The president of China Xi Jinping came on a state visit to the US that provided little in terms of concrete measures but Trump was effusive in his efforts to show Xi how much he admired him, so much so that one must think that Xi was embarrassed. Being praised may please someone but most people become uncomfortable when someone goes overboard and goes on about how wonderful they are. They are not like Trump who likes nothing more than to have people around them like Natalie Harp who gush over how wonderful he is and he probably thinks that others like it too.
Xi in turn responded with what reads like a Yelp review.
Trump almost visibly glowed with delight when Xi praised the quality of service and attention to detail of his White House visit. “Everything is done to the highest order of perfection, and there is thought in every little detail,” the Chinese president said through a translator. “And it’s greatly appreciated.”
You could describe that as the meaningless courtesies of routine statecraft, but it also suggested a high-flying hotel guest offering his compliments to the concierge: The eggs this morning were entirely delicious. And the way your people turn down the sheets at night: exquisite!
…In large part, the absolute nothingness of this summit reflects the fact that China is already winning across the board and Xi needed nothing from Trump beyond the legitimation provided by a diplotainment spectacle “to the highest order of perfection.” As China scholars Nicholas Bequelin and Yaqiu Wang write in a Foreign Policy analysis published before the summit, over the first 19 months of Trump’s second term, the geopolitical “balance of power has shifted in Beijing’s favor”.
…Xi has no need to strike an overtly aggressive posture and can afford to cosplay friendship with Trump because “the West,” or at least its greatest military and economic power, is doing a terrific job of declining all on its own. To borrow the nostrum attributed to Napoleon, the Chinese president is smart enough not to interrupt an opponent while he’s making a mistake.
Trump came into power hyperbolically claiming that the US was in a terrible state and that he would restore America’s greatness. But Andrew O’Hehir writes that Xi must be feeling good about how Trump’s policies and actions are aiding China’s effort to become the dominant power.
[Trump] has now destroyed the illusion that America was either great or good, and has entirely abandoned the nation’s role as self-appointed leader of the so-called free world. The way that happened has been enormously damaging — but, honestly, it was about time.
To a significant degree, this change is about Americans waking up to facts that were painfully obvious to nearly everyone else. Only Americans view American politics in isolation, as if we were special children on a magic island and the rest of the world still had dial-up internet and village dances.
…This administration’s incoherent and chaotic blend of expansionist, isolationist and protectionist policies — a wannabe late-medieval fortress-state that expels “outsiders,” but also a military superpower that imposes its will anywhere and everywhere — has culminated, at least for now, in humiliation and surrender on multiple fronts. Allowing Benjamin Netanyahu to lure or goad the U.S. into an unprovoked war with Iran may end up among the most disastrous foreign-policy mistakes in American history, which is really saying something.
…It’s hard to outdo the first sentence of China analyst Ryan Hass’ essay for Brookings: “The United States and Israel fought Iran, and China won.” In his analysis, the U.S. once again squandered its resources and its global credibility in a counterproductive and pointless struggle for military hegemony, while the Chinese remained focused on this century’s “defining geopolitical contest: the battle for technological leadership.”
…In the short term, it will probably drive some countries back to burning coal and accelerate oil drilling in the Western Hemisphere. But as Patricia Cohen of the New York Times reports, “over the longer term, this energy shock,” hard on the heels of the one caused by Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion in 2022, “is likely to accelerate a transition to renewables like solar and wind as well as nuclear power.”
Electric batteries have become far more efficient over the last several years, and electric cars are more affordable than ever. In April, wind and solar power produced more electricity globally than natural gas, for the first time. From the Chinese point of view, the timing is exquisite. Under Trump, the U.S. has gone all-in on fossil fuels and actively worked to crush renewable technologies, whether out of pure corruption and cronyism, macho ideology or misguided mid-century nostalgia. (Spoiler alert: It’s all three.)
China already dominates the global market, as Cohen writes, in “wind turbines, high-voltage cables, transformers, solar panels, batteries, software to manage energy flows and more.”Furthermore, Chinese industrial strategy has dictated producing that stuff well beyond the level of domestic demand, in order to flood overseas markets at low prices and take advantage of a moment exactly like this one. If you’ve been to Europe recently, you’ve seen the increasingly popular Chinese-made BYD hatchbacks and SUVs, often with starting prices below $30,000. (While not technically banned in the U.S., these cars are subject to a 100% tariff.)
You could call that ruthless economic warfare, or you could call it capitalist competition, an arena where the Chinese have excelled. But the Trumpian decision to retreat to the 1970s on energy policy is more than a strategic miscalculation; it’s a symptom of America’s near-psychotic disassociation from the rest of the world across a whole range of policies and attitudes.
…When the Chinese tell small nations in Asia, as Hass puts it, that if the U.S. couldn’t handle a “second-rate regional military power like Iran” it is no longer a guarantor of global military stability, there is no obvious counterargument. More important still is what he calls the “narrative contrast”: China presents itself as a straightforward business partner and “reliable steward of the international order,” while America is “a violent and reckless pursuer of its own interests.” Or someone’s interests, anyway. Definitely not yours or mine.
As Ryan Hass writes:
China’s ascent is not what America’s architects and advocates for striking Iran had in mind. Rather, they argued that America would emerge from victory over Iran stronger while China would be weakened. In this telling, if Iran’s government fell, then China’s anti-West coalition of partners would be diminished. China would lose access to discounted Iranian oil, which accounted for roughly 13% of its overall oil imports. More intangibly, China would be exposed as a bystander, stuck reacting to U.S. President Donald Trump’s bold gambits rather than a shaper of global events itself.
Events of the past several months have disproven such blinkered assumptions. To the contrary, as Robert Kagan has argued, Iran will emerge stronger and more influential from the conflict. This is because Tehran will enjoy leverage over every major economy in the world through its control of the Strait of Hormuz.
China also will gain on a relative basis from America’s setback against Iran. Beijing sees the United States wearing itself down while China preserves its strength and keeps its resources concentrated on what it views as the defining geopolitical contest: the battle for technological leadership. For China, hegemony in the Persian Gulf region would carry more burdens than benefits. China is content to remain a friend to all and an enemy to none without having to assume the burdens of becoming a security guarantor in the region.
Trump’s destruction of US soft power has been obvious for some time. What may be less obvious, but no less real, is the loss of even hard power, as its floundering in the Persian Gulf demonstrates. Trump can rename lakes and gulfs and straits all he wants, but that just makes him and the US look ridiculous, since no one mistakes that for power.
Hass concludes:
If America is serious about contesting China’s vision of global leadership, it will need to rediscover strategic discipline, reinvest in alliances, and concentrate on technological advancement as the principal measure of national power.
Strategic discipline? Reinvest in alliances? Concentrate on technological advancement? Trump is utterly incapable of any of those things and it is not clear if subsequent presidents can pull the US out of the pit into which he has dropped it.
A bigger question, and one for which I have no idea as to the answer, is whether this decline in US global power and influence is the result of all empires inevitably going into decline and that Trump merely accelerated the process by his chaotic behavior, or whether more far-sighted and strategic leadership could have prevented it.
As for your last question, ‘prevented’ is a strong word, but I’d say more far-sighted and strategic leadership could have at least deferred it for a few years, possibly longer.
Part of the problem, of course, is that some of this in the U.S. has been building up for a long time. Nixon directly played to the Lost Cause to get elected, Reagan actively played footsie with the evangelical and libertarian movements in order to get their help to stack the courts, Bush Jr. had a whole cabinet of people who believed that a good crisis shouldn’t go to waste… and all the while, the Democrats were not only complacent and assuming ‘business as usual’ while business was getting far less as usual, but the Democrats under Clinton were actively becoming the tools of the billionaires and what anywhere else in the world would consider a centre-right party. Basically after Reagan the Democrats became pretty much the ‘sane Republicans’ of the previous generation, because they too had discovered that it didn’t really matter what they did when they were in office because most of the population didn’t understand well enough to care.
Basically I’d say the downfall of the American Empire came when one of the two parties became more interested in tapping into the population’s darker desires to retain power at all costs than in actually making things better for their own constituents. And that’s basically everything post-Nixon.
Always remember that Roger Ailes, who helped found Fox News, was an active part of Nixon’s ‘dirty tricks’ committee. Those were the people who felt that the problem with Watergate wasn’t that Nixon had done illegal things, but that the media had reported on it in a way that made Nixon look bad and forced him to step down. Those were the people who spent years building up Conservative Talk Radio on cheap AM radio bands and building an audience of resentment to the point where something like Fox News would have enough of an audience to pay for itself. The ones who have been actively undermining the entire concept of democracy in the U.S. for over fifty years while their nominal opposition kept saying “Oh, it’s not really that bad.”
While not everything horrible in the U.S. is the fault of Nixon and his co-conspirators (I mean, the Lost Cause and the end of actual Reconstruction after the Civil War laid the groundwork for it, and U.S. Imperial Adventurism goes back even before its founding but really accelerated with the Spanish-American War of 1898), the fact that people in power back then preferred to sweep the problems under the rug rather than cause political waves by actually dealing with them is a good chunk of why we’re all here today, even those of us not in the U.S.
So I think to actually prevent the fall of the American Empire, you would need a time machine. As it is even before Trump’s second term it would have required active and major restructuring to fix the damage already done, and the fact that Biden was one of the ones trying to say ‘nice doggie’ to a rabid animal while seriously underestimating the problem meant even that didn’t happen.
With regards to the rest of the article, yeah, China is obviously the big winner from this. Both the U.S. and Russia are currently in the midst of destroying themselves in wars that didn’t need to be fought. All China needs to do is act like the grown-up in the room and the stable business partner.
China is exporting drones to Iran but I doubt the buffoon-in-chief brought it up.
(On the issue of energy, the last few years has seen the emergence of cheaper non-lithium batteries that can act as a power buffer accompanying new, even better photovoltaic cells. The holy grail is manufacturing long-lasting cheap perovskite PV cells)
.
-Mano et al, important things are afoot in Britain. The new Labour leader is bringing in new changes which I hope will inspire Americans too.
(The Guardian has no paywall, and at Youtube A Different Bias has several entries about the Labour conference)
Jenora Feuer@#1, well put.
I am unsure about what the implications of the decline of the USA as a superpower, and the rise of China in it’s place, really are. I don’t know how much China will want to interfere in the politics of other nations or whether they will move to change the economic system to be less favourable to the accumulation of enormous wealth by the few (I know they’ve stomped on some of their own super-rich, but they don’t seem to be ideologically opposed to the accumulation of that wealth as long as it’s shared with the appropriate politicians). And I could go on, however the area on which I have seen little to no commentary is how this will affect science and engineering research around the world.
I am not clear on is whether China has the science and engineering research base to take over from the USA, and if it does what it’s attitude will be to sharing that research with the rest of the world. I do know that in some areas there is considerable political interference, such that eg. in acupuncture all Chinese studies are positive despite there being no anatomical or physiological basis for the practice. If that kind of problem occurs in other subject areas then the whole world will be the poorer, as it will if the problem doesn’t occur, but the Chinese decline to share their research with the rest of us.
“To borrow the nostrum attributed to Napoleon, the Chinese president is smart enough not to interrupt an opponent while he’s making a mistake.”
That’s Sun Tsu, not Napoleon. I keep hearing people misattribute quotes from Sun.
@tonykehoe #4:
What did Sun Tzu write? Snopes attributes the comment to Napoleon.
@tonykehoe #4 interesting, I have only every heard that as attributed to Sun Tzu, never Napoleon, so I guess it depends on the surrounding culture as to who gets credit?
More on topic:
Strong disagree. I think only a small percentage of Americans realize how terrible a picture of America the facts point to. A heavy reliance on just a few media sources and social media means that few americans actually have a wide perspective.
The problem with this question is that it doesn’t address the interrelatedness of the two. Trump is president because of the decline. The decline is made worse by Trump. Decline caused by Trump -- Trump caused by decline. Broadly speaking American decline has been caused by a successful subversion of culture by the wealthy to protect the value of wealth over labour. Using money to sway media and politics against regulation and labour has led to a situation where people are angry and they don’t even know why or who they should be angry at.
It’s frustrating so many non-americans are gettting hurt by it too