New Yorker journalist Evan Osnos says Chinese leaders think of President Trump as a "paper tiger" who makes promises he can't deliver and who can be "managed" with flattery.
Under the banners of America First and Make America Great Again, President Trump has been reducing commitments abroad and withdrawing from treaties. Meanwhile, China is doing the opposite, trying to fill the gaps, expanding its power and playing a larger role on the global stage. How and why it's doing that and what that means for the U.S. is the subject of an article in The New Yorker called "Making China Great Again: How Beijing Learned To Use Trump To Its Advantage."
If you go and talk to strategists in Beijing, what you find out is that they call this the period of strategic opportunity. And I asked a strategist in Beijing, this very prominent figure, a guy named Yan Xuetong. I said, how long does the period of strategic opportunity last for China? He says, well, it lasts as long as Trump is in office. And if you line up - just on a piece of paper, if you line up the ways in which the United States is withdrawing from the world, you see that there are all of these quite immediate and natural ways in which China is seeking to fill that void.
And it's worth pointing out that President Trump is not withdrawing from the world apologetically. He's doing it with some verve. I mean, he believes this is the right thing to do. So he is, as he said, withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, withdrawing from UNESCO, he's pulled out of the U.N. negotiations on how to handle the refugee crisis, he's threatening to overturn the Korean Free Trade Agreement. And in each one of these cases, China has found a way to try to move into that space. So at the same time that the United States has said that the U.N. General Assembly needs to cut the peacekeeping budget by $600 million, China has said, well, we will now invest more in peacekeeping at the U.N. They've become one of the largest contributors of troops and money to U.N. peacekeeping.
Another example is foreign aid. You know, the United States, under the budget that the Trump administration has proposed for 2018, would cut foreign aid by about 42 percent. China has said in fact that it's expanding its foreign aid around the world. They've embarked on a project called The Belt and Road Initiative, which is essentially a play on the Silk Road of the old days where they're going to build bridges and railways and things like that. And it's a vast project. It's about seven times the size of what the Marshall Plan was in 1947, which was the U.S. project to rebuild Europe. So there's this very clear sense that into the void created by America's return, America's withdrawal to America First, is the possibility for a Chinese renewal and a new era of Chinese leadership.
China is doing many of the things that the United States was doing about 70 years ago. That is to say that they are investing in the kinds of assets that we believed were really important to us at the end of World War II - diplomacy, foreign aid, influence beyond our borders, infrastructure. And that's why we undertook projects like the Marshall Plan, which was explicitly designed to, not only rebuild the physical infrastructure of Europe after the war, but really also to plant our values there so that when we rebuilt Germany or we rebuilt Japan in Asia, that we were also putting down things like freedom of the press, democracy, human rights.
Our view was that it would actually fortify America's position in the world. It would make us stronger because we had seeded our values beyond our own borders. And this president takes a very different view. He really believes that doing those kinds of investments - investing in foreign aid, investing in diplomacy - he believes it's either too costly or irrelevant and, therefore, he is cutting back systematically and quite dramatically from those commitments.
In a sense, China is simply using its growing economic and political clout at the U.N. to pick up distressed assets abandoned by the United States and its allies and repurpose them to serve its strategic goals.
Under the banners of America First and Make America Great Again, President Trump has been reducing commitments abroad and withdrawing from treaties. Meanwhile, China is doing the opposite, trying to fill the gaps, expanding its power and playing a larger role on the global stage. How and why it's doing that and what that means for the U.S. is the subject of an article in The New Yorker called "Making China Great Again: How Beijing Learned To Use Trump To Its Advantage."
If you go and talk to strategists in Beijing, what you find out is that they call this the period of strategic opportunity. And I asked a strategist in Beijing, this very prominent figure, a guy named Yan Xuetong. I said, how long does the period of strategic opportunity last for China? He says, well, it lasts as long as Trump is in office. And if you line up - just on a piece of paper, if you line up the ways in which the United States is withdrawing from the world, you see that there are all of these quite immediate and natural ways in which China is seeking to fill that void.
And it's worth pointing out that President Trump is not withdrawing from the world apologetically. He's doing it with some verve. I mean, he believes this is the right thing to do. So he is, as he said, withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, withdrawing from UNESCO, he's pulled out of the U.N. negotiations on how to handle the refugee crisis, he's threatening to overturn the Korean Free Trade Agreement. And in each one of these cases, China has found a way to try to move into that space. So at the same time that the United States has said that the U.N. General Assembly needs to cut the peacekeeping budget by $600 million, China has said, well, we will now invest more in peacekeeping at the U.N. They've become one of the largest contributors of troops and money to U.N. peacekeeping.
Another example is foreign aid. You know, the United States, under the budget that the Trump administration has proposed for 2018, would cut foreign aid by about 42 percent. China has said in fact that it's expanding its foreign aid around the world. They've embarked on a project called The Belt and Road Initiative, which is essentially a play on the Silk Road of the old days where they're going to build bridges and railways and things like that. And it's a vast project. It's about seven times the size of what the Marshall Plan was in 1947, which was the U.S. project to rebuild Europe. So there's this very clear sense that into the void created by America's return, America's withdrawal to America First, is the possibility for a Chinese renewal and a new era of Chinese leadership.
China is doing many of the things that the United States was doing about 70 years ago. That is to say that they are investing in the kinds of assets that we believed were really important to us at the end of World War II - diplomacy, foreign aid, influence beyond our borders, infrastructure. And that's why we undertook projects like the Marshall Plan, which was explicitly designed to, not only rebuild the physical infrastructure of Europe after the war, but really also to plant our values there so that when we rebuilt Germany or we rebuilt Japan in Asia, that we were also putting down things like freedom of the press, democracy, human rights.
Our view was that it would actually fortify America's position in the world. It would make us stronger because we had seeded our values beyond our own borders. And this president takes a very different view. He really believes that doing those kinds of investments - investing in foreign aid, investing in diplomacy - he believes it's either too costly or irrelevant and, therefore, he is cutting back systematically and quite dramatically from those commitments.
In a sense, China is simply using its growing economic and political clout at the U.N. to pick up distressed assets abandoned by the United States and its allies and repurpose them to serve its strategic goals.
