Jim Geraghty of National Review Online assesses the president’s approach toward communist China.
A recurring complaint of this newsletter, and elsewhere, is that Donald Trump, the man who once said on the campaign trail, “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country,” has mostly proven to be about as tough as the Pillsbury Doughboy to Xi Jinping once in office, particularly in his second term. …
… [O]n front after front, Trump keeps making decisions that leave Xi smiling. We were promised a rottweiler, and we got a chihuahua. …
… Finally, there are some signs that Trump is losing patience with Xi. He conducted an eight-minute interview with the Financial Times on Sunday and told the newspaper that he could delay his summit with Xi, scheduled for March 31 in Beijing as part of a three-day presidential visit to China.
“It’s only appropriate that people who are the beneficiaries of the strait will help to make sure that nothing bad happens there,” Trump told the Financial Times. After saying that U.S. allies in Europe should volunteer to help escort oil tankers through the strait, Trump added, “I think China should help too because China gets 90 per cent of its oil from the straits [sic].” He added he wanted to hear a decision from China before the summit. “We’d like to know before that. It’s [two weeks is] a long time.”
The Chinese government may not see much need to send its navy to the Persian Gulf, since their cargo ships are traveling unmolested.
But there’s another move the Trump administration made last week that largely got lost in a busy news cycle: United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer announced the initiation of new investigations into 60 countries about “excess manufacturing capacity” and “forced labor.” …
… Everybody in the world knows that forced labor is rampant in China; the only people who dispute this are cheerleaders for the regime in Beijing. On its last day in office, the Biden administration released its updated report on forced labor in China’s Xinjiang Region.
