Because of the US liberal establishment’s near-demented dislike for their duly elected president, Donald Trump, Chinese criticism that US has returned to a “Cold War mentality” has been widely welcomed in and around the US political elite’s Georgetown headquarters.
Beijing was responding testily to the publication of a new US national security policy that named both Russia and China as America’s geopolitical rivals and listed the potential threats they posed.
Whatever the inconsistencies and indeed embarrassments in his beloved social media posts, as he comes to the end of his first year in office, it is apparent that President Trump has not wavered from the no-nonsense, America-first policies that won him the White House.
He has driven his tax reforms through Congress, abandoned the tree-hugging environmental policies of the Obama administration and torn up Washington’s acceptance of the Paris Climate Accord with its program to reverse apparent man-made global warming. He has yet to build his wall to keep out Mexican migrants. However, he has thus far won his battle to exclude Arab citizens from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen with a Supreme Court decision that the travel ban can stand pending further legal challenges.
And despite the still-puzzling links between his campaign team and Russia, Trump has not really stinted on his chauvinism. He has accused China of unfair trade practices, of stacking the deck to its advantage by demanding Washington accord Chinese firms American market access, which is simply not available for US firms in China.
Trump has sniffed that when it comes to manufacturing, globalization is a cover for economies such as China, India and Indonesia to enjoy unfair advantages. This tended to ignore US dominance of Internet products and services, the oil, gas and power engineering industries and the massive but not always apparent influence of US banking and finance. It also ignores the reality that “rust-bucket” industries, not simply in America, are those that have moved to cheaper, less regulated countries. US miners who voted for Trump and his promise to reestablish their failing industry will be among his very harshest critics if he fails to deliver on his turn-around promises for US coal mines.
What is so odd about the Beijing protest at Trump’s new US security policy is that any responsible government would always be analyzing from where its greatest threats came and working on possible scenarios and how they could be countered. That is what the business of government is all about. And military commanders around the world spend much of their time examining what would happen if they had to go to war, even with their current allies. For instance, it is frankly unthinkable that there is not, somewhere within the headquarters of China’s People’s Liberation Army headquarters, a fully-developed plan for the invasion of North Korea.
Thus for Beijing to complain that Trump’s new security policy is cast in the terms of Cold War rhetoric is complete nonsense. The touchy-feely diplomacy of the Obama years, that embraced virtually everyone except tragically the Palestinians, was always a sham. The Trump bombast may sometimes be deeply objectionable, as with his anti-Muslim ravings, but at least he has the virtue of refusing to conceal his thoughts. Like it or loathe it, you generally know where you are with Donald Trump.
