Like no other US president since and including Richard Nixon, Donald Trump has taken bold initiatives to put communist China and North Korea on the strategic defensive.
Trump insisted during his campaign that China’s trade offensive against the West and North Korea’s nuclear weapons program were long-festering threats that earlier administrations were too gullible or too timid to challenge.
He said that the solutions would be “very easy” and that he would accomplish them “very fast.”
On taking office, Trump quickly set about putting his campaign rhetoric into action. He did it with trade and economic instruments, imposing sanctions on North Korea and tariffs on China. He did it with “fire and fury” threats against North Korea and secondary sanctions on Beijing for colluding with Pyongyang.
And he did it with a dramatic months-long condemnation of North Korea’s misgovernance and human rights violations that strongly implied the possibility of regime change in Pyongyang.
Notably, he did not deploy that third weapon against Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) rule.
For more than a year, the hardline Trump strategy seemed to be working. Xi and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un hastened to the negotiating table and a series of high-profile summit meetings with Trump to pre-empt his taking even stronger measures in pursuance of his ambitious policy goals.
Then, Trump quickly pivoted to a virtual love-fest with the communist leaders, cultivating personal relationships that he was confident would lead to policy breakthroughs in Beijing and Pyongyang.
However, Xi and Kim were using the summits and frequent high-level exchanges with Trump to gain time, to see how US politics would affect his power and to take his measure.
At their own summit in Beijing last year, they seemed to have reached a strategic conclusion. They could play along with his bosom-buddy form of diplomacy without having to make substantive concessions: no fundamental structural change in China’s economy and no serious progress toward North Korean denuclearization.
They reverted to the traditional communist negotiating tactics — demand, delay, deceive, distract — while yielding very little to meet the US’ policy objectives.
Now, both regimes have pretty much discarded the false camaraderie that they posed to cajole Trump into making his own concessions on trade (postponement of additional tariffs, reprieves for ZTE and Huawei Technologies) and on North Korea (suspension of military exercises with South Korea).
Xi has said there is no way Beijing that would adopt the sweeping economic reforms that Trump seeks as a condition for ending tariffs and defusing the trade dispute because, as Xi accurately notes, China’s communist system depends on those market distortions.
Kim goes even further, rejecting Trump’s proposal for a fourth one-on-one meeting that he says “gives us nothing” and merely “gifts the US president with something he can boast of.”
The leaders apparently believe that Trump is on the psychological defensive because he has the pressure of a re-election campaign next year and the political/legal danger of impeachment.
Kim, with Xi’s collusion or at least concurrence, has even given Trump an ultimatum: Lift sanctions in the next six weeks, or find yourself back in the days of pre-apocalyptic confrontation. The threat is an insulting rebuff to Trump and should be met with a firm, substantive response.
Trump needs to acknowledge that the diplomatic love affair that he thought he had with the two leaders was a mirage and that the only thing that will get them to budge is the same thing that worked in the first stage of their relations with him: a campaign of no-nonsense maximum pressure in all its dimensions.
He should immediately roll back all the concessions and gestures of good faith that he has made to Xi and Kim, expand tariffs and sanctions, resume joint exercises with South Korea, and crack down on ZTE and Huawei.
He should make clear that resumption of North Korean nuclear and/or missile testing would present a clear-and-present danger to the US and its allies, and would require a forceful response.
Trump should immediately undertake two powerful, but non-kinetic courses of action: One has been readily available to US administrations, but has been ignored for decades, and the other is a measure that has only recently come under consideration.
For China and North Korea, Trump should launch a strategic communications campaign, such as former US president Ronald Reagan did, to get the truth about their own countries and the outside world to those heavily propagandized populations. The moral force that helped bring down the Berlin Wall is the least that this generation of the free world can offer Hong Kongers and those trapped in Tibet and East Turkestan/Xinjiang.
Specifically for China, Trump can direct the US Department of the Treasury to block Chinese companies that do not meet the same transparency and accounting standards imposed on all US entities from participating in US securities markets.
That would protect US investors, retirees and military personnel from being forced to finance communist Chinese products used to oppress Chinese and weapons that threaten the US, its allies and security partners, or others in the region.
These measures would hasten the demise of two of the world’s most oppressive and dangerous regimes.
Whatever else happens in and to his presidency, a historic positive legacy awaits Trump if he re-grasps the opportunity that he alone created.
Joseph Bosco, who served as China country director in US secretary of defense, is a fellow at the Institute for Taiwan-American Studies and a member on the Global Taiwan Institute’s advisory committee.
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