Both Trump and Xi Overestimate Themselves

Get audio access with any FP subscription. There are two ways to understand this week’s summit in Beijing between China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and U.S. President Donald Trump. The first, and most tempting, is to see it as a meeting between two figures commonly described as the most powerful men on Earth, with all of the personal chemistry and theatrics surrounding their second-ever summit in China. The second centers on the encounter between the nations they incarnate—and although this is the harder one to parse, it is also the more important. There are two ways to understand this week’s summit in Beijing between China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and U.S. President Donald Trump. The first, and most tempting, is to see it as a meeting between two figures commonly described as the most powerful men on Earth, with all of the personal chemistry and theatrics surrounding their second-ever summit in China. The second centers on the encounter between the nations they incarnate—and although this is the harder one to parse, it is also the more important. The most common narratives about the contrasting trajectories of the two countries are often superficial and misleading. The United States under Trump is said to be a decadent and declining superpower, heedless of its own drift, or at least powerless to arrest it. China, by contrast, is often imagined to be a nation on the march, one full of purpose and hell-bent on progress. And this is not just how outsiders imagine China; at the level of national discourse, at least, it seems to be how Chinese leaders imagine themselves. The reality, in both instances, is considerably more complicated. As they meet, both Trump and Xi lead systems with both enormous strengths and vulnerabilities, making easy directional projections for either country complicated. Considerable danger, meanwhile, lurks in the easy and pervasive assumptions that circulate within the two bodies politic about the supposed inherent advantages of their peoples or systems. During his second term especially, Trump has demonstrated the dangers of rampant self-belief and bluster. There is little space for complexity in the way he and his inner circle talk about the world, and drastically inadequate recognition of the limits of U.S. power. One can see this in the way that Washington’s superficial success in Venezuela, where it abducted a sitting president and replaced him with a Trump-friendly vassal, induced overconfidence in the notion that Iran, a vastly larger and more determined civilizational power, could be brought to its knees by a joint U.S.-Israeli air campaign. The wages of this grave miscalculation have been high and are still mounting, with no end in sight. And yet Trump and his Pentagon remain deluded in the belief that by securing an unprecedented increase in the U.S. military budget—to the tune of $1.5 trillion—the United States’ ability to dictate the rest of the world will grow accordingly. Objectively speaking, China, on the other hand, has been far less of an unadulterated success under Xi than the global public imagines. Contrary to popular belief, midway into his unprecedented third mandate as head of the Chinese state and Chinese Communist Party, China is still not in danger of overtaking the United States as the world’s largest economy. By some estimates, in fact, it has lost ground relatively, and Chinese per-capita income remains vastly smaller than that of the United States. China has achieved several highly significant advances during Xi’s tenure, but even in many of these areas, signs of systemic weakness go hand in hand with apparent progress. Under Xi, China has become a near-peer to the United States in military strength, especially in its home region, the Western Pacific, where much of the two countries’ power contest will play out in coming decades. It has undergone an extraordinary expansion of naval power, deploying new submarines and aircraft carriers that rival the United States’ best at a remarkable clip. Its air and missile forces, too, now represent formidable challenges to any future U.S. deployment under hostile conditions. And yet on the evidence of Xi’s continuous purges of its highest ranks, the Chinese military continues to be riddled with gross corruption, is untested in war, and continues to be perceived by Xi as insufficiently loyal. Whether the corruption is as pervasive as Xi’s purges suggest, or whether those purges reflect his own paranoia and hunger for personal control, the effect on operational reliability is much the same. In economic matters, meanwhile, even some of the shiniest symbols of China’s industrial prowess trail question marks behind them. The most obvious example of this is its electric vehicle industry, which is increasingly seen as world-beating in terms of innovative design, price, and even quality. But as with other recent Chinese industrial triumphs, such as solar energy, the industry’s explosive expansion has been fueled by lavis

Both Trump and Xi Overestimate Themselves

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