Donald Trump’s Cold War with China is more about winning votes in Florida than crushing Beijing
It’s well documented that everything Donald Trump does is centred on winning a second election.
Or a third, if he were allowed.
Such is his addiction to his job, there’s plenty wondering whether, if he loses, he’ll admit to it and go quietly.
Trump has been eyeing re-election pretty much since he first set foot in the White House as President and, naturally, the obsession gets stronger as the election campaign cranks into gear for the November vote.
Everything that happens to any American politician right now is all about the ballot box and nothing else.
And, in any election, it really helps a President to have an external enemy.
Some Big Threat from overseas that he can point to and say “Only I can save you from this.”
During the original Cold War, plenty of Presidents saw the logic of this and looked as tough as they could against the Soviet Union.
Not that Donald is a exactly a slave to logic, but even he sees the sense in the approach, and in a recorded speech to the United Nations General Assembly this week, he renewed his now regular attacks on China, with what might be kindly termed a ‘pugnacious’ view of China’s role in the Covid-19 pandemic, amongst other things.
According to Trump, the Chinese should have “stopped the virus at the border” (with a wall, perhaps) and he claimed that the World Health Organisation is controlled by the Beijing government (hence the forthcoming US withdrawal from the only organisation capable of coordinating a pandemic response).
In case the point hadn’t landed he went on to make dark threats about US military spending which he claimed are “at an advanced level… like frankly we’ve never thought of having before,” adding “I only pray to God we never have to use them.’
Which is, pretty much what a succession of Presidents said to Soviet leaders for thirty years or so, though, admittedly without the backdrop of a battle over control of Tik Tok, where the battleground is centred on adolescents lip-synching badly, but where personal data is the weaponry.
So it’s all pretty punchy.
China’s President Xi tried to act like the Grown Up in the room in response – saying “major countries should act like major countries” which positioning China as a global leader in being carbon neutral (by… erm… 2060), while glossing over repression in Hong Kong, Tibet, the plight of the Uyghers, the rising military tensions with Taiwan and India…. Nothing to see in any of those places, keep moving along.
Of course, Xi, as President for Life, can gloss over such things. His long game of Chinese supremacy is still intact.
He doesn’t have pesky voters to worry about.
Still less, does he worry about who the American voters choose. They may tinker with industrialising fake news as part of efforts to destabilise, but that doesn’t mean they have a preferred candidate.
They may find Biden less exasperating to deal with, but studied indifference will remain their stance.
And that’s the reason why you shouldn’t worry overmuch about a damaging Cold War between a declining and an emerging Great Power (please don’t ask which is which).
Almost as Trump was speaking, the speech was being edited into social media clips for his election machine. Trump talks of China as part of his domestic, not foreign, policy.
He can rattle his weaponry while thinking of voting patterns in Florida, the bellwether state of the election, rather than militarisation in the South China Sea.
And, much of what he says (of not the tone in which he says it) is similar to what Joe Biden would say, if anyone were listening.
For Trump, it’s simply another element in his Strong Man tactics – a list of enemies, internal and external, that range from protestors (against him), the the media, to Covid to foreign governments.
The list is ever-changing and ever-growing.
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And should Trump win, the rhetoric will die down, the military exercises in China’s backyard will ease up, the trade wars will become easier to unravel and, as near the start of his first four years in the job, Trump will be proclaiming his friendship with Xi over pan-seared Dover sole, once again.
And China will resume it’s patient accrual of power influence and status, not worrying about how quickly it achieves pre-eminence, just confident that it will.
So don’t lie awake worrying about a new Cold War. Unless you’re concerned about who it propels into White House…
Jimmy Leach is a consultant who has had real jobs, including head of digital communications for two Prime Ministers and head of digital diplomacy at the Foreign Office. He has also had senior roles at The Guardian, Independent and HuffPost UK