american president

Ahead of President Trump’s arrival in Beijing on Wednesday for his summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, longtime China expert Kurt M. Campbell offered a novel way of watching the two leaders’ high-stakes faceoff. Think of it not as nation-versus-nation or army-versus-army, but as the sort of “single combat” celebrated in ancient literature, along the lines of David and Goliath in the Bible or Achilles and Hector in “The Iliad.”

“This one has the feel of a geopolitical heavyweight matchup,” Campbell, chairman of the Asia Group strategic consulting firm, wrote in Foreign Affairs this week.

Unlike in their initial get-together early in Trump’s first term, both men now are seasoned leaders in their separate ways — Xi an unchallenged dictator, and an envious Trump seeking to be. Both act with few immediate checks on their power, though Xi acts strategically and Trump impulsively and transactionally. And both, as leaders of super-powers, have the capability to shape the economic and security fates of a wary world.

That world, Campbell concluded in his essay, is “eager to see whether the two leaders emerge driving together in the chariot, or with one dragging the other behind,” as Achilles did the vanquished Hector.

However the Trump-Xi meeting ends, Trump is no Achilles going into this match. In fact, in the six decades of U.S.-China relations, perhaps no American president has entered the summit arena in a weaker position than Trump, the would-be strongman and artiste of the deal. Worse, his weakness — and by extension his country’s — is mostly self-inflicted.

Trump had postponed what was intended as an early April meeting in hopes of striding triumphantly into Beijing as the conqueror of Iran, a China ally. Instead China is receiving him as a “giant with a limp,” in the phrase of its Communist Party-controlled Global Times newspaper.

Trump’s Mideast war, the sort he’d promised never to start, lingers for a third month in a costly stalemate — $29 billion and counting — that has humiliated the president in the public words of Germany’s chancellor and the private thoughts of many more global leaders, Xi likely among them. Trump can’t “project the same arrogance” as he did visiting China in 2017, a former Chinese army officer, Yue Gang, told the New York Times.

At home, the conflict has caused gasoline prices and inflation to spike while tanking Trump’s already depressed polls. A newly released CNN poll conducted April 30 to May 4 had 65% of Americans disapproving of his overall job performance and a whopping 70% against his handling of the economy — the issue that arguably got him elected. With experience, American consumers and soybean farmers now know that they, not the Chinese, have paid for Trump’s beloved tariffs.

The president’s standing at home could hardly have been helped by his parting words to reporters at the White House. Asked “to what extent are Americans’ financial situation motivating you to make a deal” with Iran, Trump blithely replied, “Not even a little bit.” He added, in the sort of political gaffe that journalist Michael Kinsley defined as telling the truth: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

He’s already a loser in the negotiations with Xi. For weeks the Trump administration has unsuccessfully urged China to use its leverage to goad Iran to accept a peace on Americans’ terms or, at a minimum, to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, given China’s self-interest as Iran’s biggest oil customer by far. As China scholar Henrietta Levin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the Associated Press, “I don’t think China has any interest in solving the problems the U.S. has created for itself in the Middle East.”

Not least, perhaps, because China has seen that, by the Pentagon’s own reckoning, the war has depleted U.S. stockpiles of weaponry after thousands upon thousands of strikes against Iran. And that has further raised questions in China and beyond about whether Trump would have the United States come to the defense of Taiwan, the self-governing, U.S.-armed island that China claims as its own.

After all, the thinking goes, if the United States can’t bring a lesser power like Iran quickly to heel, how might it fare against a near-peer such as China, especially with a diminished U.S. arsenal and Mideast distractions?

It’s mostly a mystery what the leaders’ talks might yield. In a break with diplomatic tradition, though not with Trump’s seat-of-the-pants style, apparently little planning went into this super-power summit — another reflection of a distracted U.S. side. Still, with a number of tech, agribusiness, finance and aerospace chieftains in tow, Trump and his team are hoping for a few politically appealing deliverables, such as sales of U.S. soybeans and Boeing aircraft, to give the president a lift back home.

But don’t look for progress on the longstanding issues dividing the United States and China over trade and military dominance in the Pacific region. And as for another of those perennial issues — climate change and clean-energy technology — the U.S. under Trump has willfully surrendered global preeminence to China, ceding markets for solar, wind energy, electric vehicles, grid storage and more in his backward-looking, ostrich-like obsession with drilling oil and mining coal.

Whatever hyperbolic claims Trump makes for his China trip, the outcome of the summit (on top of his quagmire in Iran) should at least be this: retiring the myth of Trump the deal-maker and savvy businessman.

If he were such a visionary, Trump would be prodding the nation to global leadership in technology and clean-energy investments, not reversing past progress and paying companies billions of taxpayers’ dollars to stop clean-energy projects. In markets worldwide, the future is now and America is forfeiting the game to China.

In this contest, Trump is letting Xi drive the chariot. Unfortunately, average Americans are the ones being dragged through the dust as China rides into the 21st century.

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