A Failing, Flailing President Supplicates Xi

Why China has contempt for Donald Trump

One of Donald Trump’s signature claims is that Joe Biden made America a “laughing stock”, and that he has made us great again and respected around the world.

Yet this is the opposite of the truth. As a result of Trump’s petulant, self-destructive policies, much of the world now holds him and America as a whole in contempt. As the New York Times reported just before Trump’s visit to Beijing, the Chinese now talk routinely about “American decline,” and describe Trump as “an accelerator of American decay.”

To be clear, China has many significant problems of its own. It faces a demographic crisis: Its working age population has been shrinking for more than a decade. Its economy is deeply unbalanced, relying on unsustainable trade surpluses and unproductive investment to make up for inadequate consumer spending. Its economic growth is slowing. It suffers from high youth unemployment. Discontent is rising, held in check by autocratic, police-state measures.

But despite China’s domestic troubles, in geopolitical terms China is on the ascendant. Trump’s visit to Beijing is a field trip by a failing, flailing would-be autocrat pleading with a real strongman, who leads a much more serious country, to bail him out of the mess he’s made.

To be fair, a portion of China’s relative rise and America’s relative decline reflect trends that pre-date Trumpian chaos. China’s manufacturing output overtook that of the U.S. around 15 years ago, and it was already the workshop of the world by the time Trump took office the first time:

The overall size of China’s economy, measured at purchasing power parity — that is, taking China’s lower price level into account — has exceeded that of the U.S. since 2015, although China’s GDP is still lower in dollar terms.

China remains poorer than the U.S., with real GDP per capita about a third of the U.S. level. But while the U.S. still has higher productivity and technological sophistication, the Chinese have been gaining on us for a long time and narrowing the gap.

Furthermore, China’s still relatively low GDP per capita obscures the fact that the Chinese tech sector is highly sophisticated, in many areas as sophisticated as anything in the West.

As I said, all of this predates Trumpian chaos. Yet Trump has vastly weakened America’s geopolitical position -- in effect,throwing away whatever cards we had.

How so? Let me count the ways.

First, before Trump the United States possessed one big geopolitical advantage over China: We were the leader of an alliance of nations bound together by their shared commitment to democracy. As the chart at the top of this post shows, for well over a decade the size of the U.S. economy has been outstripped by the Chinese economy. However, the combined economies of the NATO countries remain much bigger than China’s economy. Furthermore, the free-world advantage is even larger when Japan, Korea, Australia and other non-NATO U.S. allies are included. But thanks to Trump, these democracy-aligned countries are better described as former allies.

Trump has declared that NATO’s members are “useless” because they haven’t rescued him from his Iran debacle. But why should they? Trump has broken all of America’s trade agreements. He has demanded that Canada become the 51^st state and that Denmark hand over Greenland. He supported the anti-European Orban regime in Hungary and has made it increasingly clear that he supports Russia’s attempt to conquer Ukraine. Now he expects nations he has insulted and betrayed at every opportunity to come to his aid in a war he started. True, bullying and whining have worked for Trump throughout his nepo-baby life — but they don’t work against sovereign nations that retain their pride.

But that’s not all. In addition to trashing our alliances, Trump is doing all he can to condemn America to scientific and technological backwardness.

While Chinese is at the forefront of the green electrotech revolution, this administration’s anti-renewable energyobsession grows ever more extreme. For example, the Department of Defense is using bogus national security concerns to block essentially all development of wind power in the United States – at a time when many Americans are facing significant jumps in energy bills due to data center energy consumption.

In Congressional testimony yesterday Doug Burgum, the Secretary of the Interior, insisted that solar farms are useless because “when the sun goes down, they produce zero electricity.” Rep. Jared Huffman responded,

Mr. Chairman, I request unanimous consent to enter in the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of: It’s a battery. China’s figured it out. That’s why they’re cleaning our clock on clean energy.

The Chinese are indeed cleaning our clock on clean energy. Last year solar and wind power accounted for the vast majority of the growth in Chinese electricity generation:

And backward-looking energy policy is part of a broader abandonment of the future, as MAGA wages war on science in general.

Trump’s trade protectionism, which was supposed to revive U.S. manufacturing, is completely failing in that goal. It has, however, graphically revealed U.S. weakness vis a vis China, which has easily weathered the impact of Trump’s tariffs while demonstrating that its ability to retaliate by cutting off the supply of rare earths gives it the upper hand.

And now, of course, Trump is visiting China against the background of a humiliating defeat in the Persian Gulf at the hands of Iran – which China has long supported through oil purchases and dual-use technology transfers.

Thus the formerly strutting Trump is forced to fly to Beijing as a supplicant, hoping that Xi Jinping will offer concessions that will extricate him from the domestic and international trainwreck he has wrought. Yes, Xi might offer some soybean purchases for failing American farmers and some deals to the executives traveling with Trump as a face-saving sop. But rest assured that the Chinese will use Trump’s debilitated status to their ultimate advantage, pressing for concessions on Taiwan while letting Trump bleed away what’s left of U.S. credibility on a failed war.

What a sad and pathetic spectacle.

MUSICAL CODA