The Patriot Post® · Trump Tackles China

“The business of America is business,” said President Calvin Coolidge with characteristic brevity a century ago, and not much has changed since then.

No one knows this better than our current president, Donald Trump, which is why he didn’t go to China alone. Yes, he took Secretary of State Marco Rubio, but he also took with him the CEOs from 14 of the world’s most powerful companies, including SpaceX’s Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.

The Dow is up this morning, flirting with the 50,000 mark, which means American business likes what it’s seeing from the American president in China.

Beijing rolled out the red carpet for Donald Trump, and its diplomatic protocol reflected that Trump’s standing with the ChiComs has improved since his last visit there in 2017, when he was greeted on the tarmac by a relatively low-level schlub. No, Chinese President Xi Jinping didn’t greet him this time, either, “but this time,” as the New York Post’s Steven Nelson reports, “Beijing noticeably upgraded the reception by sending Vice President Han Zheng along with both ambassadors and senior foreign affairs officials.”

In his speech earlier today in Beijing, Trump showed customary respect for the history between the two nations, touching upon Confucius as well as Ben Franklin and George Washington. “The relationship between the American and Chinese people goes all the way back to America’s founding,” Trump noted. “Two-and-a-half centuries later, that first connection has grown into one of the most consequential relationships in world history.” He also noted that the Chinese helped build our Transcontinental Railroad, even if he didn’t mention the, er, somewhat taxing conditions that those Chinese laborers toiled under. Trump also noted that the Chinese people “love basketball and blue jeans,” and that “Chinese restaurants in America today outnumber the five largest restaurant chains in the United States.”

Trump even invited Xi to the White House in September, indicating that the two countries are committed to continued dialogue. After all, that’s what Trump does. Unlike Joe Biden, he communicates, and so do his people.

According to the White House readout of Trump’s two-and-a-half-hour meeting with Xi, Trump pushed for China to play a larger role in brokering a peace deal with Iran, and that it might happen. According to Fox News’s Jacqui Heinrich, the readout says that “Xi told Trump that China opposes Iran’s efforts to militarize the Strait of Hormuz and charge tolls for its use, and China agrees with the U.S. that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.” The readout also said that Xi “expressed interest in buying more American oil to reduce China’s dependence on the Strait.”

The sticking point was, predictably, Taiwan. Trump indicated that U.S. policy toward Taiwan hasn’t changed, but that’s not good enough for the Chinese, who’ve become increasingly belligerent toward that highly successful island nation just across the Strait of Taiwan, which continues to serve as a free-market thorn in China’s side.

China expert Michael Pillsbury, who wrote the highly influential book The Hundred Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower, seemed shocked by the stridency of China’s message about Taiwan. “That never happens,” he said, referring to the unusually grave, even threatening nature of China’s statement about Taiwan.

According to the Chinese readout of Trump’s meeting with Xi: “If it is handled properly, the bilateral relationship will enjoy overall stability. Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts, putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy. ‘Taiwan independence’ and cross-Strait peace are as irreconcilable as fire and water. … The U.S. side must exercise extra caution in handling the Taiwan question.”

So what’s different? Why is China all of a sudden rattling its saber about Taiwan? Could this be a bit of desperation on Xi’s part, a phony-tough desire to show strength amid questions about his continued leadership of the world’s largest nation?

After all, when was the last time China got its hands dirty in a real military conflict? In recent years, the ChiComs have seemed far more interested in exercising economic dominance and sowing political chaos around the globe without resorting to military action.

Indeed, columnist Hugh Hewitt noted that China is a rising power, but perhaps it’s not rising as quickly or as forcefully as it wants the world to believe. After all, the U.S. made quick work of all of China’s high-tech military weaponry in Iran. In addition, China, perhaps more than any country besides Iran, has taken a hit from U.S. military action there. China absolutely guzzles Iranian oil — 90% of Iran’s oil goes to China, and 50% of China’s oil comes through the Strait of Hormuz — and it’s been unable to quench its thirst lately with the Strait all bolloxed up like it is. That means Chinese industry is suffering, and it means China’s ability to flood worldwide markets with its goods is also suffering. So it’s definitely in China’s interest to lean on Iran, even if doing so will benefit Donald Trump and the United States. This is Trump playing the long game, or 3D chess, or whatever the grand strategists want to call it.

No wonder Xi and his fellow commies wanted Joe Biden to win. They could roll Biden six ways until Sunday. But Trump? Good luck w’ that.

Xi has been doing some reading, namely a book by a Harvard professor and longtime presidential adviser on China, Graham Allison, titled Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? The book posits that a rising power is often historically destined to clash with a ruling power. Allison notes that these conditions have been in place 16 times over the past 500 years, and 12 of them ended violently. History, then, suggests that the odds are against a lasting peace between the U.S. and China, and this is more serious than Athens versus Sparta, or even Germany versus Great Britain, because both of today’s belligerents have nuclear weapons. Lots of them. China, in fact, has doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal in the past 10 years.

The Chinese are no doubt learning from what’s happening in the Persian Gulf these days. Their notes so far indicate that even if they militarily smash Taiwan, they might not achieve the political outcome they desire. So instead, according to a paper from the Council on Foreign Relations, China might consider a “layered campaign of coercion” toward Taiwan, which might include “maritime quarantine, cyber disruption, financial pressure, and selective military action.”

Taiwan is the big issue for China. Full stop.

Xi, though, acknowledges the obvious. “President Trump and I, fully aware of the expectations of our two nations and the international community, have had multiple meetings and phone calls and kept China-U.S. relations generally stable,” he said in his address. “We both believe that the China-U.S. relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world. We must make it work and never mess it up. Both China and the United States stand to gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio also acknowledged the obvious on Air Force One. Asked a dumb question by Fox News’s Sean Hannity — whether he views China as our top geopolitical foe — Rubio answered, “Yeah, it’s both our top political challenge … and it’s also the most important relationship for us to manage. … We’re gonna have interests of ours that are gonna be in conflict with interests of theirs.”

Missing from all this talk about business and Iran and Taiwan was talk of 78-year-old Jimmy Lai, the aging political prisoner, former newspaper publisher, and fearless champion of once-democratic Hong Kong. The U.S. Senate passed a resolution calling on Trump to push for Lai’s release, with a 100-0 vote.

Lai’s incarceration is symbolic of what we’re dealing with regarding Communist China — a brutal regime that lies and cheats and steals and imprisons those who speak out against it. Beyond all the talk today about cooperation between the U.S. and China, we shouldn’t ever forget what kind of monstrous regime we’re dealing with.

China, despite Trump’s diplomatic talk, isn’t our friend. It’s our frenemy, at best. The ChiComs lie, and they cheat, and they steal, and they buy up American farmland right next to our military bases.

But still, as Abraham Lincoln said in his First Inaugural Address, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” Indeed, for the sake of the world, the U.S. and China must not be hostile enemies. But nor can we let the Chinese think for a minute that the world is theirs for the taking.