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- Cogito ergo sum
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The End of the American Century
Trump Is Ceding Global Leadership to China
Antony J. Blinken
President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump with President Xi Jinping, of China, and his wife Peng Liyuan during a tour of the Forbidden City, in Beijing. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
BEIJING — Amid the pomp that President Xi Jinping of China is bestowing upon his visiting American counterpart, President Trump, it’s hard not to see two leaders — and two countries — heading in very different directions.
Mr. Xi emerged from last month’s Communist Party Congress the undisputed master of the Middle Kingdom. “Xi Jinping Thought” was enshrined in the Constitution — an honor previously granted only to Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Breaking with precedent, Mr. Xi neglected to anoint a successor — a big hint that he feels emboldened to extend his rule beyond the second five-year term he has just begun. The Economist heralded Mr. Xi with an honorific usually reserved for America’s president: the world’s most powerful man.
Mr. Trump stepped off Air Force One in Beijing on Wednesday with historically low job-approval ratings, just hours after suffering a shellacking in off-year elections. His credibility is cratering abroad — polls have shown a drop in confidence in American leadership.
As the personal trajectories of Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi diverge, so too does the focus of their leadership. While Mr. Trump is obsessed with building walls, Mr. Xi is busy building bridges.
At the World Economic Forum in January, Mr. Xi proclaimed China the new champion of free trade and globalization. His “One Belt, One Road” initiative — with funding from the made-in-Beijing Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank — will invest $1 trillion in linking Asia with Europe through a network of sea routes, roads, railways and, yes, bridges. China will gain access to resources, export its excess industrial capacity and peacefully secure strategic footholds from which to project power.
While Mr. Trump shuns multilateralism and global governance, Mr. Xi increasingly embraces them.
The Trump administration has belittled the United Nations, withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, jettisoned America’s commitment to the Paris climate accord, tried to renege on the nuclear deal with Iran, questioned America’s core alliances in Europe and Asia, disparaged the World Trade Organization and multicountry trade deals, and sought to shut the door on immigrants.
Mr. Xi? He has grabbed leadership of the climate-change agenda, embraced the World Trade Organization’s dispute-resolution system and increased China’s voting shares at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Beijing is forging ahead with a trade pact that would include the major Asian economies plus Australia and New Zealand, but not the United States. China is now one of the leading contributors to the United Nations budget and peacekeeping operations. And Mr. Xi is making a determined play to attract the world’s cutting-edge scientists and innovators to China.
At home, Mr. Xi is making strategic investments that could allow China to dominate the 21st-century global economy, including in information technology and artificial intelligence — where, Eric Schmidt of Google has warned, China is poised to overtake the United States in the next decade. Mr. Xi is all-in on robotics, aerospace, high-speed rail, new-energy vehicles and advanced medical products.
Mr. Trump’s “strategic” investments — in coal and a quixotic effort to bring back manufacturing lost to automation — would make the United States the champion of the 20th-century economy.
All of this positions China to become, in Mr. Xi’s words, “a new choice for other countries” and the principal arbiter of something long associated with the United States: the international order. China has a profound stake in that order and a globalized world: It needs access to advanced technology and the export markets upon which its growth depends.
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
- tennyson
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Re: The End of the American Century
Trump lives in the past with his policies.
This may work with the aging population that support him, but the younger generation understand that his policies are backward looking vs forward looking.
"Do not confuse motion and progress, A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress"