Chinese think Trump is a genius when it comes to trade

Monica Showalter:

Has anyone ever called the Chinese 'stupid'? Not those guys.

So now they're reading President Trump, and unlike the childish Eurotrash of western Europe, they see a shrewd, wily, chess-playing, Sun Tzu-grade genius, who could easily checkmate them, and they've got a lot of reasons for thinking so.

That's the report from a European policy-domo, who actually went to Beijing and asked the local leaders what they were seeing. The report that European Council of Foreign Relations President Mark Leonard gives, in the Financial Times, is well worth the subscription or trial subscription to read it. Some of his thoughts from the piece can be read on Instapundit, however. Here's a bit of what Glenn Reynolds posted:

I have just spent a week in Beijing talking to officials and intellectuals, many of whom are awed by his skill as a strategist and tactician. . . .

Few Chinese think that Mr Trump’s primary concern is to rebalance the bilateral trade deficit. If it were, they say, he would have aligned with the EU, Japan and Canada against China rather than scooping up America’s allies in his tariff dragnet. They think the US president’s goal is nothing less than remaking the global order.

They think Mr Trump feels he is presiding over the relative decline of his great nation. It is not that the current order does not benefit the US. The problem is that it benefits others more in relative terms. To make things worse the US is investing billions of dollars and a fair amount of blood in supporting the very alliances and international institutions that are constraining America and facilitating China’s rise.

In Chinese eyes, Mr Trump’s response is a form of “creative destruction”. He is systematically destroying the existing institutions — from the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement to Nato and the Iran nuclear deal — as a first step towards renegotiating the world order on terms more favourable to Washington.

Once the order is destroyed, the Chinese elite believes, Mr Trump will move to stage two: renegotiating America’s relationship with other powers. Because the US is still the most powerful country in the world, it will be able to negotiate with other countries from a position of strength if it deals with them one at a time rather than through multilateral institutions that empower the weak at the expense of the strong.

My interlocutors say that Mr Trump is the US first president for more than 40 years to bash China on three fronts simultaneously: trade, military and ideology. They describe him as a master tactician, focusing on one issue at a time, and extracting as many concessions as he can. They speak of the skilful way Mr Trump has treated President Xi Jinping. “Look at how he handled North Korea,” one says. “He got Xi Jinping to agree to UN sanctions [half a dozen] times, creating an economic stranglehold on the country. China almost turned North Korea into a sworn enemy of the country.” But they also see him as a strategist, willing to declare a truce in each area when there are no more concessions to be had, and then start again with a new front.

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There is much more.

What seems clear is that these guys are smarter than Trump's domestic critics when it comes to his end game.  The domestic critics see someone tearing down the "world order" with no plan for what follows, but Trump has a very clear objective.  He wants a level playing field for US companies and employees with true free trade as part of the end game. 

I think the reason so many of the domestic critics do not get it is they are blinded by their Trump hatred and their belief that he is not intelligent.  It is interesting that his foreign adversaries understand his real genius better than those in this country.