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President Donald Trump’s summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping last week was historic. Was it the pivotal moment that ends Cold War 2.0?
There were few details announced during the event, but on Sunday the White House released its fact sheet on commitments Beijing made.
There is always a renewal of optimism when American and communist Chinese leaders meet. There are, however, two particular reasons suggesting caution at this moment.
First, Washington is back to talking to China, which has traditionally used discussions to persuade American presidents to delay taking action. And while Americans delayed, China has continued unacceptable conduct.
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Take fentanyl, which has caused “the deadliest drug epidemic in history.” Trump returning to Washington on Air Force One confirmed he raised the issue with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Xi has made four promises to American presidents on the topic: to President Barack Obama in 2016, to Trump in 2018, to President Joe Biden in 2023, and to Trump again in 2025. The Chinese leader has violated all his pledges.
Trump, to his credit, imposed an additional 20% fentanyl tariff on Chinese goods last year. But as Sara Carter, his drug czar, said in March, China has continued sales of precursors for the deadly synthetic opioid.
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The time for talking about this particular topic, therefore, should be over, but Washington has just allowed Xi to buy even more time.
Second, Xi displayed an aggressive attitude during the summit. On Thursday, he publicly mentioned the Thucydides Trap, a reference to a declining hegemon dangerously challenging a rising power. The insult to Trump — and America itself — was striking.
“Xi’s urging that China and the U.S. overcome the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm of major-country relations signals his expectation that the West will accept the inevitability of being overtaken by China and therefore not challenge it anywhere on earth,” Charles Burton of the Sinopsis think tank told me after the summit.
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Even worse, the Chinese leader on the summit’s first day talked about the “new era,” Xi’s phrase for the period in which the U.S. has been pushed to the sidelines and China dominates the world. “Change is coming that hasn’t happened in 100 years,” Xi in March 2023 told Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow after their 40th in-person meeting. “And we are driving this change together.”
To make the meaning of “new era” unmistakable, the Chinese foreign ministry announced, on the 16th, that Putin will be visiting Beijing, starting May 19.
Second, Xi displayed an aggressive attitude during the summit. On Thursday, he publicly mentioned the Thucydides Trap, a reference to a declining hegemon dangerously challenging a rising power. The insult to Trump — and America itself — was striking.
As Burton noted, “Xi views himself as thd modern heir of China’s lineage of great emperors, so the concept of fair and reciprocal relations with any foreign country is simply absent from his worldview.”
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Xi has long been pushing the imperial-era notion that China is the world’s only sovereign state. Chinese emperors believed they not only had the Mandate of Heaven to rule tianxia — “All Under Heaven” — but also that Heaven compelled them to do so.
Xi has often used tianxia language. “The Chinese have always held that the world is united and all under heaven are one family,” he declared in his 2017 New Year’s Message.
Moreover, Chinese officials have continually propagated tianxia themes. As Foreign Minister Wang Yi wrote in Study Times, the influential Central Party School newspaper, “Xi Jinping thought on diplomacy” — a “thought” in Party-speak is an important body of ideology — “has made innovations on and transcended the traditional Western theories of international relations for the past 300 years.”
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Wang, with his time reference, was pointing to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, two treaties that established the current international order of competing sovereign states. Wang’s use of “transcended,” consequently, hints that Xi wants a world without sovereign states, in other words, a unified world ruled by the Chinese.
How can any nation cooperate with a China that believes others have no sovereignty?
Charles Payne, the Fox Business anchor, intriguingly suggested to Fox anchor Jesse Watters that the Trump-Xi summit is an echo of an earlier dialogue: “This has a chance to become a Reagan-Gorbachev No. 2.”
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Payne’s historical analogy is far closer to the mark than Xi’s.
China at the moment is not rising, as Xi, with his Thucydides Trap and “new era” references, implied. China’s economy is deteriorating, the property market is plunging, the Communist Party is racked by purges, the military is in disarray and many people are either angry or have opted out of society. Most fundamentally, the country’s demography is collapsing: China will almost surely lose more than half its population by the turn of the century.
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Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who also prevailed over a failing state, is widely hailed as a hero because he recognized that the USSR could not be saved. In China’s ruling circles, however, he is vilified.
“Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse?” Xi Jinping asked in a secret speech to Guangdong province cadres in December 2012, one month after being named general secretary of China’s ruling organization. “An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered.”
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“Finally, all it took was one quiet word from Gorbachev to declare the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party, and a great party was gone,” Xi declared in Guangdong. “In the end, nobody was a real man, nobody came out to resist.”
President Ronald Reagan, in his dialogue with Gorbachev, was able to stabilize relations so that the Soviet Union could dissolve without catastrophe. Xi, unfortunately, is far more determined than the Soviet leader, so Trump’s challenge to manage a faltering China will be greater.
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