China Greets a Failing Superpower

Donald Trump severely underestimates the power and commitment of the People’s Republic of China. He may not be the first president with this myopia, but he most certainly is the least prepared to deal with the issue. Take a good look at that that thick, dotted red line above (known as the “nine-dash line”) in the NPR map above. China has always maintained that Taiwan was a part of the PRC, but by relying on ancient historical territorial definitions and based on China’s literally building a land-fill island (with a powerful airfield) in the middle of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, China expanded her territorial claims to include the entirety of the encircled sea.

Initially, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia objected, but with Donald Trump calling our foreign policy shots with inconsistency and a rather shallow understanding of Asian politics, these countries are facing territorial incursions into their own justifiable territories. They began to realize that China was calling the shots. To them, we have become an unreliable ally, ready to withdraw with little or no reason. Anyway, the United States was doing very little other than an occasional “freedom of navigation” effort as a U.S. warship or aircraft cross into nine-dash sea lanes. Even Japan and South Korea see the writing on the wall.

The latest of these “little boundary challenges” by U.S. military forces occurred at the beginning of October. “A Chinese warship has forced an American destroyer to change course in the South China Sea by sailing close to it in an ‘unsafe and unprofessional’ manner, the US Navy says.

“The USS Decatur was sailing past the Gaven and Johnson reefs in the disputed Spratly Islands, which China claims… The [PRC] Luyang destroyer ‘approached within 45 yards [41m] of Decatur's bow,’ Commander Nat Christensen said… The Chinese manoeuvre almost caused a collision, US officials said.

“‘The US side repeatedly sends military ships without permission into seas close to South China Seas islands, seriously threatening China's sovereignty and security, seriously damaging Sino-US military ties and seriously harming regional peace and stability,’ China's defence ministry said.” BBC.com, October 2^nd.  Sino-American relations? If they ever were good, they are horrible now.

Yet Trump constantly refers to PRC President Xi Jinping as having been instrumental in enabling the détente with Korea’s Kim Jong-un, another Trump-buddy (Trump literally telling a rally that he “fell in love” with Kim). That Kim has not even begun to remove his nuclear capability and is claiming a lack of reciprocity on nuclear disarmament from the United States, doesn’t seem to restrain Trump from heaping praise on a process that is going to take a very long time to deliver.

Meanwhile, Xi now commands a naval fleet with more combat ships than the entire U.S. Navy, replete with silent nuclear submarines capable of launching nuclear-tipped missiles while underwater, a shiny new aircraft carrier, lots of high-performance stealth aircraft and a litany of highly sophisticated warships with every defensive and offensive weapon imaginable. Not to mention the ICBMs capable of reaching all of the United States. We may be more sophisticated, but our forces are thinly spread out all over the world. China’s forces are concentrated in Asia where they clearly dominate the region. Absent an all-out war, our military has conceded that there is little the United States can do at this stage to undo China’s rather solidified power in the region.

China is heavily focused on exerting hegemony over all of Asia. Xi’s “Belt and Road” initiative has begun investing billions and billions of dollars to build massive rail and highway infrastructure from China back through the rest of Asia, following the old Silk Route. This connectivity would give China super-control of that region’s economy.

As the United States unraveled the about-to-be-signed Trans Pacific Partnership, a massive Pacific Rim multinational trade agreement, China stepped in with an alternative agreement that clearly excluded the United States, and was instantly warmly received. China has become the champion of “free trade,” now that the United States has negated that policy (which it created) and turned to isolationism and limited bilateral trade agreements instead.

Meanwhile the PRC-US trade war has exploded out of control. US consumer prices are shuddering upwards. Watching China shut off their American farm-goods purchases, US farmers are hoping that normal trade relations are restored before Trump’s short-term agricultural bailout funds are depleted. Trump keeps promising that China will cave, but the reverse seems to be happening; President Xi would lose inestimable power within his own country should he give in to U.S. demands.

As my October 1^st, blog, USMCA - Winners: Big Business / Losers: The Little Guys, points out, despite Donald Trump’s deceptive braggadocio that it was the United States that rebuffed a “desperate” request by the PRC to resume bilateral trade negotiations in the face of a mounting tariff war, the reverse occurred: “Chinese officials canceled the planned negotiations after Trump announced he would impose new levies of up to 10 percent on another $200 billion in Chinese imports, effective Monday [9/24]. Beijing vowed to strike back, slapping duties of up to 10 percent on an additional $60 billion in American products.” Washington Post, September 22^nd.

Sure, China will eventually negotiate a trade agreement with us, but notwithstanding an expected Trump victory lap at that event, you can bet that China will come away with a vastly better deal than Trump has promised his constituents. Whatever else may be said about the Trump era, the United States has pretty much squandered decades of credibility, influence and global power that better presidents, Republican and Democrat, had built up during and after World War II.

How bad is it? Globally, Trump scored a nasty 70% in a Pew no-confidence survey (below Putin’s 62% and Xi’s 56%). “A wide-ranging survey shows diminished trust in American world leadership under Trump compared with that of his predecessor, Barack Obama — but also suggests that many do not want to see the U.S. elbowed aside by China in terms of global preeminence.

“[Pictures of foreign leaders looking on with disdain or even responding with open public laughter at Trump’s self-aggrandizement] “reinforce the findings of a global attitudes survey released by the Pew Research Center on Monday [10/1], which paints a picture of an increasingly isolated United States, underpinned by doubts as to whether Trump would do the right thing in a crisis and a sense of slipping U.S. leadership on issues such as human rights.

“‘America’s global image plummeted following the election of President Donald Trump, amid widespread opposition to his administration’s policies and a widely shared lack of confidence in his leadership,’ the nonpartisan Washington-based think tank wrote.

“The 25-nation survey, it said, found that the U.S. president’s image ‘remains poor’ in much of the world — with some notable exceptions, such as Israel, where Trump maintains considerable popularity, and South Korea, where a watchful public keeps a close eye on how Washington deals with volatile North Korea.” Los Angeles Times, October 2^nd. Will the world ever trust us again, knowing that our best practices and policies can be undone by a single rogue president? I wonder if China, when facing the United States, will finally get tired of winning?

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is with true sadness that I watch unfriendly world leaders, particularly in China and Russia, play Donald Trump like a puppet at the expense of the American people.