Rogue Nation

President Trump Criticizes China as Meeting on North Korea Nears
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

President Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, leaving the White House on Wednesday for a trip to Poland and Germany. 

WARSAW — President Trump criticized China on Wednesday for failing to do more to pressure North Korea on its nuclear program, suggesting as he prepares for a high-stakes meeting with Xi Jinping this week that he is re-evaluating the United States trade relationship with Beijing in light of the growing provocations from Pyongyang.
Mr. Trump vented his displeasure with China in a pair of early-morning tweets as he was departing on a trip to Warsaw, and to Hamburg, Germany, for the Group of 20 gathering of major world economies, where discussions about how to deal with the North Korean threat will be high on the agenda. 

He plans to hold meetings on the sidelines with Xi, as well as with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan and President Moon Jae-in of South Korea.
“Trade between China and North Korea grew almost 40% in the first quarter,” Mr. Trump said in one of the tweets on Wednesday. 

“So much for China working with us — but we had to give it a try!”
A few minutes earlier, he suggested that American trade agreements should be contingent on such cooperation.

“The United States made some of the worst Trade Deals in world history,” he wrote. 

“Why should we continue these deals with countries that do not help us?”

It was not clear where Mr. Trump garnered his 40 percent figure for growth in overall trade between China and North Korea. 

A South Korean group, the Korea International Trade Association, said on Monday that North Korea had exported as much iron to China in the first five months of 2017 as it did in all of 2016.
But the group also said that North Korea’s exports of coal to China remained frozen. 

Coal is the North’s most valuable commodity, and China cut off its coal imports this year. 

China’s trade with the North grew 37.4 percent during the first three months of the year, compared with the same period in 2016, Chinese trade data released in April showed. 

China said the trade grew even as it stopped buying North Korean coal.
The meeting with Xi, with whom Mr. Trump developed a rapport during a getaway at his Mar-a-Lago estate in April, took on graver significance after North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile this week that the South’s defense minister said was capable of reaching Hawaii. 

Mr. Trump has said that he would never allow the North to develop such a capability, but his options for dealing with the threat are limited.
“We’re going to do very well,” Mr. Trump told reporters as he responded to shouted questions about his plans to address North Korea’s escalation as he left the White House on Wednesday to begin the trip.
Yet his comments on social media suggested that Mr. Trump is struggling to find a way to pressure China to use its influence on the North to de-escalate tensions. 

After the missile launch, Mr. Trump used Twitter to try to goad China into a strong response, suggesting that it “put a heavy move on North Korea and end this nonsense once and for all!”
He also said it was difficult to believe that Japan and South Korea would “put up with this much longer.”

Trump Tweets, China Retreats

Beijing has no idea how to handle the president, or his twenty-first-century version of the bully pulpit.
By Gordon G. Chang

Beijing’s diplomats have been remarkably quiet after the election of Donald Trump, even though the president has signaled his administration will pursue policies fundamentally disadvantageous to China.
Chinese leaders, some think, are merely laying in wait, but there are signs they have themselves been ambushed and still do not know how to react to Trump. 

Perhaps Erin Burnett put it best. 

“No one has ever talked to China like this before,” she said on her CNN show last month, in the wake of the president taking a congratulatory phone call from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen. 

“China doesn’t have a strategy to deal with this.”
Chinese leaders once had an extremely successful strategy. 

They let American presidential candidates rail against “China” and then challenge them early in their first months in office, throwing them off balance and setting the tone for the rest of their terms.
George W. Bush, for instance, faced a crisis on April 1 of his first year in the White House when a Chinese jet clipped the wing of a U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane in international airspace over the South China Sea. 

Beijing then imprisoned 24 aviators for 11 days, successfully exacted what amounted to a public apology and a ransom, and completed the humiliation by stripping the Navy plane of its sensitive electronic gear and requiring it to be chopped into pieces.
Beijing tested his successor by harassing two unarmed Navy reconnaissance vessels, the Impeccable and the Victorious, in the South China and Yellow Seas in a series of dangerous incidents beginning March 2009. 

One of those incidents was so serious—the attempted severing of the towed sonar array from the Impeccable—that it constituted an attack on a U.S. vessel, in other words, an attack on the U.S. itself.
Bush and Obama, pursuing misguided approaches, tried to minimize China’s conduct. 

Both presidents avoided further confrontations with Beijing and throughout their terms looked and acted as if intimidated. 

During their administrations, Beijing continually undermined peace and stability in the region—and did so largely without America imposing costs for clearly unacceptable behavior.
Enter a new type of leader, Donald J. Trump. 

The willful president did not wait for China to challenge him. 

On December 2, he took what is now known as “The Call” from Tsai.
Trump turned the tables on Beijing, striking the Chinese even before the swearing-in. 

His conversation with Taiwan’s president was not some happenstance event, as he later tried to characterize it, but the result of weeks of staff work on both sides.
As both critics and admirers noted, the call undermined more than four decades of settled policy, and President Trump made it clear he knew the significance of what he did. 

“I fully understand the One-China policy,” he told Chris Wallace in an interview aired on Fox News Sunday on December 11, “but I don’t know why we have to be bound by a One-China policy.”
The most remarkable aspect of this extraordinary series of events is China’s reaction or, more precisely, its two apparently uncoordinated reactions. 

First, the Chinese air force on December 10 flew planes completely around Taiwan. 

That was the second time in two weeks China’s aircraft had done so, the first time an apparent warning to Tsai to not make the call to Trump. 

Then last month the Liaoning, China’s only aircraft carrier, and five escorts took a detour on the passage from Qingdao to Hainan to brush by the east coast of Taiwan.
Moreover, many interpret China’s seizure of a U.S. Navy drone last month in international waters in the South China Sea as another response to the Tsai call. 

Trump tweeted about the incident as well, suggesting the Chinese could keep it. 

His startling suggestion is certainly an attempt to divest the Chinese of leverage acquired by grabbing the underwater craft.
The provocative actions of the Chinese military, which has been implementing its own foreign policy in recent years, is balanced out by the curiously restrained response from China’s civilian leaders. Trump has repeatedly slammed them in subsequent tweets, but as the South China Morning Post pointed out Wednesday, “Beijing has refrained from directly criticizing him as an individual, despite his outspoken comments about China.”
China’s leaders, as numerous Chinese commentators have pointed out, is unhappy about the unprecedented barrage directed at them, so why such restraint? 

For one thing, the "leadership", in the words of Liu Weidong of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, “has yet to adapt to Trump’s unorthodox style in dealing with diplomacy.”
Said Liu to the South China Morning Post, “Trump may think he is just making casual comments, but Beijing takes it very seriously, since this disrupts Beijing’s calculations.”
Trump is not acting like any of his predecessors, and while that is often held to be a criticism, it has had one important beneficial effect: unnerving overly confident Chinese officials who have become too accustomed to dealing with American presidents behind closed doors.
Those officials find Trump’s effective use of Twitter utterly confounding. 

After all, China’s scripted leaders are picked by their fellow Communist Party cadres, and all of them stay in power by coercion rather than persuasion.
Take Trump’s soon-to-be counterpart, Xi Jinping. 

Xi has only one social media posting to his credit in his entire career, and that was posted to the account of a Party media outlet, the authoritative PLA Daily. 

Tellingly, Xi has no account of his own on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like service. 

China’s supremo, apart from on-high pronouncements, is not big on direct communication either.
Even though Trump cannot stop communicating his intentions, Xi & Co. remains unprepared for him. For instance, Beijing, as the Financial Times reported, was “shocked” by the appointment of Peter Navarro as head the newly formed National Trade Council.
Chinese leaders had hoped, and almost certainly expected, Trump would follow his predecessors and “tone down his anti-Beijing rhetoric after assuming office.” 

With Navarro, Commerce Secretary pick Wilbur Ross, and U.S. Trade Representative-designate Robert Lighthizer—trade hawks all—Trump has made it clear he is going to take on Beijing as the first order of business. 

Chinese leaders should have seen this coming.
There is one other explanation for Beijing lying so low. 

At the moment, Chinese technocrats are engaged in an all-out war against speculators shorting the renminbi, the Chinese currency.
The People’s Bank of China, the central bank, looks like it has been spending tens of billions of dollars in the past several days supporting the “redback,” which fell 6.95% last year against the dollar in the onshore market. 

Perhaps Beijing is letting Trump alone because they do not want him tweeting about their desperate effort to stabilize the situation. 

He has, as just about everyone knows, complained about their rigging of the Chinese currency.
China is now rigging its currency upwards, not down as Trump has alleged, but in Beijing they undoubtedly do not want to take a chance and get involved in a Twitter war with him over any subject, a conflict they know they cannot possibly win.
The Chinese have just met someone impossible for them to intimidate.

Western civilization vs. Chinese barbarity

President Trump stresses his desire for warmer ties with Russia, while steadily bashing China

By Nicole Gaouette

A battle between Chinese despotism and the forces of Western civilization

Washington -- President Donald Trump has been playing global favorites on Twitter.
He has showered praise on Russian President Vladimir Putin, calling him "very smart!," and dismissed charges that Moscow tried to hack the election process -- even as he's bashed China for currency manipulation, skewing trade and failing to rein in North Korea.
It's unusual enough for a president to try to sway foreign policy before he's in office, let alone in 140-character bursts. 

While Trump aides have said some of his statements shouldn't be taken "literally," the tweets offer insight to his foreign policy views and raise a question: When both China and Russia are challenging US power globally, why does he favor Moscow and not Beijing?
Trump's positions on Russia and China mark a sharp turn from current policies -- and that might to the point. 

Trump and much of the Republican establishment have made clear they aim to dismantle Barack Obama's "legacy". 

Trump is also looking to use international relations in pursuit of economic ends.
Some analysts point to the possibility that Trump is taking a deeply strategic approach; others say he simply fails to understand the crucial importance of long-standing US alliances. 

At the least, it is an approach that contrasts with dovish Obama, who has tried to find areas of common interest with China and to isolate Russia for a series of international violations.

Russia has conducted a stealth invasion of Ukraine, annexed Crimea and is believed to have supplied the missile that brought down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, shot down over Ukraine in 2014.
Moscow has supported Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his country's civil war, including in the bombing of civilians in Aleppo.

The Russian military has buzzed US aircraft and ships. 

And the US intelligence community found with "high confidence" that Russia was behind hacking during the presidential election campaign meant to sow doubts about American democracy.
And yet Trump speaks warmly of Putin and his desire for better cooperation with Russia, publicly dismissing the hacking allegations and accusing the intelligence community of acting politically.

Russian officials have said they were in contact with the Trump campaign throughout the election.

Matt Rojansky, head of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, said one reason could be Trump's belief that the US should do more work with Russia to defeat terrorism and his view of that challenge as a "civilizational battle between radical Islam and, broadly speaking, the forces of Western civilization."
Trump and his aides, particularly his national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, are much more comfortable including Russia under the Western civilization umbrella than Republicans such as Arizona Sen. John McCain and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, Rojansky said. 

That will cause friction, possibly sooner rather than later.

If Trump's stance on Russia might fray some of his alliances in Congress, he's already put European allies on edge with his warmth toward Putin and questions about the worth of NATO. 

He's also unnerved Asian allies by questioning the cost of helping Japan and South Korea defend themselves.

Some analysts have suggested Trump is practicing a sophisticated version of the "triangular diplomacy" former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon used to play the Soviet Union and China off against each other in the 1970s.
But the two nations are no longer bitter enemies and instead have a well-defined, if mutually wary, relationship.
China has targeted the US with cyberattacks. 

Beijing has pushed US companies in China to give up proprietary technology, it has contested US claims to freedom of navigation through Asian waters, its military has buzzed US naval vessels and Air Force jets, and it recently stole a US underwater drone.

If Trump seems to look the other way on Russian transgressions, China gets no free pass.
The President often charges that Beijing steals American jobs with unfair trade practices. 

"China has been taking out massive amounts of money and wealth from the U.S. in totally one-sided trade, but won't help with North Korea. Nice!" he tweeted Monday. 

Soon after winning the presidency, he antagonized Beijing by holding a phone conversation with Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen.
Trump has long made China a bogeyman, accusing it in a 2012 tweet of having created the concept of global warming in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive. 

He has particularly fixated on China's economic practices, blasting it on trade and currency throughout the presidential race and blaming it for the loss of American jobs. 

Trade and job losses were central rallying cries of his campaign.