Trump’s neo-isolationist policies have delighted Beijing as they have put China in the perfect position to claim the throne and sit atop the global command.
LONDON: Donald Trump adores being adored. Since moving back into the White House more than a month ago, he has addressed ecstatic fans, rambling on for hours to great applause explaining how he was making America Great Again. For Trump it’s pure theatre. The problem is, like theatre much of what he says is pure fiction.
Take, for example, his remarks to reporters last week at his Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago. Falsely blaming Ukraine’s president for starting the war which has cost tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives, Trump called Zelensky “a dictator without elections” and claimed his support among voters was near rock bottom: “I hate to say it, but he’s down at 4 percent approval rating”, were his exact words. Wrong. According to a report released on Wednesday by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, “Zelensky retains a high rate of public trust at about 57 percent.”
On elections, Zelensky was elected to a five-year term on 31 March 2019 by a landslide, voted for by some 75 percent of the electorate. Ukrainian law prohibits parliamentary or presidential elections during a state of martial law, which Ukraine is currently in because of Russia’s full scale invasion of the country. With Russia illegally holding 20 percent of Ukraine while constantly bombarding Ukrainian cities with missiles, it requires very few brain cells to realise that would be impossible to hold free and fair elections. So again, Donald Trump is wrong.
But perhaps the biggest porky from Trump was about money, claiming that America had given Ukraine $350 billion. According to a US interagency oversight group that tracks aid to Ukraine, the US Congress has appropriated $183 billion in assistance to Ukraine since the start of Russia’s invasion on 24 February 2022. The Kiel Institute, a German based think tank tracking support going into Ukraine, calculated that the US spent $119 billion on aid over the same period. Either way, the real expenditure was little more than half of Trump’s claim. Crucially, much of this was actually spent in the US to boost the domestic defence industry by replacing old equipment given to Ukraine. It was also used to supply Ukraine with new US-manufactured weaponry, again boosting the income of US manufacturers.In fact, 80 percent of the ‘Ukraine bill’ was spent in the US, according to the Washington Post.
As well as disparaging Ukraine in favour of Russia, Trump made it clear that he placed little stock in rules-based systems, alliances, or multinational forums.Nobody was expecting this breath-taking reversal of US foreign policy, the biggest in eight decades. Since the late 1940s, the United States crafted the Western world as a free democratic alliance, determined to maintain its sovereignty, maintain its peace and prosperity, and in many ways to repel aggression from dictators. With the United States under Trump slipping and sliding with the aggressive dictator in the Kremlin against the democratic country of Ukraine, clearly the victim, it’s not only European leaders that are stunned. Trump’s erratic behaviour is confusing leaders all over the world. Those in Asia are asking themselves if American foreign policy can ever again be taken seriously. More importantly,under a flip-flop president they question if American guarantees can be relied upon?
Rather than building goodwill, deepening friendships and informally collaborating with like-minded nations, Trump has used a wrecking ball to destroy relationships. Barely a month after his inauguration, Trump made good his promises to withdraw America from numerous global bodies – including the Paris Climate Accords, the World Health Organisation, and the UN Human Rights Council – while cutting massive amounts of funding for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Trump clearly doesn’t understand the importance of soft power.
It was the American political scientist, Joseph Nye, who differentiated between two types of power. Hard power uses material assets to compel and coerce others to bow to your will. Soft power, by contrast, is non-coercive and uses policies, culture and political values to persuade or co-opt others to follow your example or suggestions. Soft power shapes what others do through appeal and attraction.Nye argues that the use of hard power in the modern day is costly, both financially and politically, whereas soft power is comparatively low cost, or even free.
Soft power has long been a cornerstone of US leadership. But now America’s traditional style of soft power, such as progressing infrastructure, education, healthcare and democratic institutions around the world, is being abandoned by the Trump regime. Many believe that under Trump, America is causing self-harm by suddenly reversing course on its foreign aid, cancelling long-standing contractual commitments, stranding life-saving products, and levelling accusations of pervasive corruption without proof. As Walter Clemens argues in his piece in the influential Washington outlet The Hill:“The problems arising from Trump’s sheer ignorance are compounded by his disdain for empathy, his apparent pleasure in fostering and witnessing brutality and his frequent success at flouting any kind of law – municipal, national or international. Trump, his team and an acquiescent Republican majority in Congress are taking away a major facet of what once made America great.” Clemens titled his piece:‘How to lose friends and alienate nations: Trump is junking US soft power.’ Exactly what the Donald is doing, seeminglyin total ignorance.
Trump’s neo-isolationist policies have delighted Beijing as they have put China in the perfect position to claim the throne and sit atop the global command. By calling its tools and very existence into question, Trump has all but destroyed America’s soft power. For example, on Wednesday, Washington announced that it is cutting more than 90 percent of USAID foreign aid contracts and $60 billion in overall assistance around the world. This disclosure indicates the scale of the administration’s retreat from US aid and development assistance overseas and from decades of US policy that foreign aid helps US interests by stabilising other economies and building alliances. President Trump and his unelected henchman, Elon Musk, have hit foreign aid harder and faster than almost any other target in their push to cut the size of the federal government, claiming that USAID projects enhance a “liberal agenda and are a waste of money”.
USAID is the greatest vacuum that China has the opportunity to fill. The agency contributed $860 million to humanitarian efforts in Southeast Asia alone. Now, without the support of American dollars, the region’s leaders are looking to China, which has always had a vested interest in increasing its soft power in the area. Critical programmes across Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa have also been slashed, undermining humanitarian efforts and long-term strategic objectives which will be inevitably exploited by Beijing. Nowhere will this be more evident than in Africa where at the blink of an eye,contracts for tuberculosis, malaria and HIV treatment have suddenly been cancelled, along with more than a thousand emergency food kitchens in famine-stricken Sudan. China’s Belt and Road Initiative has already poured billions into infrastructure projects in Africa, and although many of these are in Chinas commercial interest, they carry with them significant soft power. Beijing’s prospects of co-opting further influence over large swathes of Africa through further aid and diplomacy are jaw droppingas Trump’s America retreats.
In the Middle East, China has also emerged as a formidable actor and will benefit from Trump’s weird decisions. It has adopted a multilayer approach and engaged with the region through the soft power of diplomacy, economic investments, security and cultural outreach. This complex web of engagement was specifically designed to promote China as a reliable partner and role model in the Middle East, unlike an unreliable America. Public opinion surveys
The dramatic shift by Donald Trump in just a few weeks is not merely transactional but will be generational. Once a country realigns its economic and political loyalties, reversing that trend becomes exponentially more difficult. New generations of policymakers and citizens will come to see China, not America, as their principle economic partner and friend. While hard power can be rebuilt through military investment and economic force, soft power, once eroded, is far more difficult to restore. Even if Trump’s successor attempted to undo the damage, the trust, credibility and moral leadership that America took generations to cultivate could be lost for generations.
While the last 20 years have been marked by a substantial rise in Chinese soft power across the world, Trump’s isolationist policies have offered Beijing even greater opportunitiesto seize control of a newly emerging global order. The irony of all this is almost too perfect. Donald Trump has placed confronting China as a top priority, even using it as a justification for disengaging from Europe. Yet every action he takes, such as abandoning his allies and retreating from global leadership, only strengthens Beijing’s position, opening the door for even more soft power. Xi Jinping must be a very happy man.