How Donald Trump has turned the White House into his Imperial Court
Originally published in the Australian Financial Review
In the short term, Trump’s brute exercise of America’s size and strength is making him the most powerful president in recent history.
It now borders on conventional wisdom that to compete with China in the global economy, the US and other countries are increasingly having to become more like it.
Just look at how America has adopted trade and investment restrictions to build and protect US industry, to give it a level playing field with China, which has long pursued such policies.
Few, however, predicted that Donald Trump would so faithfully adopt the most ancient of Chinese policies, according to which visitors arrive at court bearing gifts for the emperor and kowtow before him.
The so-called tributary system described the framework that the imperial court used for centuries to deal with smaller, and, by definition, inferior states.
Visitors would arrive bearing tribute and acknowledge the superiority of the emperor’s realm, and in return have their own states recognised and gain access to trade and security.
How else does one describe the procession of national leaders arriving at the White House in recent months to consecrate deals with Trump?
Not only have visiting leaders agreed to accept high tariffs as the price of access to the US market, but they have also dropped their own and pleaded for exemptions at Trump’s feet.
This week, it was the turn of South Korea. President Lee Jae Myung followed the Oval Office script, offering billions in investment and flattering the US president by telling him he should build a Trump Tower in Pyongyang.
Japan set the template in July by accepting a 15 per cent tariff and agreeing to spend US$550 billion ($842.5b) in the US. Trump piled on the humiliation by calling the Japanese investment pledge “a signing bonus” and announced, “it’s our money.”
Life was much easier, and cheaper, under Trump 1.0. The late Shinzo Abe, then Japan’s Prime Minister, successfully cultivated Trump by gifting him a gold-plated golf club and nominating him for the Nobel Prize for his efforts to secure peace on the Korean Peninsula.
It goes without saying that neither the Japanese, nor others, have confirmed the details of these lopsided deals announced by Trump, nor have they agreed to spend the money the way he directs them to.
In that respect, Trump echoes imperial China in another way, in that much of the tribute offered to emperors over time evolved into mere ritual incantations of fealty rather than genuine displays of submission.
“Australia has no war it can offer on a plate for Trump to solve, in his campaign for a Nobel Prize.”
Bowing before Trump has become corrosively instinctive, nonetheless, because that is considered the smart way to do business in Washington.
One country that hasn’t played the game is China itself. Trump took a step back from punishing the Chinese, after they delayed essential supplies of the critical minerals that they have a lock on.
Periscope diplomacy
Thus far, Australia has quietly resisted as well, though Anthony Albanese will have to front up in Washington, or elsewhere in the US, at some stage.
One senior Australian diplomat described Canberra’s approach as like gliding under Washington in a submarine, occasionally putting up the periscope to survey the battlefield, before heading underwater again.
Australia made a down payment with the US by easing restrictions on US beef products coming into the country, which Trump gleefully promoted on social media.
Kicking Iranian diplomats out of Australia, as the government did this week, won’t hurt either.
Australia is also attempting to make itself an indispensable partner in establishing what the Taiwanese called a “non-red” supply chain, in other words, one free of input from China.
Trump once demanded exclusive access to critical minerals in Ukraine, which he portrayed as a financial bonanza to repay the US for the cost of supporting Kyiv’s war with Russia.
Australia has a better slate of critical minerals than Ukraine, but we are offering the US security of supply, not a mother lode of profits.
As Kevin Rudd, Australia’s Ambassador to Washington, recently reminded us, customers outside of the China supply chain will have to agree to price supports to make the trade sustainable.
Chinese companies have such a grip on the critical minerals market that they can drive fresh investors out by manipulating prices and making competitors uneconomic. Hence the need for a floor price
Australia has no war it can offer on a plate for Trump to solve, in his campaign for a Nobel Prize. We invest in the US, but mainly through superannuation funds.
Being a longstanding military and intelligence ally is thin gruel in MAGA world.
Albanese might yet find another form of tribute to carry to the US, that is, once Trump agrees to receive him at court.
But the things that the US most wants – greater defence spending and more rhetorical alignment on China – have thus far been ruled out by the Prime Minister.
The tributary system, and the hubris it engendered about Chinese superiority, was one reason why the country fell apart in the 19th century under pressure from the West.
Is the US going the same way? There is a lot of ruin in a nation, as Adam Smith once said, and we are far from the end of US power.
In the short term, Trump’s brute exercise of America’s size and strength is making him the most powerful president in recent history.
But as one commentator in Seoul said, as his president departed Washington this week: “On the surface, (Lee and others) are bending their knee. In their heads, however, they are preparing for a world without the US.”