Wall Street Journal - The World Waits Out Trump

Wall Street Journal

OPINION

GLOBAL VIEW

The World Waits Out Trump

The belief in Beijing, Moscow and Berlin is that the U.S. can no longer lead the globe.

By Walter Russell Mead

June 1, 2020

As a beleaguered Trump administration struggles with an unprecedented surge of domestic challenges, foreign leaders friendly and otherwise are recalibrating their strategies for coping with an unconventional administration embroiled in turbulence. It now looks as if China, Russia and Germany have decided how to handle President Trump through November. Berlin will ignore him; Moscow and Beijing will take advantage of U.S. distraction.

For Russia, this means overlooking its own economic problems and the coronavirus pandemic to step up its engagement in the Libyan civil war. For its part, the Chinese leadership seems to believe that it is impossible to conciliate Mr. Trump, but that there is also little to fear from him. An economic crisis worse than 2008, the greatest surge in racial and political dissension since 1968, and a presidential election likely to test America’s strife-filled political climate—no Chinese leader, least of all Xi Jinping, could be expected to ignore opportunities like these.

Beijing’s latest policy choices represent an across-the-board defiance of U.S. pressure. Last week, one of China’s most senior military officials, Gen. Li Zuocheng, gave a chilling speech in the Great Hall of the People: “If the possibility for peaceful reunification is lost,” he warned, “the people’s armed forces will, with the whole nation, including the people of Taiwan, take all necessary steps to resolutely smash any separatist plots or actions.” Beijing has always claimed the right to use force to block Taiwan’s independence. It is, however, unusual for such a senior military official to threaten the island so explicitly.

That threat came against the background of an escalating crisis in Hong Kong, where the Chinese Communist Party’s threat to impose new national-security laws on the city has generated global concern over the future of the “one country, two systems” approach that allowed Hong Kong to flourish after Britain’s departure in 1997. For Taiwan, Beijing’s apparent open contempt for previous pledges about two systems combined with open threats of war in the event of a Taiwanese declaration of independence demonstrates the party’s determination to gain full control over the island.

The CCP’s response to threatened U.S. sanctions on Hong Kong was also ominous. According to Western news reports, China has apparently told state-owned enterprises to halt some purchases it agreed to make as part of its Phase One trade agreement with the U.S. More American steps on Hong Kong will bring more trade retaliation, sources warned.

At the same time, Beijing is stressing tensions with India. It is making new territorial claims on the disputed frontier even as Chinese troops dig into positions on the Indian side of the line of control that separates the countries’ forces.

If the U.S. and its allies want a confrontational relationship, Beijing says, they can have one. China is not deterred.

Meanwhile, German Chancellor Angela Merkel blew up Mr. Trump’s plan for a high-profile demonstration of Western unity by declining his invitation to a June Group of Seven summit at Camp David—now postponed to September—citing pandemic-related concerns. Together with her decision to join French President Emmanuel Macron in promoting a massive aid package for the fragile Covid-hit southern economies in the Eurozone, a clear pattern emerges: As the world crisis intensifies, Germany’s priority will be the European Union. The president is not exactly irrelevant to Berlin’s thinking. But the German sense seems to be that there is little to gain by trying to work with Mr. Trump and little to lose by ignoring him.

The president’s critics will pounce on his inability to coordinate a united allied response to Chinese and Russian provocations as further proof of his inability to achieve constructive results in foreign affairs. They will not be entirely wrong, but this story has more characters than Donald Trump. The problem isn’t only that Russia, China and Germany don’t see much point in trying to reach agreements with the current president. They likely believe that the triple threat of the pandemic, economic crash and civil unrest in the U.S. will promote an American withdrawal from global issues no matter who wins in November.

Recent events reinforce a beliefs in many foreign capitals that U.S. society has entered a period of dysfunctional chaos and that the American political system is no longer capable of providing consistent leadership in international affairs. As each president dedicates himself to the destruction of the previous executive’s policies, what Mark Twain said about New England’s weather begins to look like a description of American foreign policy: If you don’t like it now, just wait a few minutes.

Whatever happens in the election, the U.S. administration next year will face a problem even more daunting than the intellectual challenge of crafting a national strategy for an increasingly dangerous time. It will have to convince the world that this time, America really means what its president says.