| President Donald Trump began his second term styling himself as a great “peacemaker” and dealmaker. But
almost 100 days since his inauguration, the president is struggling to
forge peace amid a thicket of raging conflicts — not least in Gaza and
Ukraine — and has few artfully-brokered deals to show after causing
global panic with the threat of sweeping tariffs on exports to the
United States. In particular, his efforts to persuade Russia (via
negotiations over Ukraine) and confront China (through an escalating
trade war that’s seen triple-digit tariffs slapped onto Chinese exports)
don’t appear to be delivering the results Trump intended. This
week, the Trump administration was on the back foot. Dozens of trade
and finance ministers gathered in Washington for the annual meetings of
the International Monetary Fund, where officials offered gloomy prognostications on the state of the global economy.
Trump’s tariffs — or the specter of them — are expected to be a drag on
economic growth and may contribute to a “significant slowdown,”
according to the IMF. At a Washington Post event this week,
Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, said she was
already seeing “some softening of growth numbers” on the continent and
warned of an “across-the-board effect on GDP” around the world. The
likely spike in costs for U.S. consumers may arrive in a few weeks. China’s retaliatory measures have spooked U.S. business leaders and even senior administration officials, who, my colleagues reported Thursday,
were scrambling to mitigate the damage from Chinese restrictions on
rare-earth exports that are critical for production in key U.S.
industries. Trump has touted the many bilateral trade negotiations
underway with various countries to resolve his grievances over perceived
trade imbalances, but it’s unclear how much stock foreign governments
may place in these deals given Trump’s penchant to scrap existing
agreements. “The only certainty is
uncertainty,” a visiting senior Southeast Asian official told me,
speaking on the condition of anonymity to frankly assess his
government’s approach to Trump. The official cast doubt on the rest of
the world’s confidence in investing in the United States because of the
volatility of the administration and was skeptical about the U.S.’s
ability to thrash out new trade agreements with dozens of countries. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signaled an apparent softening toward China, suggesting that current tariff levels are not “sustainable” and that “de-escalation” could be around the corner. But Beijing is digging in its heels, sensing growing leverage over Washington, while Trump and his allies are desperate to save face as their gambit flounders. Trump may see his tariffs on China as the initial provocation that spurs a grand bargain with Beijing. But many analysts reckon a deeper realignment and separation may be underway. The
U.S. and China are in a state of economic decoupling and there do not
seem to be any guardrails to prevent escalations in trade tensions from
spreading to other areas,” Rick Waters, a former senior U.S. diplomat at
the Carnegie Endowment for Global Peace, told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s becoming more difficult to argue that we’re not in a new Cold War.” Chinese
President Xi Jinping has seized the moment to cast China as a stable
upholder of a rules-based order that undergirds globalization,
challenged by a destabilizing, protectionist America. At home, major
stimulus packages for the Chinese economy may better insulate China from
the blow of U.S. tariffs. “Tolerance for the pain that’s going to be
caused is greater in China than it is in the United States,” Andy
Rothman, chief executive of Sinology, a California-based consultancy, told my colleagues.
“In the U.S., you have so many consumer items … where there is no ready
replacement. Are people willing and able to pay double … for shoes for
their kids?” Kurt M. Campbell and Rush Doshi, two former Biden administration officials who focused on China policy, argued in a recent Foreign Affairs essay
that the best strategy to compete with China involved a more calibrated
wielding of punitive measures and careful diplomacy that strengthens
economic and security cooperation with other countries. Trump’s America
First pugilism offers neither. “If
anything, the United States — particularly in the era of President
Donald Trump — risks overestimating unilateral power and underestimating
China’s ability to counter it,” they wrote. In the case of Russia, Trump has taken an altogether gentler approach. The
White House’s attempts to force a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine
appears to have hit an impasse. In public, there’s been more friction
between the Trump administration and Ukraine — which is resisting a
full-fledged Russian invasion — than with the Kremlin. Trump has
repeatedly berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as the figure
with “no cards to play,” while seemingly echoing Russian talking points
on the origins of the conflict. Trump
envoy Steve Witkoff will be in Moscow for meetings with top Russian
officials, but it’s unclear what, if any, concessions the White House
wants to extract from the Kremlin. The framework of a potential deal
offered by the Trump administration “would rule out NATO membership for
Ukraine, include U.S. acceptance of Russia’s illegal annexation of
Crimea, leave the Russian army with nearly all the territory it has
taken so far and not give any real security guarantees for Ukraine,” my colleagues reported. “The elements would be deeply damaging to Zelensky if he accepted.” Zelensky’s frustration with Trump’s ongoing moves was palpable Thursday, as Kyiv reeled from deadly Russian airstrikes
that killed 12 people and injured dozens more in the Ukrainian capital.
He cut short a visit to South Africa and returned home, citing the
latest Russian attacks as reason to be skeptical of Trump’s claims that
Russian President Vladimir Putin wants a ceasefire. “What
is puzzling is all the pressure has been on Ukraine, and all the
conciliation has been for Russia,” Lord Mark Sedwill, chair of
geopolitical advisory at Rothschild & Co., told me. Sedwill, who
served as Britain’s national security adviser for much of Trump’s first
term, argued that Trump’s current approach on multiple fronts downplays
U.S. strength and clout. “The whole agenda is Make America Great Again,
and yet, paradoxically, he underestimates American power,” he said. “Why
does he treat Putin as an equal? Putin is nowhere near an equal.” At
a time when both China and Russia are conjuring visions of American
decline, Trump is “almost willfully accelerating this multipolarity, as
though he sees the world in that sort of sense of 19th-century spheres
of influence, and accepts that America’s sphere of influence is rather
more constrained than actually is the case,” Sedwill added. |