Trumpian Absurdism and US-China relations

Donald Trump’s bizarre post-election improvisations continue, having now made a crater of sorts in the field of US-China relations. Analysts and journalists have done their best to find the logic underneath Trump’s narcissistic fury, the almost aggressive texture of his ignorance, and the inexplicable pacing of his actions. The editor of Foreign Policy magazine, David Rothkopf, seemed to capture things best when he said that Trump’s pronouncements are “one part lunacy, one part incompetence, one part canny plan”. Trump’s tweets on China ‘more dangerous than funny’ Trying to suss out meaningful patterns in the case of Trump’s approach to US-China relations remains muddy but necessary work. In the case of the US president-elect’s discussion with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, it is important that we recognise that the leaders in Taipei may have played the key role in enabling the call, that Trump’s advisers on the Taiwan issue may have very little toleration for the ambiguities of the one-China consensus, and that lobbyists like retired senator Robert Dole may have more influence in Washington on this issue than China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Even if we assume that Trump’s roiling of the cross-straits consensus is finished for the time being, problems may still arise from the region itself. Inter-Korean relations seem primed for a new kind of rupture in the spring. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has spent the past couple of weeks gleefully watching things blow up along the disputed Yellow Sea boundary with South Korea, and overseeing a commando raid on and destruction of a mock-up of the presidential Blue House in Seoul. If Trump had any interest whatsoever in the daily presidential briefings offered to him by the CIA, he might glean as much. Underwater drone spat shows why China-US relations are tense – and can only get worse under Trump Michael Hayden, a former head of America’s National Security Agency and the CIA, described the briefings as not so important for their specific content but for the cumulative effect that they could have on a chief executive. These are a means of “building up a mental database” of crisis points so that when shooting actually begins, the president can make adept decisions and understands limitations and flexibilities in the new reality. In one briefing which was just declassified, we can read how just one week before Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as US president in 1977, Taipei and Beijing engaged in a kind of chest-bumping in the Taiwan Strait. Carter entered his term recognising the gravity of cross-strait relations, and with a tangible sense that the movement of the Chinese civil war towards peaceful resolution was hardly inevitable. Even if Trump is ignoring intelligence briefings, there has been one bit of good news: he has finally ended the unorthodox “reality show” style selection of his nominee for secretary of state. ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson’s interviews with Trump, to whom he was introduced thanks to yet more Republican lobbyists, probably dealt more with the Middle East and Russia than China. Tillerson is no Jon Huntsman, leaving more space for under-secretaries to exert their expertise and networks. But at least the key players on the team are now set, assuming that Tillerson can make it through the US Senate and does not become the key symbol around whom antipathy in Washington towards malignant Putinist influence will gather. Trump’s stance on one-China principle signals turbulent times for Sino-US ties But if we assume that Tillerson’s presence allows us to start on the real work of looking forward to the shape that US-China relations will take, we may yet be disappointed. Even if he no longer has the ability to tweet from the White House, Trump shows little ability to change his style, which appears to be a form of performance art with more ties to the Dada movement than to the political and foreign policy legacies of Nixon or Reagan. This is to say the intellectual profits from trying to figure out the logic of Trump’s China policy, or putative national security adviser Mike Flynn’s moves towards China are likely to be few. It may only be when Trump is confronted with meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the need not to throw the US economy into a prolonged trade war with China, and brush backs from his activist vice-president Michael Pence, that some form of stability might arrive. With any luck, in a few months’ time, we will look back at Trump’s China performance in this period the same way we look at the 1920s opera The Nose by Dmitri Shostakovich: as an avant-garde work which still makes almost no sense outside of an Absurdist reading. Adam Cathcart is a lecturer in Chinese history at the University of Leeds

Trumpian Absurdism and US-China relations

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Few intellectual profits to be had from trying to figure out the logic of next US president’s China policy

Few intellectual profits to be had from trying to figure out the logic of next US president’s China policy