President Trump left town last weekend for a six-day Asia trip, partly to change the subject and partly to score some cheap symbolic victories. As always, his goal was short-run, made-for-TV successes, with foreign leaders fawning in his presence.
The Washington he left behind includes several messes of Trump’s own making: an angry public reaction against his abrupt bulldozing of the White House’s East Wing, the prolonged government shutdown, soybean farmers and cattle ranchers upset at the collateral damage from Trump’s tariff policy, repeated reversals on National Guard stunts (most recently in San Francisco), and questions being raised even by Republicans about murders on the high seas with no evidence of drug smuggling. It was a convenient time to get out of town.
At his first stop, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on Sunday, Trump got just the spectacle he wanted, as he enlisted the leaders of Cambodia and Thailand to give him credit for ending what was not a war but some border disputes.
“This is a momentous day for South East Asia,” Trump said, “a monumental step.” Trump had demanded this special ceremony as a condition for coming to the annual Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit. In fact, both leaders had signed a cease-fire agreement back in July.
As the two prime ministers were about to sign the deal, Trump recounted how he got involved in the Thai-Cambodian border conflict while playing at his Turnberry golf course in Scotland last summer. “And I said this is much more important than a round of golf … I could have had a lot of fun, but this is much more fun … saving people and saving countries.”
From there, Trump headed to Tokyo for a ceremonial meeting with Emperor Naruhito at Tokyo’s Imperial Palace. On Tuesday, he will meet Japan’s first female prime minister, Sanae Takaichi.
But the most difficult part of his Asia mission looks to be the last one: his Thursday meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Trump’s challenge is to make defeat look like victory, or at least a delay of anything dire. In recent weeks, Trump has engaged with China with his usual bluster, threatening to increase tariffs to 100 percent in retaliation for Xi’s threat to withhold exports of rare earth minerals.
On Sunday, all too predictably, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the worst had been averted. The current “truce” between Trump and Xi will continue.
Bessent and his Chinese counterparts have negotiated a “framework deal,” taking the tariff hike and China’s rare earths embargo off the table. China has also reportedly pledged to buy more soybeans, though they did this during Trump’s first term as well and then promptly never bought the soybeans.
Bessent’s announcement set up Trump and Xi for a smiling handshake before the cameras when they meet in South Korea. The stock market soared. All of this is vintage Trump. It addresses none of the long-term issues dividing the U.S. from China, namely the impact of China’s entire mercantilist system on U.S. manufacturing, national security, intellectual-property theft, and geopolitical influence as Trump abandons instruments of soft power and foreign aid.
Trump’s ploy ducks all of these far more consequential questions. The game of making a threat, then backing off in the face of a counterthreat, is far from a victory, however nice it looks on TV. In the meantime, in contrast with Trump’s several mutually contradictory domestic and tariff policies, China makes steady gains in advanced industry after advanced industry, from AI to solar energy to electric vehicles to computer chips, and military concerns such as China’s menacing of Taiwan only intensify. In fact, Xi’s goal in these talks could be getting Trump to back off the U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan.
China’s secret weapon is Trump’s personal corruption and myriad business deals with Chinese entities by Trump senior officials, such as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trump family members.
IF WE LOOK AT THE BIGGER PICTURE, Trump’s foreign policy is a shambles. He just reversed himself on Putin yet again. You can imagine Marco Rubio working up the nerve to tell Trump how Putin made a total fool of him, even to the extent that Trump was repeating Putin talking points in his latest White House conversation with Ukrainian President Zelensky.
This was alarming enough that NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte made an abrupt trip to Washington basically to warn Trump that even if he tried to sell out Zelensky, Europe would stand behind Ukraine. And Europe quickly redoubled its own sanctions and commitments of aid to Ukraine. Trump has done what no previous American president has been able to do: unify the 27 disparate nations of the EU—against himself.
After the Rutte visit, Trump reversed his Russia-Ukraine policy again, imposing sanctions against Russian oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil, including against banks that finance oil purchases. Oil profits account for about 40 percent of Russia’s national budget. Trump also authorized Ukraine to use some long-range missiles that reach deep into Russia. But it’s anybody’s guess how long this harder line will last until Trump reverses himself yet again.
Meanwhile in the Middle East, Trump’s sickening triumphalism and his fawning over Benjamin Netanyahu in his speech to Israel’s Knesset proved premature, to put it mildly. One of the many pieces of collateral damage from Netanyahu’s strategy of assassinating Hamas leaders is that Hamas is now fragmented and Hydra-headed. So if a militant splinter faction that was not party to the cease-fire deal decides to engage in sniper fire against a unit of the IDF, Netanyahu can take that as proof that “Hamas” is not honoring the cease-fire.
Trump reacted by sending envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff back to the Middle East, and giving Hamas (whoever that is) a 48-hour ultimatum to return more remains of dead hostages, most of which are buried in rubble. But even if they succeed in restoring a fragile cease-fire, Netanyahu has myriad ways of sabotaging the larger agreement on which regional peace depends.
Trump will keep resorting to the diplomacy of choreography and spectacle, occasionally achieving secondary tactical goals such as propping up Argentina’s Javier Milei or claiming to have averted a much-exaggerated border war between Thailand and Cambodia. To an appalling degree, the media seems to be playing along, giving Trump the friendly coverage he craves.
But with Trump, there seems to be a rule of thumb. The more consequential the issue—securing Middle East peace, achieving a viable containment policy on China, ending the Russia-Ukraine war on equitable terms—the wider the gap between Trump’s theater and reality.