President Donald Trump is mad that China is palling around with his strongmen friends.
Trump erupted on social media late Tuesday night — US time — as television footage aired of Chinese leader Xi Jinping hosting the authoritarian leaders of Russia and North Korea at a stunning military parade in Beijing.
“Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America,” Trump wrote in a message to Xi.
The Truth Social post heard around the world means one thing: If China’s two big gatherings of authoritarian leaders, US adversaries and erstwhile allies this week was intended as a personal affront to the US president, it worked perfectly. And it underscored the futility of his attempts to subject the true global hard men to his art-of-the-deal charms and his claims that his supposedly close relationships with such leaders can be decisive.
Trump met with Putin in Alaska last month, but his gushing red-carpet welcome has so far failed to unlock any progress toward ending the war in Ukraine. Putin has defied Trump’s hopes by escalating attacks on civilians and is stalling on talks with President Volodymyr Zelensky. The US president’s first-term summits with Kim were similarly unsuccessful. The North Korean leader has more nuclear weapons now than he did before taking part in Trump’s photo-op diplomacy.
The president’s online tirade went on to point out that Americans had suffered heavy losses in the struggle against a common enemy, imperial Japan, the 80th anniversary of whose defeat was marked in Beijing on Wednesday.
“Many Americans died in China’s quest for Victory and Glory. I hope that they are rightfully Honored and Remembered for their Bravery and Sacrifice!” Trump wrote.
China’s big celebration comes at a tense international moment as the new Asian superpower seeks to capitalize on Trump’s erratic foreign policy, which has shattered America’s reputation as a reliable great power.
Trump’s fury was ironic, since the last few days in China have seen the kind of performative spectacle that he loves.
But the gathering of anti-Western powers in Tianjin and Beijing is about more than trolling. It’s an early warning that Trump’s second-term policies based on tariff coercion, the bullying of lesser powers and “America First” nationalism may be backfiring.
“China is leveraging the missteps or mistakes that the US (is making),” Jackie S.H. Wong, an assistant professor of international studies at the American University of Sharjah, told CNN’s Becky Anderson on “Connect the World” Tuesday.
Some of the alarmist talk about China and Russia building a new axis of resistance to the US is overblown. Nations represented at a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin lack formal defense agreements or pooled economic sovereignty to compare to groups like NATO or the European Union.
Territorial tensions periodically spark between China and India. Moscow might need China’s help in fighting its war in Ukraine, but the Kremlin is still getting used to being the junior superpower. And despite Communist Party iron rule, China suffers from internal political and economic pressures, demonstrated by Xi’s regular purges of top officials and military brass.
But the festivities of recent days are part of China’s wider effort to showcase its emerging might and to test out alternative global affiliations and systems as it seeks to eclipse the West. By gathering leaders from Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere, it was demonstrating the capacity of a bloc to frustrate US global power on multiple fronts.
One top US military leader on Tuesday downplayed the significance of events in China.
“Nations like China and North Korea and Russia, and others do these kind of events. There’s certainly a big focus on messaging,” Gen. Kevin Schneider, commander of the US Pacific Air Forces, told an online talk Tuesday.
“But I think the takeaway for this is we are not deterred,” Schneider said.
A lot of this predates Trump.
Eight decades after the end of World War II, it’s not surprising that institutions born in the aftermath of the horror need a reboot. The rise of populous developing nations was always going to threaten American hegemony and the global system built and dominated by the West. And as the last members of the Greatest Generation fade away, the triumph of the democracies in World War II is becoming history rather than a tangible human memory.
But Trump’s choices in the first eight months of his second term are accelerating a shift of global power to the East. They’re playing into Xi’s quest to revive what he believes is China’s rightful global prominence. Trump’s attacks on allies and desecration of US foreign aid programs are brewing resentment among erstwhile American friends who are now hedging their bets with an alternative superpower.
Incredibly, the force doing most to undermine the West is the president of the country — the United States — that guaranteed freedom and democracy for generations.
Many steps that Trump takes to demonstrate US power end up undermining it.
By taking on Beijing in a massive trade offensive, Trump picked on the one nation that would be ready to absorb economic pain to damage the US. Now, Trump has found that Beijing has, well, a trump card: control of a large share of rare earth metals that the US needs to run its tech industry and military applications. Trump’s failure to force Beijing to back down is enhancing a sense that it’s ready to challenge American might — and drawing foreign leaders to Beijing.
Trump’s capricious tariff attacks on US trading partners — based on his hunches rather than economic data — and attempts to throttle the independence of the Federal Reserve play into China’s previously unconvincing claims that it, and not the United States, is the stable superpower on which partners can rely. Nations represented in Tianjin, for example, included many that looked to Washington rather than Beijing in recent years, including Vietnam — which is facing tough US tariffs —Egypt, and NATO member Turkey.
The most startling example of Trump’s clumsy, counterproductive behavior shone through the attention lavished throughout the summit in Tianjin on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a fellow populist nationalist leader and erstwhile friend of Trump. Trump’s claims to have solved a flare-up between India and Pakistan earlier this year and demands for the Nobel Peace Prize infuriated Modi. A 50% tariff on Indian imports to the US fractured nearly 30 years of efforts by Republican and Democratic presidents to prevent India and China — which are home to a billion people each — from moving closer together.
Laughing and shaking hands, Xi and Modi both argued their two countries, long separated by mistrust, could be partners and not rivals.
Modi’s interaction with a jovial Putin was even more overt. Last month, the Russian leader had a private chat in Trump’s Beast limousine at their summit in Alaska. In China, Putin one-upped Trump, inviting Modi into his ride, and a photographer was on hand to capture the friendly hourlong chat inside.
Xi’s welcome to Modi matched that of Putin.
India is “signaling to the US that ‘we have alternatives, and China can be that alternative,’” Wong told Anderson on CNN International.
“I would say China is leveraging that opportunity.”
Trump’s misstep is more surprising since he jelled with Modi during his first term. But India is a deeply proud nation whose colonial history makes it especially sensitive to being bullied. It is hyper-touchy about anything to do with its arch-rival Pakistan. Such subtleties seem to escape the White House. Perhaps Trump’s purge of State Department experts is taking a toll.
Russia is often portrayed in the West as a decrepit power; a shadow of the Soviet Union despite its vast nuclear arsenal. There’s some truth to this after 25 years of Putin’s corrupt rule. But the Russian leader buttressed his image in defying Trump.
This has left the US president expressing disappointment and resorting to his classic tactic of teasing apparently imminent announcements to spare his embarrassment. He told reporters Tuesday he’d spoken to Putin and “learned things that will be very interesting. I think in the next few days, you’ll find out.”
Many foreign policy experts thought a shrewd second term goal for Trump would be to push US adversaries like Russia, China and North Korea apart. Instead, he’s driven them together, and driven India, a member of the US “Quad” grouping with Australia and Japan, closer into their orbit.
Trump’s supporters dispute any characterization of his foreign policy as anything but a roaring success. The White House argues that the United States has never been more respected in the world. It bills Trump as the “President of Peace” and claims he’s ended seven global wars — even though some of the nations it names weren’t fighting each other when Trump intervened.
The president told CNN contributor Scott Jennings on his radio show on Tuesday that he wasn’t concerned at all by the diplomatic signaling coming from China.
He also implied in a conversation with reporters in the Oval Office that Xi would be forced to capitulate. “China needs us. And I have a very good relationship with President Xi, as you know. But China needs us much more than we need them.”
Meanwhile, Trump is making overt attempts to prove he’s as tough as any global strongman.
On Monday, as superpower diplomacy played out across the Pacific, he announced a US strike that killed 11 people in the seas off Venezuela, which officials said targeted drug traffickers. The attack could herald a military campaign on questionable legal ground regarding congressional authorization.
He also re-upped threats to send National Guard reservists into Chicago as he methodically escalates his effort to normalize the use of the military in law enforcement despite constitutional curbs. But there was a reminder that despite his authoritarian instincts, the United States still has democratic safeguards that Russia and China lacks when a judge ruled that his dispatch of federal troops to Los Angeles earlier this year was illegal.
The president does have some significant second-term wins. His wielding of US might against smaller nations has tariff cash gushing into the Treasury. And despite his stumbling, he remains the only world leader with a chance to force all parties to the table in pursuit of peace in Ukraine. His relentless pressure on NATO allies led to significant pledges of increased defense spending.
But China’s superpower coming-out party this week shows it’s critical for US power that he somehow prevails over Beijing in the trade war.
Oodles of flattery that the president has enjoyed from foreign leaders seeking to dodge his wrath may be giving him a false impression of how the rest of the world sees him. “Our country is the hottest country in the world right now,” Trump said Tuesday. “Everybody’s talking about the USA.”
The United States was likely on the lips of many of those gathered in China this week. But not quite in the way Trump thinks.
CNN’s Brad Lendon contributed to this report.
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