At 8:40PM EDT last Thursday, as the two were wrapping up a ceremonial dinner with their families, President Donald Trump informed President Xi Jinping that the United States was concluding a cruise missile strike against a Syrian airfield involved in a chemical weapons attack against rebels earlier in the week.
In the limited context of U.S.-China relations, the strikes against Syria, a regional partner of China’s, followed a weeks-long campaign by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whose tough talk on North Korea included putting “all options on the table”. To Beijing, which views an unstable Korean peninsula as one of the greatest potential threats to China’s national security, Tillerson’s comments, combined with very real unilateral action in Syria, likely raised the stakes for the Chinese to need a successful summit between the leaders on Friday.
A charitable interpretation of these events would be that ramping up pressure ahead of negotiations comes straight out of Trump’s Art of the Deal. After all, the President opens the second chapter of his seminal real estate investment guide with, “[m]y style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing to get what I'm after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want.”
But reality is probably less charitable, for two reasons. First, the decision to attack the airfield was made following a short series of National Security Council meetings. In these meetings, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster said in a press briefing following the strikes, that “[t]here were three options that we discussed with the President, and the President asked us to focus on two options in particular, to mature those options.”
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates once described a similar deliberation on Afghanistan early in Barack Obama’s tenure. In that discussion, senior advisor Bruce Riedel provided Obama, “three options, two of which are ridiculous, so you accept the one in the middle.”
Trump has made many, many statements opposing missile strikes in Syria in the past, but it would not be surprising if his change of heart is—rather than a carefully calibrated attempt to ratchet up pressure on a foreign power largely not involved in Syria—simply attributable to the President falling for a tactic like that described by Gates. In the context of turmoil on the National Security Council and Trump’s apparent tilt away from anti-establishment voices, including his advisor Steve Bannon, the decision to launch cruise missiles in the Middle East is another data point in a trend.
Even if Trump gainfully employed his classic negotiating tactic, he, in his own words, failed to achieve any substantive objectives in his meeting with Xi. That is because the only “objective” of this meeting was in reality tactical: to build a relationship between the two leaders that will pay dividends down the line.
And tactically, the meeting was largely successful, as the leaders did (likely) leave with a stronger personal rapport and both were able to declare the meeting productive to their respective home constituencies. Secretary Tillerson described “the atmosphere, the chemistry between the two leaders [as] positive. The posture between the two really set the tone for our subsequent meetings between our high-level delegations.”
In 2013, President Obama held a meeting with Xi, at Sunnylands, similarly designed to build a personal rapport and promote a long-term, fruitful relationship. And like Tillerson in regards to Trump and Xi, then-National Security Advisor Tom Donilon described the Sunnylands summit as “positive and constructive, wide-ranging and quite successful.”
However, at Sunnylands, Obama reached an agreement with Xi to limit hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) that ultimately paved the road for both countries to commit to the Paris Climate Agreement, as well as a list of other deliverables that similarly provided substantive floors on which to build future negotiations. Tackling the issue of climate change evolved into one of the most consequential objectives achieved in the U.S.-China relationship under Obama’s leadership (even as it is assailed by the current administration).
Meanwhile, the current White House’s readout of the summit at Mar-A-Lago does not reveal any similarly substantive achievements. Indeed, the White House pulled climate change issues off the agenda between the two Presidents, eliminating the opportunity most ripe for substantive bilateral progress. The closest thing to a deliverable was found on the economic side, where, as described by Secretary Mnuchin, “the plan is for us to develop a 100-day plan.”
Trump is fond of saying he will not “telegraph” his intentions before he acts, but an enigmatic foreign policy, by definition, makes it more difficult for either side to identify areas of mutual interest that can serve as a keel when the relationship enters stormy waters.
The Mar-A-Lago summit between President Trump and Xi may have ameliorated the tensions that Trump exacerbated in the few months following his electoral victory, but it failed to provide a single objective toward which China and the United States can jointly work. In this sense, Trump’s first meeting with President Xi manifested a continued degradation of the world’s most important relationship and represents a lost opportunity for reset.
We still do not know what the United States under Trump’s leadership wants from China, where it is willing to compromise and what it will do to protect those interests on which it will not compromise. These are some of the many difficult questions that Trump must answer himself before meeting again with President Xi. It may be useful that the two leaders have established a baseline veneer of cordiality as the Trump administration begins to assemble its China policy, but there remains a fundamental lack of clarity to the substantive, constructive agenda on which the two countries can collaborate, cordially or otherwise.
