Five months later, everything liberals said about the tax bill turned out to be true. Contrary to Republican claims, wage growth has been anemic. Instead of sharing the wealth with employees, companies have spent record amounts of money buying back their own stock. The tax cuts are creating larger deficits than Republicans predicted, and those deficits are now being cited as a pretext for cutting spending on the poor.
.. has signaled that he wants the summit meeting too much,” David Sanger reported in The New York Times. The U.S. government has even issued a commemorative coin about the summit featuring Trump and “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong-un face-to-face, signaling to the world that it’s now the American president who craves legitimation from the North Korean dictator.
.. Even a casual newspaper reader — which, of course, Trump is not — knows that when North Korea talks about “denuclearization,” it doesn’t mean unilaterally giving up all its nuclear weapons. A hastily arranged meeting between two bellicose egomaniacs, premised on a basic misunderstanding, is unlikely to resolve one of the world’s most intractable geopolitical conflicts; a flimsy agreement that roughly preserves the status quo seems like a best-case scenario.
.. We all want to be open-minded, but con men should never be given the benefit of the doubt.
Trump’s Charm and Threats May Not Be Working on China. Here’s Why.
Chinese negotiators left Washington this weekend with a significant win: a willingness by the Trump administration to hold off for now on imposing tariffs on up to $150 billion in Chinese imports. China gave up little in return, spurning the administration’s nudges for a concrete commitment to buy more goods from the United States, and avoiding limits on its efforts to build new high-tech Chinese industries.
China’s propaganda machine took a victory lap after the talks, proclaiming that a strong challenge from the United States had been turned aside, at least for now. “Whether in Beijing or Washington, in the face of the unreasonable demands of the United States, the Chinese government has always resolutely fought back, never compromised, and did not accept the restrictions set by the other side,” the official Xinhua news service said in a commentary on Sunday.
.. One photo was taken during the trade talks in Washington, appearing, if somewhat biasedly, to trumpet the youthfulness of Chinese delegates compared with American lawmakers. Another, dated from 1901, showed the opposite as representatives from China and colonial powers signed an accord to end the Boxer Rebellion, considered a national humiliation.
.. China’s success partly comes from its ability to stick to a single strategy in trade. Even as Beijing has shown a willingness to talk and make peace offerings in the form of multibillion-dollar import contracts, it has held fast to its refusal to make any commitment for a fixed reduction in its trade gap with the United States.
.. The trade imbalance between the countries has actually widened since Mr. Trump visited Beijing in November
.. Beijing also has not bent on its Made in China 2025 initiative, an industrial modernization program that Washington and American business groups complain forces foreign companies to share their best technology while potentially creating state-sponsored rivals.
.. White House trade officials have more expertise with trade law, but China has a small but cohesive team of negotiators who report directly to Liu He, a vice premier and nearly lifelong friend of Xi Jinping
.. Policy decisions that once took a month can now take as little as a day
.. China only committed to continue buying ever-rising quantities of American food and fossil fuels
.. Trump suggested on Thursday that China might have prodded Mr. Kim to threaten to cancel the summit meeting between the two leaders planned for June 12.
.. Mr. Trump’s perception of a link indicates that at the very least the North Korea issue may have been a constraint on American officials’ willingness to confront their Chinese counterparts.
.. In some ways, Beijing may find it almost impossible to agree to American demands. The United States exports only $130 billion in goods a year to China. Finding more goods to buy to reduce China’s trade surplus by $200 billion would be extremely difficult, except if China cut its own exports to the United States.
“It is kind of unrealistic — and if Chinese officials agree, they will face a lot of pressure from public opinion,”
Trump’s Iran Threat May Wreck Talks With North Korea
As he prepares for possible talks with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un about controlling the North’s nuclear weapons program, President Trump is facing his most complicated national security challenge so far. He has made the task far harder by threatening to blow up the only other recent deal to control a nuclear program, with Iran.
.. Now consider North Korea, with 20 to 60 nuclear weapons, and facilities for producing plutonium and enriching uranium, many of which are hidden.
Mr. Trump has insisted on the North’s complete and verifiable denuclearization. And, by all indications, he wants it done immediately. Yet by threatening to abrogate the Iran deal and reimpose sanctions Mr. Trump has added to the challenge of making that happen.
.. He has claimed, without a shred of evidence, that Iran is out of compliance
.. and has complained that Iran is still building ballistic missiles, arming Hezbollah and supporting President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. None of these concerns were supposed to be prevented by the deal.
.. He has demanded that Britain, France and Germany fix what he calls “flaws” in the pact by May 12, presumably so he will have someone else to blame when it falls apart.
.. The president, and his new hard-line team of national security advisers, may think that walking away from the Iran deal will persuade Mr. Kim of his toughness and his determination to secure terms that go far beyond those reached with Iran. More likely, Mr. Kim will see it as proof that the United States cannot be trusted to stick to its commitments and will be reluctant to reach any agreement.
.. A serious negotiation with North Korea would include Mr. Trump pressing Mr. Kim to freeze nuclear and missile testing, halt the production of nuclear weapons fuel and the deployment of nuclear weapons and put an Iran-like verification system in place.
.. But why would Mr. Kim agree to any of that if the Americans walk away from the Iran deal? Why would Mr. Kim, or any future adversary for that matter, assume Mr. Trump is negotiating in good faith?
.. Mr. Trump could contribute in an unprecedented way to international peace and security by engaging with Mr. Kim. That possibility will be squandered, though, if the American president escalates a manufactured nuclear crisis with Iran at the very time he is trying to defuse one with North Korea.
Journalist: As U.S. Retreats From World Stage, China Moves To Fill The Void
OSNOS: Yeah, it’s quite dramatic. I mean, actually, when Donald Trump was elected the Chinese government was really worried. They were shocked, and for exactly the reasons that you just described. They had listened to all of the rhetoric from the campaign trail about how China was taking advantage of the United States and how he was going to really finally impose harsh punishments on China. So they didn’t exactly know what to make of him. But they worried that he was, as one former U.S. official put it, their mortal enemy. And so their response was that they sent out a bunch of Chinese researchers, think tanks, who came to Washington. I remember meeting with some of them, in fact.
They would call up reporters. They’d call up analysts. And they’d say, you know, what do we make of this? What should we make of Trump? And what they concluded was that actually he could be managed. He could be handled. They concluded that Donald Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail was exactly that – it was rhetoric on the campaign trail. And they discovered something important, which was that he was highly responsive to gracious treatment, to flattery.
And this is actually an old Chinese playbook. If you go back to the 19th century, the imperial government at the time laid down in writing some of its techniques, really, for dealing with foreigners. And one of them was, as they put it, barbarians like receptions and entertainment. That’s the term they used – barbarians. They said that foreigners respond to that kind of treatment with great appreciation. Before Donald Trump went to China this fall, Chinese officials had said to some Americans, people with high-placed sources in the Chinese government, that they intended to wow him with thousands of years of Chinese imperial history. They thought that he was, as one person put it to me, uniquely susceptible to that.
And they laid it on. They laid it on thick, frankly. I mean, they gave him a personal tour of the Forbidden City by Xi Jinping. They gave him military bands. There were kids with pompoms who were shouting uncle Trump in Chinese. And he responded to it gloriously. The first thing he said when he got to the podium standing next to Xi Jinping was how grateful he was for that magnificent military band. He was willing to not allow questions from the press, which of course is something that China would want. But traditionally, an American president insists on questions from the press. So from China’s perspective, that summit could not have gone better.
GROSS: So do you think that this means that President Xi sees President Trump as weak and easy to manipulate?
OSNOS: He sees him as very manageable. He sees him as somebody who is responsive to the techniques that China uses to handle foreigners. What he sees him as – well, to use the Chinese term, the one that they have used, is that they see him as a paper tiger, which is to say that he’s somebody who makes larger threats than he’s willing to back up, that he promises things that he can’t deliver.
As they say, look; he has not been able to build a wall on the border with Mexico. He has not succeeded in doing some of the things that he said he was going to do. But even more important than that is that they see him as somebody who is unaware of the details of foreign affairs. He frankly just doesn’t know enough about complicated issues like Tibet, Taiwan, North Korea.
And so as a result, what they’ve found in their interactions with him – and they said as much in private conversations to former U.S. officials – is that they expected him to push back when the Chinese would lay out their positions on things, and instead he wouldn’t push back. He just simply didn’t know enough to be able to challenge some of their assertions. And from China’s perspective, that’s a tremendous blessing because it makes it much easier for them to get their way in negotiations.
.. But the truth is that China has indicated in a variety of ways that they are trying to manage Trump, meaning that they’re trying to do as little as possible for as long as possible while continuing to hold him at bay. They don’t want him to attack North Korea because that could have negative implications for China, but they are also – they are simply unwilling to put the kind of pressure on North Korea that he wants because they worry that that would lead to the end of the North Korean government and then that would also be bad for China.
So just recently – and this really didn’t get much attention in the news but it’s an important fact – China sent an envoy to Washington at the end of December. And that envoy was there to talk with senior administration officials about North Korea and oil. And the administration said to the Chinese official, look, you need to cut off oil or we’re going to do – we’re going to take these very drastic steps where we’re going to try to punish you in a variety of ways. And China called their bluff. And the Chinese envoy said, we are simply not going to do it. And the United States backed away and said, well, in that case, let’s continue to work this problem together and so on and so on.
And those kinds of little minor interactions which really never make the press, or at least never get very much attention, that’s the marrow of the relationship. That’s the center of it. And bit by bit, China is coming to the conclusion that the Trump administration is both inexperienced and simply just doesn’t have the staff or the know-how to be able to make the kinds of actions and – that support what the president’s language sometimes promises.
.. But now, the United States, through Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, has taken this really radical step towards confrontation. I mean, just to state the obvious here, that this is nothing that we’ve ever seen in 44 previous presidencies. This is not how presidents of the United States conduct themselves. And so it’s – it forces a country like China, which is stuck in the middle, to try to hedge and really to hedge against unpredictable behavior, which means that they have to be more conservative. They can’t put their trust in a Donald Trump figure.
And, you know, Terry, I think that there are sort of – those are the short-term consequences. But the long-term consequences are quite distinct. And that is that this contributes to an erosion of American credibility in a way that is really hard for people to see at the time but becomes very obvious in retrospect, that other countries just look at us differently when the words of our president don’t carry the full faith and credit of the United States, when he says something that is inspired by – who knows what? – if it’s inspired by a headline on television or it’s inspired by his mood. In effect, it forces other countries to treat his words as if they don’t matter quite the same way. And that’s a very strange new way of people looking at the United States.
.. If you want to understand how the damage to American credibility is felt, it’s useful to remember this – there was a moment during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 when John F. Kennedy sent an envoy to Paris to meet the French president, Charles de Gaulle. And what he said was, look; we the United States – we’ve found Soviet missiles in Cuba, and we’re going to impose a blockade on Cuba. And we have CIA photos that show that and demonstrate why it is that we’re justified in doing so.
And de Gaulle famously said, I don’t need to see the photos. The word of the American president is good enough for me. And among diplomats that’s sort of considered this – really a sort of foundational concept, that the word of the American president is good enough for our allies to depend on. But today that’s not the case. And it’s not just our allies who are unsure. It’s also these other countries like China, which occupy a space between being an ally and an opponent. But it makes them even less likely to trust us than before.