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.