The visit by Donald Trump, the American idiot king, to Beijing for a summit with President Xi ended in apparent failure and toe-curling abasement of the United States. Trump, in an absurd riff, suggested that this diplomatic fiasco was the “greatest summit ever” and a summit of the type that observers had “never seen before”. In a sense he was right.
His public obsequiousness to President Xi and his empty claims that the US and China enjoyed wonderful relations exposed Trump as a thoroughgoing charlatan.
Abject failure in terms of diplomacy might well be received with equanimity by those who cannot wait for Trump’s presidency to end. But the only significant Chinese democracy, namely Taiwan, must have held its collective breath on whether Trump, in pursuit of a favourable headline, might secretly have signalled to Beijing that the US would curtail or compromise Taiwan’s capacity to defend itself from invasion, or that America was less inclined in future to assist Taiwan defending its democracy.
The fact is that Trump cannot be trusted by any ally and, as long as Trump remains president, all of America’s allies must proceed on the basis that pre-existing security guarantees for their freedom have become entirely negotiable in Trump’s transactional deal-making with third parties.
No sooner than Trump departed Beijing with his political and diplomatic tail between his legs, President Xi arranged to welcome Russian president, Vladimir Putin. While some western commentators believe that Xi is now minded to pressurise Putin to end the conflict in Ukraine, there seems little reason to believe that China will lean so heavily on Putin as to humiliate him by demonstrating that his special military operation in Ukraine had ended in defeat for Russia.
If increasingly optimistic predictions of Ukrainian logistical and technological military capacity are true and if the scale of Russian war casualties is remotely comparable to published estimates, there is cause for hope that conditions for ending the invasion of Ukraine will soon be met.
On the other hand, Volodymyr Zelensky still stands accused by the White House of having started the conflict, and Ukraine still remains bereft of American support in Putin’s murderous attempts to destroy its freedom and democracy.
We have no idea of the exact origin of Trump’s subordinate approach to the Kremlin. There is no real reason to disbelieve long-standing suggestions that Trump is the subject of potentially devastating Russian intelligence kompromat. Nobody has provided any credible alternative explanation.
Similar and equally profound questions arise in relation to Trump’s dealings with the Netanyahu regime in Israel. At the end of the day, it was American munitions which enabled genocide in Gaza. At the end of the day, the United States has failed abysmally to halt Israel’s de facto territorial expansions in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon and southwestern Syria.
Trump dares not deploy ground forces in his conflict with Iran. But the military onslaught by air against Iranian targets carried out in tandem with Israel has triggered an emerging world economic crisis with serious internal political side effects in America that threaten the Republican grip on both Houses of Congress.
With plunging approval ratings, escalating inflation, and rising unemployment, Trump has let down middle America. The White House has also engaged in grotesque and divisive religious posturing which has led to conflict with Catholics, the Pope, moderate Christian opinion and – strangest of all – extremist evangelical believers.
Egged on by Netanyahu’s regime, US foreign policy has floundered in the Middle East. Incredibly, Trump now claims that he has postponed further planned aerial attacks on Iran with Israel because of objections by America’s Arab allies. Details are now emerging of the illegal establishment of Israeli forward bases in remote areas of Iraq. This breach of Iraqi sovereignty will backfire badly.
Meanwhile Trump’s political onslaught against the EU and NATO has been sidelined by his Middle Eastern fiasco. While that may afford centrists in Europe some relief, the nagging fear is that the idiot king will search around for some other theatre of activity to distract middle America from the mess he has made of the American economy. Apart from the AI share bubble, Trump has delivered economic slowdown fuelled by his unlawful tariff wars and military excursions.
The US Supreme Court has, by its Trumpian majority, given Republicans the green light for a re-districting gerrymander designed to offset Trump’s slump in the polls next November.
Trump’s options are rapidly shrinking. Regime change in Cuba may be on the White House agenda. But can that swing votes in Trump’s direction? Lastly, we have Trump’s internal programme of political persecution and retribution. A flurry of late-night social media posts reveals the darkest sides of Trump’s political imagination. He now accuses many of his opponents of treason.
In reality American democracy stands poised on the edge of calamity and Donald Trump is the man set to usurp and betray it – the real traitor.