Trump’s triumph explained: Xi and Obama fuel America’s revolt

Chinese President Xi Jinping at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Two presidents, China’s Xi Jinping and America’s Barack Obama, have taken actions which do much to explain why Donald Trump is triumphant.

Xi Jinping, at the World Economic Forum at Davos no less, posed as the champion of globalisation, even preaching against protectionism and populism. “Just blaming economic globalisation for the world’s problems is inconsistent with reality, and will not help solve them,” he said.

You have to admire Xi’s chutzpah. If every nation in the world practised globalisation in the way China does, it would be a world of constant chaos and near inevitable conflict. Let’s be clear: China does not practise free trade. It rigidly and politically polices foreign investment, frequently showing investors the door once it has achieved technology transfer. It controls its currency. It directs capital from its banks, often unprofitably, to favoured industries. It shamelessly subsidises industries. If foreign businessmen transgress often extremely opaque regulations, and fall out with the local powers that be, they can find themselves in jail with months and months going by ­before charges are even identified, much less laid.

If Trump implements globalisation along those lines the world almost certainly is headed for real trouble. By comparison with ­Beijing, Trump’s proposed economic nationalism is mild and even old-fashioned, quaint, with talk of ­tariffs and the like. It is just because mercantilist economic systems like China’s have been in part free ­riders on the global free trade system, taking its advantages but not living up to its disciplines, that there has been such a reaction in the rust belt states of America which led to Trump’s triumph.

Nonetheless, there is real danger in this moment and, whatever America’s grievances, the world does not want Trump to precipitate any type of conflict. The US is by far the biggest economy in the world, and China a clear second. Any serious trade dispute between them will have global consequences.

More than that, they are geo-strategic rivals, especially in Southeast Asia but also in Northeast Asia and even in some global issues. The danger of trade disputes leading to military miscalculation, while not overwhelming, is real and the stakes are enormous.

But if China helped create the Trump effect, so did Obama. The truly wicked action of Obama in commuting Chelsea Manning’s 35-year sentence for espionage is exactly the kind of ­irresponsible, leftist-symbol politics, directed particularly against everyone who serves in the American uniform, which contributed so much to the nationalist reaction which propelled Trump. Policemen and soldiers voted for Trump. Obama explains why. Manning gave more than 700,000 confidential US military documents to WikiLeaks. These included the names of Afghans who worked confidentially with the Americans, the names of confidential contacts of American embassies around the world, and military tactics the US employs, the knowledge of which has helped empower terrorist groups.

Manning did also expose what appear to be some abuses by the US military, If, as she then was Bradley Manning, she had just exposed those, she still would have been charged but it would be possible to have some respect for her motivation.

Further, as a transgender person she has struggled in an all-male prison. Manning deserves to have her human rights respected. But that has nothing to do with commuting Manning’s sentence, which offers some kind of half wink or nod from Obama that really he too is on the side of those who demonise and hate the American military, even as he has ruthlessly used the military at times.

The simple equation is that innocent people’s lives were put at risk, and perhaps sacrificed, because of Manning’s treachery and then Obama rewarded Manning. It is just this kind of demented leftism which has infected the last months of the Obama administration and which did so much to kill Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid. Obama has reverted to a pure version of the celebrity, leftist politics of Zeitgeist orthodoxy he preached with such undergraduate certainty before he became president.

When ordinary Americans are confronted with a choice between traitors who give secrets to America’s enemies and the soldiers who die for their security, they tend to choose the latter and respond with disgust to the former.

Hollywood and Harvard sometimes make a different choice. Hollywood and Harvard lost the last election.

Take Xi and add Obama and you get Trump.