Trump should distrust and verify Xi after Beijing summit
by Clifford D. May · The Washington TimesOPINION:
How successful was the summit last week in Beijing? President Trump said it was a “great success.” Xi Jinping, China’s supreme ruler, merely called the meeting “constructive.”
Perhaps Mr. Xi thought: “Trump is cunning and unpredictable, so I had better keep our relations on an even keel while he is in office.”
It is also possible that he thought: “I know how to play Trump. Vladimir Putin is also paying me a visit in a few days. I will tell him, Kim Jong-un and those now calling the shots in Tehran what they need to do next.”
If you watched the summit on TV, you saw the pageantry: a military honor guard, flag-waving children and an elaborate red-carpet ceremony.
What you might not have noticed: All that was staged in the shadow of Tiananmen Square, where, in 1989, the Chinese Communist Party massacred hundreds, possibly thousands, of peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators.
Nine years later, the blood long since scrubbed from the square, President Clinton arrived in Beijing to toast China’s rulers. He soon began pushing for China’s admission into the World Trade Organization. That came about in 2001.
“Bringing China into the WTO is a win-win decision,” Mr. Clinton said. “It will protect our prosperity, and it will promote the right kind of change in China.”
It was a noble experiment, and it failed.
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Since then, the CCP has waged a relentless campaign against American interests: stealing intellectual property on an industrial scale, infiltrating critical infrastructure through cyber operations and flooding American communities with fentanyl while its state media and an algorithm with 179 million American users flood American minds with disinformation.
Last week, Mr. Trump announced that the summit had resulted in agreements on Chinese purchases of American agricultural products and Boeing jets. He also said Mr. Xi agreed that the Strait of Hormuz should remain an international waterway and that Iran’s rulers should not have nuclear weapons.
Will Mr. Xi stop providing Tehran with satellite intelligence to target U.S. forces? As President Ronald Reagan didn’t quite say: Distrust and verify.
Xi Jinping is a Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist. Among his titles: general secretary of the CCP, president of the People’s Republic of China and chairman of the Central Military Commission.
Beneath this framework lies something older and no less dangerous: the imperial conviction that China is not merely a great power but also the rightful center of civilization itself, the Middle Kingdom, the literal center of the world, surrounded by less-civilized people who must pay tribute to the only legitimate ruler of the planet.
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Mr. Xi’s long-term goal is nothing less than a new world order, one in which China displaces the U.S. as the world’s dominant nation.
During the summit, he invoked the “Thucydides Trap” — the idea that a rising power challenging an established hegemon risks conflict. The implication was clear: If the U.S. refuses to accommodate Beijing’s ambitions, then war is all but inevitable.
He has made such arguments for years to his roughly 100 million CCP comrades. His speeches and articles have been carefully read in Mandarin by Matt Pottinger, an incisive China expert who served as deputy national security adviser in the first Trump administration and now chairs the China program at my think tank.
For example, this observation by Mr. Xi in a CCP textbook: “Our state’s ideology and social system are incompatible with the West. This determines that our struggle and contest with Western countries is irreconcilable, so it will inevitably be long, complicated and sometimes even very sharp.”
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Where it may be sharpest soonest is on Taiwan. Mr. Xi is determined to seize and subjugate the Taiwanese — free, self-governing, prosperous people who would prefer not to be ruled by communists on the other side of the Taiwan Strait.
Mr. Xi is also keenly aware that the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., TSMC, fabricates about 90% of the world’s most advanced chips. These are vital for the development of artificial intelligence. Whoever controls such chips controls the commanding heights of the AI-driven world to come.
At the summit, Mr. Xi warned that a clash with the U.S. over Taiwan could create “an extremely dangerous situation.”
Mr. Trump did not backtrack from the long-held U.S. position of “strategic ambiguity,” declining to say whether the U.S. would help defend the Taiwanese if they were attacked. He also did not say whether he will approve a pending $14 billion arms sale that Taiwan needs for deterrence and, should that fail, defense.
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Those who characterize this summit as signaling a detente cite a toast Mr. Xi offered during a state banquet at the Great Hall of the People. The U.S. and China, he said, “should be partners rather than rivals.”
I would remind you of two maxims from “The Art of War” by the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu: “All warfare is based on deception” and “Hold out baits to entice the enemy.”
Within the foreign policy establishment and the media, we repeatedly hear that the U.S. and China are engaged in a “strategic competition.” That sounds like an Olympic table tennis match, which may mislead people to believe we can sit back and let the best “ideology and social system” win.
It is imperative to understand that the American experiment, now 250 years old, is being stress-tested by what is, by almost every measure, the most powerful communist party in history.
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If our goal is to pass on our way of life to our children, then serious efforts and real sacrifices will be required.
If instead we allow CCP algorithms to disinform us while Beijing arms and emboldens its allies in Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang, then we will have squandered what took 2½ centuries to build. Mr. Xi is counting on it.
• Clifford D. May is the founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.
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