One year on, Asia has conquered Donald Trump, not vice versa
President Xi Jinping caught on early that lavishing the US president with pomp and praise could easily tame the harsh, anti-Asia rhetoric he put on display before his election
US President Donald Trump’s first year in office has proven to be the chaotic, rambling Twitter-fuelled reality show that his many critics feared when the braggadocious billionaire and one-time television star became the first US president elected without any government or military experience.
There has been the head-spinning reshuffle of top White House personnel and a mountain of near-daily misstatements from the press office (“the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period”).
There was the messy, unplanned roll-out of the problematic “travel ban”. There’s been the stench of crony capitalism and nepotism with the hiring of his daughter and son-in-law into influential West Wing positions, and the greater stench of racial insensitivity (lauding parading neo-Nazis as “fine people”).
And all of this was against the backdrop of an ongoing special counsel investigation into whether Russia interfered in the US election to help boost the Trump campaign; there have already been indictments and guilty pleas with more expected.
Yet after a year in office, Trump has found a way to nuance or totally discard many, if not most, of his previous positions on Asia. Normally, political opponents and critics would deride a president who so blithely jettisons his old campaign rhetoric as a “flip-flopper”. In Trump’s case, those opponents and critics are breathing a sigh of relief.
Trump’s vanishing act: a metaphor for the US in Asia?
The biggest change from rhetoric to reality has been in US relations with China.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump told one rally of supporters: “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country and that’s what they’re doing. It’s the greatest theft in the history of the world.”
Trump at various times accused China of stealing American jobs, hacking into US computer networks, and inventing climate change as a “hoax” to disadvantage American companies. He even said he was “not surprised” to find Chinese athletes cheating at the Olympic Games because, he said, “that’s their MO”.
The US-China relationship was set to enter its most contentious phase perhaps since the normalisation of relations 45 years ago under Richard Nixon.
But the Chinese leadership learnt to take the measure of the man. Xi paid a pilgrimage to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and lavished the novice president with the praise he covets. Xi also came with gifts in the form of some token trade concessions, like lifting China’s 14-year ban on American beef, opening a potentially lucrative market to US cattle farmers. Trump came away boasting about his great new relationship with his new “friend” Xi.
Forget the Xi-Trump bromance, it’s time the US came clean on its vision for China and Asia
Later, in his November visit to Beijing, Chinese leaders treated Trump royally, opening up the Forbidden City for a state dinner – making Trump the first foreign leader so honoured since the Communist Revolution of 1949.
In return for the flattery and red carpet treatment, Trump tempered his earlier rhetoric about China as a trade cheat and currency manipulator. “I don’t blame China,” Trump said in Beijing. “After all, who can blame a country for being able to take advantage of another country to the benefit of its citizens?” Trump instead blamed his own predecessors in the White House, saying they, not China, were responsible for letting “this out-of-control trade deficit to take place and to grow”.
Why Asia’s Muslim leaders would rather play it safe with Trump
Trump still remains mercurial and unpredictable, particularly when he takes to Twitter, leaving many of his administration’s policies contradictory and confusing. On China, for one, while Trump lauded his new bromance with Xi, and revelled in the royal treatment he received in Beijing, back home in Washington he released a new National Security Strategy document that listed China – along with Russia, North Korea, Iran and an Islamist terrorist group – as one of main threats to US power and influence in the world. Trump also seems likely in early 2018 to pursue new targeted trade penalties against imported Chinese steel, aluminium, washing machines and solar panels.
China and North Korea: What now if Xi-Trump bromance is over?
But behind the schoolyard jibes, real diplomacy is taking place and it reflects a remarkable degree of consistency with past administrations by using international alliances to tackle global problems.
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced plans for a January 16 summit in Vancouver for the 16 nations that sent troops to help South Korea during the 1950-53 Korean war, along with Japan, South Korea and India. And Joseph Yun, the state department’s special representative for North Korea policy and a career foreign service officer, recently travelled to Southeast Asia to engage in some old-fashioned diplomatic arm-twisting, pressuring both Thailand and Myanmar to sever their ties to the North Korean regime.
Trump’s more modulated positions on Asia, as distinct from his rhetoric, reflect the influence of seasoned diplomatic professionals at the State Department, such as Yun, as well as the career military men guiding America’s defence and foreign policy, such as Defence Secretary James Mattis and National Security Adviser HR McMaster.
But once Trump go to the White House, he seemed to learn that he faces the same constraints and regional complexities as his predecessors. He needs China and South Korea to help pressure Pyongyang, and threatening a trade war with either is not a way to promote cooperation.
In many areas, particularly in domestic policy, Trump has been a wrecking ball, as he tries to single-handedly reshape American government, policies and politics.
But as he enters the second year of this most unusual presidency, Asians can largely feel relieved. It seems the region has managed to reshape the new American president, more than he has reshaped the region. ■
Keith B. Richburg, a former Washington Post correspondent, is director of the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre