security adviser writes. It “embodies” a pre-
existing bipartisan and cross-government desire for a tougher us
posture towards China. Yet the president’s efforts were from the
start cynical, contradictory and fundamentally self-defeating.
The administration’s permanent state of chaos—in which
“panda-huggers” such as Steve Mnuchin and dragon-slayers like
Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro vied to influence the daily
policy lurches—played a role in that. But the main reason was Mr
Trump. In Mr Bolton’s telling, he showed little ambition and none
of the patience necessary to address the ways in which China
games the economic system. He had no interest in pushing back
on Xi Jinping’s growing authoritarianism; he admired it. Herding a
million Uighurs in prison-camps was “exactly the right thing to
do”, the president allegedly told his Chinese counterpart more
than once. (His fawning before Mr Xi—you’re the “greatest leader
in Chinese history”—is often toe-curling.) Mr Trump’s sole con-
cern, in Mr Bolton’s telling, was to strike a trade deal that he could
spin to his base as a win, however insubstantial its contents. In
time this became his explicit negotiating pitch: Mr Bolton de-
scribes the president “pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win” re-elec-
tion by promising to buy more American soyabeans and wheat. It
was apparently for this that Mr Trump waged a trade war estimated
to have cost 300,000 American jobs before the pandemic struck.
China, which was also suffering badly from the tariffs, musthave been amazed that America would settle for so little. And, giv-
en Mr Trump’s desperation for the “phase one” trade deal signed in
January, there was always going to be a fair chance it would be able
to wriggle out of honouring its commitments. Sure enough, China
is already undershooting its promise to spend $211bn on American
goods and services by the end of the year—such that Mr Navarro
declared the deal “over” this week. The president tweeted back
that, no, it was “fully intact”. Mr Trump’s coarsening of America’s
political culture is often described, in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s
artful phrase, as a case of “defining deviancy down”. He is increas-
ingly defining toughness on China down, too.
The collateral damage from Mr Trump’s trade policy goes be-
yond America’s hard-hit farmers and factories. Mr Bolton de-
scribes the president intervening to block routine law enforce-
ment of Chinese corporate abuses—including the sanctions
busting of zte, a telecoms firm—for fear it would hurt his prospect
of a deal. America’s allies were “discouraged and confused” by
such capriciousness. China appears to have been encouraged. It is
hard to see any sign—in its assertiveness during the pandemic and
otherwise—that Mr Trump has caused it to rethink its economic
model or global influence campaign.
Perhaps the best that can be said for Mr Trump’s blundering is
that it didn’t produce even worse outcomes. The us-China rela-
tionship is in poor shape; yet he has shown it to be more resilient
than many feared. It no doubt helped that Mr Trump has little in-
terest in China’s most neuralgic strategic concerns. If he wins a
second term, Mr Bolton predicts, he may well “abandon” Taiwan.
Another consolation is that the president’s effort to weaponise
China electorally appears to be failing. Surveys suggest Joe Biden
enjoys the same seven-point lead on handling China that he has
overall. It seems Mr Trump’s ambition to define himself as strong
on China and “Beijing Biden” as weak has been overtaken by
events. Who cares that he barred travellers from China in February
when the European Union is considering banning entrants from
virus-ravaged America today? Especially—if Mr Bolton is right—
when Mr Trump’s China policy is partly to blame for that tragedy.
In a television interview, he alleged: “Trump didn’t wanna hear
about [the virus]...He didn’t wanna hear bad things about Xi Jinp-
ing...He didn’t wanna hear bad things about the Chinese economy
that could affect the ‘fantastic’ trade deal he was working on.”
A third upside, given undimmed bipartisan enthusiasm for
confronting China, is that Mr Trump has provided a number of les-
sons in how not to go about that. And the weaker he looks, the
more they are being heeded. Almost every Republican in Congress
supported the Uighur human-rights bill that Mr Trump grudgingly
signed into law last week. A bipartisan Tibet human-rights bill is
in the pipeline. Meanwhile Mr Biden’s campaign, which three
months ago was being pushed to sound more strident on China by
the protectionist left as well as by the president, is instead starting
to sound more thoughtful.Have you seen her, have you heard?
A senior adviser to the former vice-president on China describes
plans to identify and invest in the sources of America’s competi-
tiveness. He cites the country’s economy, alliances and democratic
values. It is too early to detect in this the makings of a successful
China policy. Mr Biden has got a lot of foreign policy wrong over
the decades. But it does have the advantage of sounding serious.
“Being wrong” about America’s interests is another thing Mr
Trump has defined down. 7Lexington Xi bangs his drum
John Bolton destroys Donald Trump’s signature foreign-policy boast