Trump’s Asian tour had an air of success

Donald Trump’s Asia tour had an air of success but it’s unclear what it achieved.

Donald Trump addresses troops at the US Yokota Air Base, on the outskirts of Tokyo.

Donald Trump’s loudest critics have been confounded.

The US President did not embarrass himself, his office or his country during his tour of Asia — the longest since George HW Bush’s visit 25 years ago.

However, that is the best that can be said. The bar was set low.

“It has been an incredible 12 days,” Trump said as he flew home. “We’ve had a tremendously successful trip. I have made a lot of friends at the highest levels” — the latter perhaps unsurprising for a US president.

Trump’s two prime aims from the trip were to pull together a ­regional coalition to confront North Korea, and to redress the trade imbalances that he told ­voters last year were destroying their jobs and living standards.

Private deals may have been reached on these issues, but no progress appears to have been made that is on the public record.

Doug Paal, vice-president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment, previously vice-chairman of JPMorgan Chase International, and director of Asian affairs for presidents Ronald Reagan and Bush, said in Beijing this week that he expected Trump would say on his return that he had wiped out this year’s trade deficit with China by his announcement of $325 billion in deals being negotiated.

But there was no evidence, Paal says, that the Trump administration has even tried to address with China the core issues that concern American and other international businesses, especially market access and the technology regime.

It appears China had been expecting tough negotiations on such issues. As soon as Trump had left, Beijing announced autonomously several market-opening moves that it had thought the US leader would have pushed for — including of the ­finance sector and the car industry, to allow, for instance, Tesla to set up production in Shanghai’s free trade zone fully as foreign owned rather than in a joint venture as formerly required.

For decades business in the US, as elsewhere, had come to a consensus that it was better to be inside the Chinese market suffering the rough with the smooth than to be outside it.

“That has significantly changed,” Paal says.

As trade studies Trump has ordered start being published, new rules for engagement are expected to be drafted in the US, which will require ­reciprocity on access and policing technology transfers.

Trump appears to be setting up a situation whereby, having blamed past American leaders but not Asian countries themselves, including China, for the trade ­deficit, he may start to implement more aggressively the protectionist policies that he proposed during his election campaign last year — with ­retaliation likely from China, as from other countries, which may feel wrongly penalised.

There has been no take-up of American offers of bilateral deals, even by Japan, while the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump abandoned, made further progress this week without him.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, has emerged from his five-yearly party congress comparatively unencumbered by political debts or demands, and driven by a more activist foreign policy than any Chinese leader in living memory.

It was therefore important, says Paal — who organised that previous long presidential Asia visit, by ­Bush — for this visit to frame ways in which the US and China “might start to deal with each other in the future, managing the inevitable competition and protecting us from conflict”.

The prospect of such conflict is growing, he says, because the countries’ systems are so different while their capabilities are becoming similar. It will have to be the US that guides that conversation ­because China’s “institutional baggage” in the form of its party-state ethos is even greater.

But in part because so many senior Asia-related positions remain unfilled in Washington, this opportunity appears to have been missed. Nor were there any serious conversations about the South China Sea or Taiwan, or about human rights.

There appears to have been no conversation in Beijing about the long-proposed bilateral investment treaty between the US and China — made harder because, Paal says, “our Senate doesn’t pass treaties any more”.

The problem with leaving core items off the agenda of talks, or curtailing consideration of them, especially with China, is that ­comparisons will be made with previous presidential conversations, and the conclusion drawn that the US no longer views those issues as significant.

This, Paal says, can lead to dangerous misreadings. For instance, the US has long warned against building on Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea — but Trump hasn’t mentioned it. Xi may believe it safe now to give the go-ahead.

The key pre-emptive message to Trump from Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was that he should beware of making too much of the “state visit plus” buttering-up by Xi and resist the temptation to treat China as a “G2” partner — which naturally would downgrade the Japan ­relationship.

Abe has worked Trump well, Paal says, flying to meet him in New York last year, when he had anticipated congratulating Hillary Clinton. And Xi is “a big, self-confident kind of guy, and Trump likes that”. Such relationships can make a ­difference, but “they don’t often solve problems”.

And they haven’t on this latest long trip, where there was little evidence of Trump building strategy on personal chemistry — except mildly in the tentative discussion of a quadrilateral, “Indo-Pacific” relationship between the US, Japan, India and Australia.

But so far this has little content, and appears to derive from a ­defensive approach to China’s international resurgence. And Trump’s offer to mediate on the South China Sea struck a strange note — presuming a personal ­influence on Xi in an area of ­strategic priority, which appeared almost delusive — and those ­involved diplomatically kept quiet and just let it fade away.

James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment, says that despite the priority Trump ­accorded North Korea on the trip, “nothing positive was agreed”.

In Seoul, he says, Trump indicated the US would not talk with North Korea until it denuclearised — though presidential aides later rowed back from that position. In Japan he said that releasing the Japanese people abducted by North Korean agents to force them to train terrorists in how to pose as Japanese could be the catalyst for talks. “Military threats were put on the backburner.”

Acton says: “While denuclearisation is the goal, it’s not clear the administration has a strategy to ­attain it,” including the preconditions required to open negotiations. “And if there are to be negotiations, what interim ­outcome has to be met short of ­denuclearisation?”

China retains the biggest economic leverage on North Korea, he says. But the country “made it abundantly clear it is not going to impose economic sanctions to the extent that the regime will collapse — it’s not clear what the consequences of that might be.”

Paal says Trump’s preoccupation with North Korea suits China well, leaving it to develop and implement strategies for the rest of the world. “If you’re sitting in Beijing, what’s not to like?”

Shared interests and values previously have bound the US to East Asia. Apart from the well-crafted speech in Seoul that stressed the human cost of the tyrannical ­dynasty in North Korea, Trump found this common ground hard to locate or he lacked the motivation to seek it.

He focused instead on personal chemistry, transactions or applauding counterparts for ­wanting to make their countries great again, too.

So the US hasn’t gone away from our region; far from it. The length of Trump’s trip indicates an understanding of Asia’s importance.

And despite their understandable support for China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and for Xi’s ­generally upbeat rhetoric about a “community of shared destiny”, most of China’s neighbours retain a reserve about its underlying ­ambitions and welcome a continued US commitment.

But there was scant sign during Trump’s visit of his ability or willingness to articulate a vision or a program around which the region might rally.

If this had been a performance on a reality television show such as The ­Apprentice, a righteous judge might say he liked the look of it, but wondered what the point was.

What he did

The US President spent a preliminary day, November 3, in Hawaii where just 30 per cent of voters supported him in last year’s election, the lowest of any state. He received a briefing about Asian issues from Pacific Command.

He flew from there to Japan to launch his inaugural visit to Asia, where he told cheering US servicemen after landing at Yokota Air Base that America was resolute in standing up to North Korea.

He flew by helicopter to the Kasumigaseki Country Club for lunch and nine holes of golf with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. He, his wife Melania and Abe and his wife Akie had an intimate dinner together.

The next day he received a formal welcoming ceremony in central Tokyo, including a brief audience with Emperor Akihito, conducted a press conference with Abe, met the families of Japanese people abducted by North Korea, addressed business leaders and attended a state banquet.

He then flew to South Korea, where again he began with an address to troops — American and South Korean — at Cape Humphreys, south of Seoul, the biggest US military facility outside America. He held talks with popular new liberal President Moon Jae-in at the presidential Blue House, then the two shared a press conference before Trump addressed the National Assembly. This parliamentary speech, interrupted 25 times by applause, was widely viewed as his most impressive of the Asian tour.

He then attended a state banquet. Early the next day he attempted to visit the demilitarised zone from which he could gaze directly into North Korea, but fog prevented his helicopter from landing.

He landed on November 8 in Beijing for what was billed by his hosts as a “state visit plus”. He was greeted in the Forbidden City in the heart of the capital by President Xi Jinping, who conducted a personal tour of the vast home of former emperors. Trump and his wife watched a Peking Opera performance with Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan, and took tea together in the Hall of Embodied Treasures.

The next day Trump received a formal military welcome outside the Great Hall of the People where he then held talks with Xi, whom he dubbed “the king of China”. They together conducted a press briefing — although no questions were allowed. That evening, a state banquet was also held there.

Leaving Melania to visit the Great Wall alone, Trump flew to Danang in Vietnam last Friday, where he delivered his most contentious speech of his tour at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit, lambasting fellow members for their “unfair practices” as he declared he “will not tolerate” trade abuses.

He shared a brief exchange with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin during APEC but did not engage in a formal conversation. He flew on to Hanoi for a bilateral reception as a guest of Vietnam.

On Sunday he flew to Manila and attended, sitting alongside Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, the 50th anniversary banquet for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

On Monday he held talks with Duterte and met India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Japan’s Abe and Malcolm Turnbull, discussing co-operation including on strategic issues between the four countries.