Trump’s Asian safari

S Nihal Singh 

AFTER US President Donald Trump’s swing through Asia, taking in bilateral meetings and regional summits, what has he achieved? Much to the relief of White House staff, he remained on script for the initial part. He flew the flag of “America First”, spoke of Chinese President Xi Jinping in reverential terms, brought India centre stage in repeating his mantra on the Indo-Pacific before reverting to making policy on tweets.

Mr Trump is still in the process of conceptualising his foreign policy even as he takes countries to task for running large surpluses in trade with the US. But particularly in relation to China, the crucial part of his tour, he has come empty-handed, with his hosts adept at boosting his ego by giving him an emperor’s welcome.

It is well known that Mr Trump acts on instinct, rather than intellectual analysis. His instinct goes in the direction of the quadrilateral meeting of officials of the US, Japan, Australia and India. Significantly, there was no joint statement, with New Delhi on its part taking a cautious line so as not to broadcast its anti-Beijing theme.

The overall impression the Trump visit left was of the US abandoning its leadership role. First, he tore up the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement his predecessor took so long to put together. Then he expressed his aversion to multilateral agreements, preferring bilateral ones. At some moments, it seemed he was deliberately handing over the leadership role to President Xi, willingly grasped. The irony of a one-party state marrying capitalism with state-controlled economy leading the cry of multilateralism is too glaring to miss.

While the economic and political communities are reconciled to the aberrations of the Trump era, they believe their country can row back to the post-World War II hegemonic role the US has occupied in Europe and Asia. But international affairs are not static and President Xi, after his triumph at the recently concluded party congress, has already announced that it was time for his country to take centre stage in the world.

On the other hand, as President Trump has demonstrated, he has a domestic constituency less swayed by feelings of doing good for the world than to fight for selfish ends often tinged by the racist disease that has had a second birth. It is not that America has changed dramatically, rather the racists feel empowered by the Trump era.

No one expected Mr Trump to take up human rights issues in China or in the Philippines where President Rodrigo Duterte’s record in getting rid of drug addicts in a summary faction is common knowledge. The plight of the Rohingya refugees does not figure in the final summit communique although the US has tried to make an indirect gesture by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson going to Myanmar to appeal to the state authorities.

President Trump has been quite clear in announcing his intention beforehand that, contrary to decades of American practice, it is not his country’s mission to tell individual countries how they should order their domestic affairs. In any case, he believes in conducting transactional relations with nations.

In a sense, Mr Trump cannot conceptualise relations with individual countries and the world at large because of his limited understanding of how the larger issues of the world take shape. He prides himself on deal-making but thinks in terms of getting the better of his opponent in his fashion. International negotiations are a far more complex game because Mr Trump does not possess the background knowledge of the epochal events of the past.

Against this backdrop, the countries Mr Trump has visited are still assessing the results of a new US President undertaking an Asian safari with his pet themes of “America First” and the imperatives of balanced trade. Having decided to shower effusive praise on the Chinese hosts, his most difficult assignment was in South Korea. For one thing, the country’s leadership was sensitive to Mr Trump’s war-like rhetoric of sound and fury and he had even called President Moon Jae-in an appeaser because of his earlier efforts, snubbed by Pyongyang, to seek a peaceful solution. In any event, earlier reports in the US of suggestions that artillery could make short work of millions of South Koreans in the first hours of a war, rather than harm Americans on the mainland, gave an edge to southerners’ nervousness.

Finally, Mr Trump could not take it any longer. An official North Korean description of the US President being “old” took him to his favourite habit of tweeting. His retort was that he had refrained from calling the North Korean leader short and fat, a kind of schoolboy tit for tat that does not behove a President on official visits to Asian countries.

Consistency is not a virtue of President Trump. While the “America First” slogan is popular with his domestic constituency, people in the countries he has visited are wondering what to make of it. Obviously, countries such as Japan and South Korea where American troops are stationed are protected by US power and are sensitive to Mr Trump’s instinct to reduce international military commitments. He is therefore forced to accept this reality even while asking them for more money for their protection.

The world is wondering how long this game will go on. After he assumed office, people at home and around the world were hoping that the responsibilities of office would help tone down his angularities and self-image. True, he has had to make compromises over his more extravagant formulations over NATO, for instance. But for the most part, the intellectual establishment deems now to have given up hope that he can turn over a new leaf. They are now simply waiting for his term to end.

The Chinese leaders are laughing up their sleeves over what they see as the pitfall of democracy. But while American institutions will survive the aberrations of the Trump presidency, there will be more tests ahead for President Xi’s one-party state.