Trump, who promised Americans he would make China pay, ended up flying to Beijing to pay his grovelling respects
Donald Trump flew to Beijing this week, still believing he was the most powerful man on earth. He landed, however, behaving like a man who had just won a competition to meet his favourite boy band
There was a time, not so long ago, when the leader of the free world wanted you to know exactly what he thought of China. They were ripping America off. Stealing its jobs. Laughing at its leaders. He was going to fix it, believe him; nobody had ever seen anything like what he was going to do to China. Tremendous tariffs. Bigly pressure. The toughest president in history was going to make Beijing beg.
That was then.
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This is the man who spent the better part of a decade telling American workers that China was their greatest enemy. Who launched a trade war that rattled the global economy and cost American businesses billions. Who described Chinese leaders as cunning adversaries who had been making fools of weak American presidents for decades.
He then flew to Beijing to tell one of those leaders that he was great, that their relationship was an honour, that the top 30 businessmen in the world had come specifically to pay their respects to him and to China, as though Elon Musk and Tim Cook had booked flights to Beijing to perform a corporate kowtow on behalf of the American republic.
The strongman who was going to stare down the world had, in the space of one opening statement, turned into the diplomatic equivalent of a Labrador puppy shown a new garden.
To be fair to Trump, he did not arrive entirely empty-handed. He arrived carrying the smoking wreckage of a war in the Middle East that has blocked the Strait of Hormuz, strangled global energy supplies and left him needing Chinese help to clean up a crisis of his own making.
When you have started a war, failed to end it, and now need your greatest geopolitical rival to bail you out, a certain amount of flattery is probably unavoidable.
But there is flattery, and then there is this. There is the necessary diplomatic courtesy of two world leaders meeting across a difficult table, and then there is flying to Beijing with America’s most powerful CEOs to, in Trump’s own words, pay their respects.
Napoleon would not have paid his respects. Caesar did not pay respects. Churchill paid respects to nobody.
The art of the deal, it turns out, looks a lot like the art of the grovel when the other man holds all the cards. Xi knew it. The ‘greatest’ businessmen in the world knew it. The only person in the room who appeared not to notice was the man standing there calling everyone beautiful.
