Trump Cracks China’s Fortune Cookie

It’s easy to forget that ten years ago, candidate Donald Trump was the only national politician who took China’s growing geopolitical power seriously.  He talked about China so frequently and pronounced those two syllables so deliberately — Chi-na — that comedians and voters alike enjoyed doing imitations of the MAGA-man taking America’s geopolitical adversary to task.

On the stump, Trump called both Republicans and Democrats “stupid” for how they had permitted the Chinese Communist Party to devour American assets.  He would list beautiful American buildings and historic American real estate that the Chinese had acquired since President Bill Clinton and both parties in Congress decided to ignore China’s past bad behavior (including the ’89 massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square) and welcome it into the world’s premier economic clubs.

He pointed to two decades of multinational trade “deals” that had resulted in the closures of industrial and manufacturing plants across the United States, as once-American companies shifted operations to China and took advantage of the communists’ disregard for workers’ safety or subsistence wages.  He argued that China’s currency manipulation, organized theft of American trade secrets, and sidestepping of environmental and human rights treaties ensured that American wealth flowed in one direction: directly into the pockets of the CCP.

Trump couldn’t believe that American politicians could be so reckless, or worse, consciously willing to sabotage American economic interests for a traitor’s paycheck from Chinese-run lobbyists.  He excoriated national companies for betraying Americans while profiting from slave labor on the other side of the world.  His campaign for president was simultaneously a campaign against this percolating notion in the West that the twenty-first century belonged to China.

Remember how common it was a decade ago to hear pundits proclaim with certainty that this was “China’s century”?  The Brits had handed Hong Kong to China’s communists in ’97 (with false assurances from the CCP that the former British colony’s democratic traditions would be respected for at least fifty years).  President Clinton successfully maneuvered China into the World Trade Organization on his way out of office.  As the new millennium began, businesses in the United States shifted manufacturing operations to China, and it seemed as if everything being sold in America now had a “made in China” label.

The managers of Wall Street’s big firms and the presidents of London’s big banks all opened fortune cookies promising big fortunes in China.  European globalists such as the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab found the CCP’s totalitarian surveillance state an ideal model for the rest of the world to emulate.  China’s billion-plus population and abundant supplies of critical natural resources led Western think tanks to conclude that there was no stopping China’s future global domination.  As Hollywood partnered up with China’s communists to produce blockbuster movies, a message consistently made its way to the screen: China would soon lead the world and dominate the future.

Have you noticed that sometime between Donald Trump’s famous trip down Trump Tower’s golden escalator in 2015 to announce his presidential ambitions and his return to office last year (after surviving Deep State sabotage, lawfare, and assassination attempts) most of the “really smart” pundits have stopped talking about this being “China’s century” with so much certainty?

The shift in “punditry” didn’t happen overnight.  During President Trump’s first term, if you recall, all the “smartest foreign policy people” told television viewers that Chinese President Xi Jinping would use “flattery” and “pragmatic fawning” to appeal to Trump’s “narcissism” while outsmarting him every step of the way with regard to crucial trade imbalances between the two countries.  Xi invited Trump to China’s Forbidden City in 2017, a rare honor for a foreign guest.  The no-longer-relevant scribblers at Time covered the historic event with this headline: “President Trump Meets the World’s Most Powerful Man in Beijing.”

Entirely dismissive of President Trump’s negotiating skills during his first term in office, Time’s editors advised the billionaire businessman to arrive with hat in hand and “ask nicely.”  Time further declared, “China’s ascendancy is stark and only set to grow.”  Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative “will boost Beijing’s influence beyond its borders just as Trump’s questioning of bedrock principles such as free trade, and toadying to authoritarian regimes, is diminishing Washington’s.”  Here’s Time’s final kicker (which I love): “Trump might talk tough, but don’t expect Xi to tremble.”

Boy those geniuses at Time sure framed the Trump-Xi dynamic accurately, didn’t they?  Fast-forward to today, and everywhere you look, two things seem crystal clear: Trump is on the attack, and China is backpedaling.  Do leftwing “journalists” still believe President Trump is all bark, no bite?

Sundance over at The Last Refuge put together a succinct list of Trump’s MAGA kung fu: “First blow: the Trump tariffs hit Beijing hardest.  Second blow: the Beijing tentacle on the Panama Canal is severed.  Third blow: global tariff threats changed the risk dynamic for southeast Asia countries who acted as transnational shippers for China.  Fourth blow: cheap sanctioned oil from Venezuela was cut-off.  Now, the fifth blow: cheap, sanctioned Iranian oil is disrupted.”  Nearly 20% of Beijing’s oil came from Iran and Venezuela, and both countries had given Xi a premium discount in exchange for promises of Chinese technology and security.  China was purchasing more than 80% of Iran’s shipped oil.

What happens when oil stops flowing to China?  Alarm bells go off.  China has immediately halted domestic refiners from exporting diesel and gasoline.  First Trump takes China’s supply of oil coming from Venezuela.  Then Trump takes China’s supply of oil coming from Iran.

At the same time, Trump reasserts the supremacy of the petrodollar on world oil markets, just as China was successfully negotiating purchases in yuan.  While taking out narco-terrorist dictator Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and Islamic terrorist dictator Ali Khamenei in Iran, Trump simultaneously defends the dollar from Chinese attack.

Newsmax host Carl Higbie did an excellent job the other night explaining in nine short minutes all the different ways President Trump is making America’s position stronger and China’s position weaker in the world.  While China funds domestic protests inside the United States to frustrate Trump’s policy initiatives, the president pursues rare earth elements in Greenland (to end any long-term dependency on China), severs Chinese influence in South and Central America, and re-establishes American dominance over oil supplies in the Middle East.  Higbie takes a hard look at members of Congress, Western allies, and even NATO and concludes that President Trump is singlehandedly “containing” China while everyone else is “asleep at the wheel.”

President Trump refuses to give communist China control over the world’s future.  In speech after speech, he tells listeners that both the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries will be “American centuries.”  Every economic and foreign policy decision Trump makes considers that policy’s impact on the war already being waged between China and the United States for global supremacy.

There’s a well-known but apocryphal Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”  President Trump should send truckloads of fortune cookies to President Xi containing that wish.  On the flip side where the lucky numbers usually go, he should print this in red: 45-47, MAGA, KAG.