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It was both painful and humiliating to watch media coverage of Donald Trump’s recent visit to Beijing, because it amply demonstrated America’s decline as a great power relative to China. Prior to the summit, expectations were very low: Trump was in a weakened position, beset by inflation and declining popularity, while seeking Chinese help in getting out of the Iran trap he has created for himself. Xi, on the other hand, had forced Trump to back down in his trade war the year before, with China showing strong export growth in the face of Washington’s weak response.
And so it was. Trump returned to Washington with little to show for his visit: only two agreements on opening Chinese markets to U.S. products, and no political help in the Middle East. China did agree to buy 200 Boeing aircraft (fewer than expected), but it has failed to follow through on similar announcements in the past. The White House also claimed that China has agreed to purchase $17 billion of agricultural products, but China has not confirmed this. It did not prevent Trump from claiming that they “did great trade deals” and that the meeting was “a great success.”
It was the optics of the meeting that demonstrated how far Trump has fallen in Chinese eyes. Trump was not met at the airport by Xi. He was seated on the podium in a chair that made him look smaller than Xi, a slight that could have been avoided had Trump’s State Department not sidelined the protocol officials whose job it is to look after these things. The worst part of the visit was Trump’s constant sycophancy, exclaiming that Xi was a “great leader,” “really a friend,” someone “from central casting”; he effused time and again about how beautiful and impressive China is. As in previous interactions with various dictators, Trump seems to have thought that they would be impressed by the same kind of praise and flattery that he himself revels in. Xi, for his part, failed to reciprocate any of these assertions of friendship, saying merely that the United States and China “should be partners and not rivals.”
The most significant issue arising out of the summit was Taiwan. Trump had held up a $14 billion arms package voted by Congress in advance of the summit, and there is no indication delivery will resume anytime soon. Xi told Trump that future relations with Washington would be conditioned on the level of U.S. support for the island. A light went on in Trump’s head that Taiwan would be a “very good negotiating chip” in trade negotiations with Beijing. Trump made other dismissive remarks about the island, noting that “we’re supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war,” and repeating his assertion that Taiwan has stolen semiconductor chip technology from the United States.
His failure to say anything about Taiwan’s security stood in sharp contrast to Joe Biden’s clear assertion that the United States would act in its defense.
Donald Trump is a politician who is unable to see the world in anything but personal and self-interested terms. He was furious after his return at the suggestion that Obama was treated with more respect than he was, using the occasion to assert that “nobody respects Obama,” who was in any case “a divider.” The Chinese media has been talking for some time about the United States as a “declining power”; Xi brought it up with Trump by expressing hope that their countries could avoid the “Thucydides trap” if a declining America ceded power gracefully to a rising China. Trump immediately interpreted this as Xi agreeing with him that America was in decline under Joe Biden, but that it was great again now that he was president. As usual, Trump reserves his greatest anger and hostility for his domestic opponents, and not the leaders of the world’s great dictatorships.
The truth of the matter, which the Chinese understand very well, is the opposite: American decline is a direct product of Trump’s rise since 2016. It is as if Trump has decided to do everything in his power to weaken the United States vis-à-vis China. He has polarized an already polarized country like no previous president; he has cut funding for basic scientific research and attacked American universities which were the best in the world; he has gotten the United States involved in an unnecessary war in the Middle East that has depleted stocks of advanced American weapons; he and his colleagues have openly stated that their domestic opponents, the Democrats, pose a far bigger challenge to the future of the United States than either China or Russia.
Trump has also systematically sought to undermine the U.S. alliance system, disparaging allies while heaping tariffs on even the closest traditional friends, and threatening to grab territory from Denmark, a loyal NATO ally. He claims that the United States under his leadership is now respected as never before, when something close to the opposite is true: both friends and rivals agree that the United States has become something of a rogue state that is contributing to global instability and disorder, as well as something of a laughing stock.
Trump has made Xi Jinping’s life enormously easy in a way that was reflected in his behavior during the summit. America under Trump is engaged in such a determined process of self-harm that China does not really have to do much but sit back and watch it unfold. Trump predicted that China would not attack Taiwan while he was president. He may be right about this: Xi does not want to get in the way of a declining United States. But he may be forced to act quickly if America finally gets a president who wants to reverse that trajectory.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
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Harvard has no credibility. See below. I wrote the following some time ago. “Pinker mentions this. I will elaborate. For better or worse (certainly worse), Harvard is a bastion of intolerant, religious, anti-truth thinking these days. Consider two propositions, “sex is a spectrum” and “race has no biological basis”. Neither statement is evenly remotely true. However, 99% of Harvard students and faculty would affirm the “truth” of these statements, at least publicly. Like it or not, universities have become deeply irrational. It is somewhat unclear if the race nonsense or the sex nonsense is more deeply held. This academic insanity is somewhat new (perhaps not, see below). From “Sex is a Spectrum” (https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2021/08/07/sex-is-a-spectrum/) a comment by Spencer “Lol. I introduce students every semester to various non-overlapping or barley overlapping graphs by sex. Every year their jaws drop further. Twenty years ago barely an eyebrow was raised.” The converse point is that Harvard and other universities were deeply religious and intolerant even years ago. The famous book “The Blank Slate” was written in 2003. The Summers affair (at Harvard) is from 2006. The Pinker/Spleke debate is from 2005. It was clear then (and still is) that Spelke was/is a liar. Was she ever punished for lying? Of course, not. Of course, these problems are by no means limited to Harvard. Over at Yale, a talk was given on 'The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind'. The speaker (Dr. Aruna Khilanani) explicitly fantasized about killing innocent white people and then was offended because Yale would not give her the recording. The following is from her speech. “I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor. (Time stamp: 7:17)” These issues are by no means limited to elite universities. At University of Southern Maine, an instructor (Christy Hammer) dared to say that there are two sexes All but one student (21 of 22) walked out in protest. The one student later caved to the fanatics. Of course, Hammer was entirely correct.”
FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) statistics show that the growth of the GDP of the USA and China has continued at "normal" rates since at least 2015. Neither Trump or Xi has had any major effect on GDP growth. Given that the population of China is (roughly) 4x of the USA it is inevitable that China would have a bigger economy and more impact on world affairs. Just simple math. See "Real GDP at Constant National Prices for China" (RGDPNACNA666NRUG) in FRED and "Real Gross Domestic Product (GDPC1)" also in FRED. You can also look at the BP statistics for electricity production in China vs. the USA. In the bad old days, Mao kept China really poor and unimportant. The bad old days are over.