[The rhetorical about-face came after less than 24 hours of lavish praise and attention in the Chinese capital, a “state visit plus” that included a sunset tour of the Forbidden City, a glimpse of the Peking opera and a two-hour dinner on Wednesday. A formal state dinner was set for Thursday night.]
By
Ashley Parker and David Nakamura
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President
Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping attend at a state dinner at the
Great
Hall of the People in Beijing on Nov. 9. (Thomas Peter/AP)
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In stops in Japan, South Korea and China,
Trump was feted, pampered and celebrated with florid displays of diplomatic
pageantry and poetry — choreographed and calculated gestures aimed at stroking
the ego of the president, a builder of gilded office towers and resorts who
should know a thing or two about the advantages of seducing clientele.
“Magnificent,” Trump marveled to Chinese
President Xi Jinping after a lavish welcome ceremony featuring a military honor
guard and cannon fire at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Thursday.
Friends from around the world, he added, were calling him.
“They were all watching,” Trump said.
“Nothing you can see is so beautiful.”
One year after Trump’s electoral victory,
foreign leaders have intuited at least one thing about the mercurial president:
For Trump, the personal has both political and policy ramifications. Asian
leaders seem to be betting that if they can flatter Trump into a friendship
now, they then may be able to profit from — or even exploit — that relationship
in the future.
On his Asia trip, Trump has reciprocated his
host’s hospitality, not just in warm words but, in some cases, in potentially
favorable policy shifts that could pay long-term dividends for the Asian
nations.
On Thursday in Beijing, for instance, Trump —
who on the campaign trail had accused China of “raping” the U.S. economy and
promised to label the country a currency manipulator — declared that he did not
fault China for its behavior.
The trade relationship is “very unfair and
one-sided,” he said, before declaring, “I don’t blame China.”
“After all, who can blame a country for
taking advantage of another country for the benefit of its citizens?” he asked,
rhetorically.
Trump instead cast blame on previous U.S.
administrations for what Secretary of State Tillerson called “benign neglect”
in allowing the trade imbalance to accumulate through bad policies.
“I give China great credit,” Trump said.
The rhetorical about-face came after less
than 24 hours of lavish praise and attention in the Chinese capital, a “state
visit plus” that included a sunset tour of the Forbidden City, a glimpse of the
Peking opera and a two-hour dinner on Wednesday. A formal state dinner was set
for Thursday night.
In their approach to Trump, the leaders of
Japan, South Korea and China may have taken some cues from Trump’s first
foreign trip last spring — and, in particular, his first stop in Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi government treated Trump as though he were a member of its royal
family, projecting his image on the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh and flying jets
overhead in his honor.
He appeared to leave the country, which was
once a campaign trail foil as he criticized the Saudis for their repressive
record on women and gay people, with a changed perspective.
Trump withheld public judgment in June when
Saudi Arabia led a blockade against Qatar, another U.S. ally. This week, Trump
interjected in support of the regime after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was
accused of conducting a political purge to arrest dozens of rival Saudi princes
and government officials under the guise of an anti-corruption investigation.
On Twitter, Trump wrote he had “great
confidence” in Mohammed and his father, the Saudi king.
While long on pageantry and praise, Trump’s
Asia trip has been short on tangible new deals that will benefit the United
States. Tillerson, briefing reporters shortly after Trump presided Thursday
over a signing ceremony in Beijing for $250 billion in investments and
agreements between the two countries, played down the news as relatively minor.
“The trip so far has been full of pomp and
circumstance galore — but while optics are great and personal relationships
matter, it is the substantive yield of these visits that determines their
enduring value,” said Scott Mulhauser, who served as chief of staff at the U.S.
Embassy in Beijing during the Obama administration. “Candidate Donald Trump's
fiery rhetoric on China, security and trade on the campaign trail appear to be
taking a back seat to President Trump’s eagerness to please his hosts and
audiences abroad.”
After joint statements to the media Thursday
in China’s Great Hall of the People, the two leaders declined to take questions
from reporters — another win for Xi, whose authoritarian government has tried
to limit media freedoms and free speech.
“Do you still believe China is raping the
United States, Mr. President?” one American reporter yelled out as Trump and Xi
exited the room. Trump ignored the question.
Christopher K. Johnson, a senior adviser at
the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told reporters in advance
of Trump’s trip that China’s “state visit plus” approach was “designed to play
to what they believe is the president’s susceptibility, I guess you could say,
to being sort of wowed by the way China does a state visit, which they do very
effectively.”
“And they’re good at, you know, sort of
showing their guests 5,000 years of Chinese history,” Johnson said. “There’ll
be a special banquet, you know, a lot of effort to sort of personalize the
visit.”
It wasn’t just China that played to Trump’s
ego. In Japan, another country the president once accused of predatory trade
practices, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe treated him to a round of golf at the
course where the 2020 Summer Olympics tournament will be held. In South Korea,
which Trump complained during the campaign had not carried enough weight for
its own security, President Moon Jae-in turned over the floor of the National
Assembly to Trump for a major address shown in prime time on U.S. cable news
stations.
The upshot, in each case, was that Trump
stifled his campaign-season contempt toward the northeast Asian allies. He
praised their “ancient” cultures and their “warrior” spirits. He emphasized his
commitment to the long-standing security alliances he once questioned and —
while White House aides emphasized that other administration officials,
including U.S. Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer and Commerce Secretary
Wilbur Ross, continued to press Trump’s priorities as they negotiated on trade
— the president mostly glossed over his most serious concerns.
In Beijing, Tillerson was pressed by
reporters over Trump’s coziness with Xi. He said some of Trump’s remarks were
intended as “a little bit tongue in cheek.” But, he added, “there’s also a lot
of truth to it,” noting that the United States has long had a lopsided trade
relationship with China in part because of the “benign neglect” of previous U.S.
administrations that did not press hard enough to close the gap.
Later, asked whether Trump’s language
praising Xi was too deferential, Tillerson replied: “I did not detect that at
all.”
Yet there was no mistaking Trump’s
satisfaction in the sumptuous welcome he received here. He touted the “great
chemistry” between him and Xi, saying he had “incredibly warm” feelings toward
the leader.
If the early reports were any indication,
China’s careful stagecraft was viewed by its leadership as yielding results.
The Global Times, a newspaper known for its nationalist rhetoric, declared
Thursday that Trump “respects our head of state and has repeatedly praised
President Xi Jinping in public.”
Emily Rahaula, Amber Ziye Wang and Yang Liu
in Beijing contributed to this report.
