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WALL STREET JOURNAL
U.S.
Allies Fear Trump Will Pull a Nixon in China
Asian governments wonder whether
Trump will be tempted to strike a bargain with Beijing
By Andrew Browne
SHANGHAI—In a pointed message ahead of Donald Trump’s first presidential
swing through Asia, a Chinese shipyard launched the region’s largest
dredger.
The 17,000-ton Tiankun, dubbed the “magic island-maker,” can rip holes
in the seabed roughly equivalent to three Olympic-size swimming pools
every hour and signals a new phase in China’s South China Sea
construction that intimidates neighbors and directly challenges U.S.
regional leadership.
It is also a reminder that high on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s wish
list for the trip is an acknowledgment of China’s enlarged ambitions in
its own backyard vividly symbolized by airstrips, ports and military
facilities built atop half-submerged reefs in the world’s busiest
commercial waterway.
In Beijing, Mr. Trump will seek help on North Korea, his main priority,
as well as trade. China sees an opportunity for deal-making.
The question for Asian governments anxious about an impulsive U.S.
president weakened by investigations into Russian involvement in the
2016 election and looking for a foreign-policy success: Will he be
tempted to strike a bargain?
Mr. Xi has pushed for what he calls a “new type of great power
relations” with the U.S., an innocuous-sounding slogan but one freighted
with deep implications, not least that Washington would start treating
China as an equal and cede ground on its territorial demands in the
South China Sea and East China Sea. The arrangement could put Taiwan in
play as another of China’s “core interests” to be accommodated.
Such diplomacy would essentially create a G-2:
the U.S. and China carving up the globe between them.
Barack Obama rebuffed the idea as endangering U.S. friendships and
alliances in the region.
In recent days, the Trump White House has signaled it will push back,
too. Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, has spoken of a “free and
open Indo-Pacific region” as a counter to a Sino-centric order. There’s
talk of reviving a more formal grouping of the region’s big
democracies—the U.S., Japan, Australia and India—which to China looks
like a strategy to contain its advance.
Still, China regards Mr. Trump as a businessman, a mercurial one but in
the end open to pragmatic compromises. Chinese diplomats work on the
U.S. president through his family. Jared Kushner opened the door for
them to the inner circle. On the day she and her father were meeting Mr.
Xi in Mar-a-Lago earlier this year, Ivanka Trump scored a breakthrough
in an application to obtain Chinese trademarks for a line of handbags
and spas.
The outreach has paid dividends for Beijing. Mr. Trump is gushing about
his Chinese counterpart, telling Lou Dobbs on the Fox Business Network
after Mr. Xi’s elevation to Mao-like status at last month’s party
congress that “some people might call him the king of China.”
To the “barbarian handlers” around Mr. Xi, all this sets up well for Mr.
Trump’s visit to Beijing. They inherit an imperial tradition of
statecraft that bought off hostile tribes along the borders with a
mixture of flattery and baubles.
Cui Tiankai, the Chinese ambassador to Washington, has promised Mr.
Trump a “state visit-plus.” He knows that the grandeur of the Chinese
capital has a way of warping the perspective of visiting U.S. leaders.
Nixon was star-struck by the tyrant Mao. In engineering his “opening to
China” he not only shocked Taiwan but went behind Japan’s back, giving
America’s closest Asian ally almost no notice of the historic shift—a
point that rankled in Tokyo for decades, and helps explain Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe’s eagerness to court Mr. Trump today.
Mr. Abe’s solicitous personal diplomacy, including golf and burgers over
the weekend, reflects a long fear in Japan that Washington will do
another deal with Beijing over its head to reshape the region, as well
as suspicion of an “America First” president hostile to multilateral
trade arrangements and skeptical of alliances.
Expect Mr. Xi to deliver a few helpful gestures on North Korea at the
summit. Mr. Trump has been effective at persuading Mr. Xi to sign on to
tough U.N. sanctions. Additional Chinese moves, however, won’t go far
enough to collapse the Pyongyang regime. Bottom line: Chinese oil will
keep flowing.
Anticipate, too, a raft of business deals for Mr. Trump’s CEO entourage,
although U.S. executives on the ground expect few breakthroughs on
structural problems. For instance, Mr. Xi is unlikely to unwind the
mercantilist policies of his first term that are increasingly shutting
U.S. tech companies out of China.
Beijing is deft at mixing soft diplomacy, like commercial giveaways,
with the harder variety. The Tiankong dredger embodies Beijing’s
strategy of pushing Chinese interests by any means short of war.
Either way, Mr. Xi is likely to calculate that time is on his side. His
newfound stature effectively makes him a Chinese leader for life. Mr.
Trump’s hold on office is more tenuous. |