Trump in Asia: catastrophe dodged: Trump’s trip rated a success

Donald Trump has stayed pretty well on script during the most challenging part of his nine-day Asia tour.

Donald Trump speaks during the APEC summit in Da Nang, Vietnam. Picture: AP

So far, so good.

Donald Trump stayed pretty well on script during the most challenging part of his nine-day, five-nation Asia tour, and ­impressed Asian audiences with his friendliness and directness in their first direct sighting of him.

But by the time the US President flew from Beijing yesterday to Da Nang, he had yet to set out a blueprint for America’s role in the region to compare with the suite of new concepts, including the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, launched by his “friend”, China’s President Xi Jinping.

Trump’s task in reaffirming US leadership has been made more difficult by the failure of his White House to fill a number of the key Asia-focused jobs in the administration.

The APEC summit in Vietnam’s Da Nang provides a further challenge.

Trump is no supporter of multilateral economic arrangements, the prime impetus for the forum. But it offers him, at the same time, the biggest possible platform to ­affirm that America is not, as feared, losing interest in the region but is here to stay, despite his rejection of the “Asia pivot” and of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

There has been no breakthrough so far on resolving the prime challenge of Trump’s Asia tour, North Korea’s rapid nuclearisation.

In Japan, Trump and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe deepened their “bromance” with another round of golf, but Trump also told Abe he had to buy a massive amount of American armaments, and complained about Japanese carmakers: “Try building your cars in the US instead of shipping them over, is that rude to ask?” Japan’s auto industry responded within minutes: 75 per cent of Japanese brand cars bought in America are already made in the US.

Understandably, Abe is reserving judgment on Trump’s proposal of a free-trade agreement between the two. Abe has undergone a bitter experience with America on that front, last year delivering a painstakingly convincing argument to congress that it should ink the TPP on which he had expended considerable personal political capital only to be spurned by ­Republicans and Democrats.

Trump’s best performance has been in Seoul, closest to North Korea, where the traps were clearest, and where critics at first complained South Korea had again been “passed over”, squeezed between longer US visits to its larger neighbours to the east and west.

But while the visit was short, the quality of the encounters was applauded. Kang Choi, the vice-president of the Asan Institute, one of South Korea’s leading think tanks, told The Weekend Australian: “I was really surprised that he behaved this time.”

Trump’s tough, well-articulated speech to the South Korean ­National Assembly, applauded 25 times by the MPs, impressed Choi as much as his speech in Warsaw in July. Choi noted that while ­addressing Kim Jong-un’s human rights abuses more than his ­nuclear adventurism, he did not mention the dictator by name, but did praise the South Korean economic miracle: “championing common values rather than mercantilism”.

Trump held back from previous abusive attacks on the five-year-old free-trade agreement with South Korea, although he did praise the country’s purchase of new weapons from the US even though this is only at the starting point of negotiations. Choi said this prompted the inevitable critique from the South Korean left that Trump is “trying to sell weapons by creating a crisis”.

But Choi said that by buying more sophisticated military systems, including early warning devices and reconnaissance planes, South Korea would become less dependent on the US and more confident in its own capabilities.

He believed Trump had sensed the mood in South Korea and “skilfully dodged” the negative ­issues, attracting substantial online support in the most wired country in the world despite some protests in the streets.

The Chinese diplomatic minders cleverly shepherded Trump back towards that default and, comparatively harmless for them, mercantilism in Beijing.

Besides the atmospherics designed to present the host to best effect — Xi showing his guests the great sites of the world’s re-emerging imperial city — the main takeaway was the announcement of $325 billion of new orders for American companies.

But the 15 deals are mostly non-binding expressions of intent, and realising them could be kicked forward well into the next presidential term. On North Korea, Tong Zhao, fellow at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Centre for Global Policy, said calling on China to cease trade with North Korea, as Trump did in Seoul, was always “likely to be a dead end”.

The two countries differ about applying “coercive pressure or diplomatic overture”, he said, with China “rejecting the US view that Pyongyang bears the sole responsibility for previous diplomatic failures”. As anticipated, there was no breakthrough in Beijing on a common approach, only on the common — but already remote — goal of denuclearisation.

The challenges are piling up for Xi, too, as he seeks the global role that Trump appears to eschew. He needs to demonstrate he is managing Kim Jong-un, not the reverse, and that he prefers more contemporary and equal relations with his neighbours than as tribute-states, with both APEC and the East Asia Summit at Angelese in The Philippines providing platforms to make those points.