Donald Trump ONLY likes The Foreign Affairs where he can bully a weak country…
China is NOT weak….
Donald bought his cronies and businessmen….
Paid his respects and left….
President Donald Trump was riding the early high of his return to power last year when he took his first major foreign trip and declared that he would make a sharp break from years of U.S. nation-building around the world.
Exactly one year after that visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, he came to China at a very different moment in his presidency, with inflation spiraling and no easy way out of a conflict with Iran. The fight has ensnared the U.S. military, driving energy prices up and Trump’s approval rating down.
This time, there were no sweeping declarations about how Trump’s America would manage the world, nor backslapping bonhomie shared with Gulf royals who offered golden swords and honor guards riding Arabian steeds.
Instead, there was Chinese President Xi Jinping, respectful but businesslike, welcoming but appearing to bend little on the U.S. leader’s priorities.
Trump came to Beijing hoping to do trade deals. Xi made it known that Taiwan’s fate, not investment, was China’s top priority — yanking the spotlight from Trump’s preferred focus to warn of “clashes and even conflicts” with the United States should disagreements over the disputed island be mismanaged.
Trump left on Friday with a promise of a Xi trip to the White House in September and trade deals that were mostly a disappointment, at least as measured by the 8 percent drop in Boeing’s stock price between Trump’s arrival in Beijing and his departure. The president declared delight that the trip made it possible for top U.S. business executives to meet the Chinese leader, but offered little evidence of transactions that resulted….
…
It was a stark shift from a year ago, when the president hopped from one Gulf monarchy to another to declare that a new era was at hand. Back then, he had just imposed sweeping tariffs on the globe, including ones on China that eventually peaked at 145 percent. He vowed that Russia’s war in Ukraine would soon end under his guidance. And he was pushing Iran to engage in diplomacy to abandon its nuclear program.
Most of those efforts have fallen by the wayside. The Ukraine war still rages. Many of the tariffs were tossed by the Supreme Court. And Iran diplomacy has been set aside in favor of war….
…
Some Chinese analysts said that they take Trump’s ambitions seriously — but that they believe his vision is of a United States with a smaller shadow across the globe.
“I think he wants to fundamentally change the relations between the U.S. and the entire world. In the past, the U.S. was the unipolar hegemon providing public goods in the economic and security sense. Now he wants to change the relationship completely and to make the U.S. evolve from an empire to a nation state, just like everyone else,” said Da Wei, director of the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University….
Note….
The Russian leader will go to Beijing on Tuesday for talks with President Xi Jinping. The Kremlin said he had watched President Trump’s visit closely.
image….Politico
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.