When US President Donald Trump meets again with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the end of the month, he will be staging the second act in the comedy of manners that now passes for US foreign policy on the Korean peninsula. Between Kim’s billets-doux to the White House and Trump’s gushing praise of Kim, the script could have been written by Oscar Wilde. Like any drawing-room farce, the plot is simple enough: Kim will pledge to abandon his nuclear weapons someday, while coquettishly concealing any details about the program that produces them, and Trump will promise to shower wealth on the Kim dynasty if he does.

But, of course, this play is more tragedy than comedy. Like Trump’s threats to abandon longstanding alliances, withdraw US forces from strategically important regions, and tear up trade deals, the prospect of more presidential shooting from the hip is unnerving US allies, soldiers, diplomats, and even some politicians.

There is good reason to worry, given the outcome of the two leaders’ summit in Singapore last June. Trump’s naive acceptance of Kim’s empty promises over the past eight months has done nothing but erode the US’s leverage in South Korea and beyond. The North has continued to pursue its ballistic-missile program; and through his overtures to South Korea and China, Kim has succeeded in weakening the sanctions on his regime.

Trump has not only failed to halt Kim’s nuclear ambitions; he has also undermined America’s role as a deterrent in Asia. With North Korea’s conventional arsenal already threatening Japan and other countries that host US forces, Trump’s public intimations about drawing down troops in South Korea and elsewhere have fundamentally altered the regional strategic calculus. If asked, leaders in Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei and Southeast Asia might dissemble and avoid stating the obvious. But the fact is that Trump has cast doubt on US defence commitments at a time when both North Korea and China are increasingly pursuing their own regional ambitions.

This problem weighs heavily on the minds of other US policymakers. Hence, whenever Trump travels abroad, a squad of senior officials follows in his wake—like street sweepers after a parade—to reassure allies. Yet, no matter how effective their talking points, they cannot undo the damage that Trump has done to America’s credibility.

Consider Trump’s statement last June declaring that North Korea is ‘no longer a nuclear threat’. That would certainly come as news to Japan, America’s most important ally in the region. Even if the Kim regime did agree to abandon its effort to develop reliable intercontinental nuclear missiles, it would still have thousands of nuclear-capable short- and medium-range missiles pointing at Japan.

The Trump administration is also neglecting the threat posed by the North’s conventional arms. Trump’s unilateral decision to suspend US military exercises in South Korea is a case in point. Exercises involving US and South Korean forces are vital for refining war plans, resolving operational and cultural issues, and honing military skills. As such, they play a central role not just in preparing for various contingencies on the Korean peninsula, but also in Japan’s own self-defence. Ensuring the seamless cooperation of allied units in the region is as important to Japan as it is to the US or South Korea, and perhaps even more so now that relations between Japan and South Korea are fraying.

Whatever emerges from his next summit with Kim, it is already clear that Trump’s disregard for US alliances is taking a toll. Creating effective defence partnerships takes time and hands-on effort. If there is rancor among allies, cooperation on high-priority goals can be set back indefinitely.

For example, three years ago, US officials brokered an important agreement to facilitate the exchange of intelligence data between Japan and South Korea. Yet today, Japanese – South Korean relations have grown tense once again over the issue of wartime reparations.

So far, this renewed acrimony has compounded the fallout from an incident last December in which a South Korean warship targeted a Japanese patrol plane. In the absence of US mediation, the prospects for ongoing military cooperation between the two allies will likely continue to decline, pushing the government of South Korean President Moon Jae-in closer to North Korea and China.

In fact, Daniel Sneider of Stanford University points out that some in Japan have begun to take seriously the possibility of a US withdrawal from the region. With Trump constantly whining about allies not paying their fair share, and with South Korea going its own way, Japan’s leaders are being forced to reconsider longstanding assumptions about Japanese defence and security policy.

Trump’s disdain for US security commitments and the relationships that sustain them has not been lost on Asia’s leaders. Few find comfort in his proclamations about expanding America’s role in the world, given his more frequent threats to trash ‘unfair’ alliances.

As it happens, Trump recently signed the Asia Reassurance Initiative Act, pledging US$7.5 billion over five years to bolster US engagement in Asia. The program’s acronym—ARIA—is all too appropriate for Trump’s policies and their effects on America’s standing in Asia. An aria, after all, is a song sung alone.

Every now and then, a US political leader descends on Cairo to deliver an address outlining America’s policy objectives in the ever-challenging Middle East. In June 2005 the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, made waves with a speech that firmly put the promotion of freedom and democracy on the agenda.

‘For 60 years’, Rice observed, ‘the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region … and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.’ And to those who would accuse the US of imposing democracy on the region, she responded, ‘In fact, the opposite is true. Democracy is never imposed. It is tyranny that must be imposed.’

Needless to say, a number of regional leaders were distinctly uncomfortable with the speech, given that it came just two years after the US invasion of Iraq. But Rice was also following up on the 2002 Arab Human Development Report, which had highlighted the region’s miserable conditions and made a clear case for long-term structural reforms.

Four years later, it was newly elected President Barack Obama’s turn to head to Cairo. In his speech, Obama downplayed the promotion of democracy and emphasised the need for a more harmonious relationship between the US and the entire Muslim world, while also calling for a resolution to regional conflicts.

On the Israel–Palestine question, whereas Rice’s speech had embraced a ‘vision of two democratic states living side by side in peace and security’, Obama went further, describing the Palestinians’ situation as ‘intolerable’ and harshly criticising Israel’s settlement activities.

In Obama’s view, the unresolved Israeli–Palestinian conflict posed the second-largest danger to the region, after ‘violent extremism’. Then came Iran’s nuclear program and the threat of a regional arms race, followed by the absence of democracy, the lack of religious freedom, and economic underdevelopment. He envisioned ‘a world where Israelis and Palestinians are each secure in a state of their own … and the rights of all God’s children are respected’.

But it wasn’t to be. Despite intense diplomatic efforts by Secretary of State John Kerry during Obama’s second term, a peace settlement could not be reached. In his farewell address in December 2016, Kerry put the blame squarely on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

One can debate whether Rice’s or Obama’s words played any role in the 2011 Arab Spring, which began in Tunisia and found a symbolic home in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. But it’s clear that those who took to the streets to demand democracy and representative government were genuinely hopeful for the future. Again, it wasn’t to be. In almost all of the countries where people mobilised to demand political and economic reform, the result was counterrevolution, repression and, in Syria’s case, civil war.

Obama failed to avert the disaster in Syria. But, pursuing his previously stated priorities, he did help to prevent a devastating region-wide war by concluding the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran. That, in turn, opened the door for further engagement with Iran on all other issues of concern, including human rights.

This month, the current US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, traveled to Cairo to deliver his own speech. And he made clear that the Trump administration’s approach to the region represents a stark departure from that of its predecessors.

Pompeo started by attacking Obama for having based his strategy on ‘fundamental misunderstandings’ of history. He then declared that US policy would henceforth focus solely on destroying the two evils of the Middle East: ‘radical Islam’ and ‘Iran’s wave of regional destruction and global campaigns of terror’.

Gone was any talk about democracy and reform. On the question of peace between Israel and Palestine, Pompeo limited himself to mentioning Trump’s counterproductive decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem. The speech made no mention of overcoming divisions, building bridges and opening up the region for economic development, but it did offer plenty of implicit praise for dictators who have managed to deliver stability. In effect, America’s approach to the region has come full circle: Pompeo espoused precisely the failed policy that Rice repudiated in 2005.

On the key issue of Iran, the speech revealed the administration’s policy to be a barren one of confrontation for its own sake. Iran, in Pompeo’s telling, is the source of every problem in the region. Without profound political change there, he declared, ‘The nations of the Middle East will never enjoy security, achieve economic stability, or advance the dreams of their people.’

This is nonsense. The Iranian regime has nothing to do with the brutal repression in Egypt, the severe structural issues in Saudi Arabia, or the Israel–Palestine deadlock. Moreover, Iran is a sworn enemy of Islamic State, and has committed resources to that fight.

All told, the Pompeo doctrine seems to amount to unlimited confrontation with Iran, strong support for stable authoritarian regimes, neglect of the Palestinian issue and a complete disinterest in representative governance and reform. The Trump administration is not just ignoring the current escalation of tensions throughout the region; it is actively supporting it.

From a European perspective, this is profoundly worrying. Conflicts in the Middle East have far-reaching implications for our own security and stability. In the absence of US leadership, Europe needs its own policy for preserving the Iran nuclear deal and promoting a two-state solution of the Israel–Palestine conflict. The European Union has been both vocal and clear on these two points. But it must translate these priorities into a comprehensive vision of reform and reconciliation for the entire region.

Unlike the speeches by Rice and Obama, Pompeo’s address is unlikely to inspire anyone outside a small circle of regional authoritarians. With the US having abandoned moral leadership, it is up to Europe to show those yearning for democracy and reform that they are not alone.

The editors of The Strategist are pleased to present this extract from the first issue of a new ASPI publication series, ‘The Strategist Selections’, released today. Issue 1, ‘Kim Beazley on the US alliance and Australia’s defence and international security’, is a compilation of 24 posts written by Beazley between March 2016 and May 2018. Reproduced below is the volume’s previously unpublished afterword.

It’s now clear that the strategic context underpinning Australian defence policy as set out in the 2016 defence white paper requires reassessment. That’s a product less of a change in the behaviour of those identified as disruptors of the global system (notably, Russia and China) than of the directions of our principal ally under President Donald Trump.

DWP 2016 summed up our strategic circumstances:

[The United States] will continue to be Australia’s most important strategic partner through our long-standing alliance, and the active presence of the United States will continue to underpin the stability of our region. The global strategic and economic weight of the United States will be essential to the continued stability of the rules-based global order on which Australia relies for our security and prosperity. The world will continue to look to the United States for leadership in global security affairs and to lead military coalitions that support international security and the rules-based global order. The United States is committed to sustaining and advancing its military superiority in the 21st century, including through its Defense Innovation Initiative.

Based on these calculations about our ally, the government decided to assign military support for upholding the rules-based order and building confidence in our region equal status with the defence of our approaches as a force structure determinant for the ADF. The assessment acknowledged that two great powers (namely, China and Russia) were contesting that order globally and regionally. It also acknowledged that the burgeoning military capabilities of both powers intensified the challenge for the Americans and for us. However, it judged that the objectives we see as critical to the peace, prosperity and sovereign rights of all states in our region—and therefore the challenges—should be met, working within the structures that emerged in the aftermath of World War II.

As the second year of the Trump administration concludes, it’s clear that our assumptions about American leadership and objectives need to be revised. Liberal internationalism is subordinate to Trump’s intensely nationalist vision. He perceives allies as users and economic competitors. He admires old adversaries with authoritarian tendencies as collaborators, and as potentially more reliable than old allies. He sees the global order’s trading rules as fundamentally inimical to American interests.

July 2018 was a seminal month in the rolling out of these approaches. In Brussels for the NATO summit, Trump criticised and humiliated traditional friends and allies. He questioned their alliance commitments, alluding to NATO members’ pledge to lift defence expenditure to 2% of GDP (an old US demand), but denouncing previously agreed timelines and shifting the goalposts to 4%. Blandishments for friends. Bouquets for adversaries. In Helsinki, Vladimir Putin was feted by Trump. Little is known of their private conversation, but it was evident there was no hard talk on the many points of difference between Russia and the US.

That this would be likely was evident in Trump’s pre–Putin meeting tweet: ‘Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of US foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!’ His demeanour at the press conference afterwards displayed a level of obsequiousness to the Russian leader unparalleled at such presidential encounters.

With suspicions mounting about the basis of Trump’s fears of the Mueller investigation and his past financial and personal associations with Russia, former director of national intelligence James Clapper reflected the tone of post–press conference commentary and bipartisan anxiety. He told CNN:

I think this past weekend is illustrative of what a great case officer Vladimir Putin is. He knows how to handle an asset, and that’s what he is doing with the president … [Y]ou have to remember Putin’s background. He’s a KGB officer. That’s what they do. They recruit assets. And I think some of that experience and instincts of Putin has come into play here in his managing of a pretty important account for him, if I could use that term, with our president.

Issues of Trump’s alleged venality and allegiance are matters for US domestic politics. What focuses NATO members is the president’s repeated calling into question of Washington’s support in situations involving the collective military response mandated in Article 5 of the NATO Charter. In the past two years, Japan and South Korea have had similar concerns with their agreements as the president has worked his approaches to North Korea’s nuclear disarmament. Trust has been further eroded by America’s recent trade assault on allies; their experience isn’t much different from that of an adversary and serial offender of at least the spirit of World Trade Organization rules (for example, China, on intellectual property related matters).

Trump’s approaches to trade and to recalibrating relations with Russia and North Korea have lacked coherence. The resulting confusion has allowed allies to seek friends in the administration. State Department, Defense Department and intelligence officials have produced reassurances and signed up to policy pronouncements reflective of the old order. The communiqué of the NATO meeting covered the Russian disagreements in traditional fashion with the US signed on. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s national defence strategy elevated Russia and China to once again being the main adversaries, displacing counterterrorism from the top spot.

The NDS was a ringing endorsement of the old alliance systems. It assigned those partnerships even greater importance in an era in which old adversaries were attributed more significance and approached parity in capability. What these contradictions mean is unclear. But what is evident is that nothing can be guaranteed in this muddle. This also raises the possibility that adversaries might probe possible gaps in the multilateral security edifice where responses from the US would be uncertain.

Returning to that quote from DWP 2016 at the beginning of this afterword, the one part that still resonates is the last sentence. The US, it says, will continue to sustain, advance and upgrade its military capabilities. While the rest of the assessment is somewhat frayed, major increases in US defence spending and vigorous technological regeneration now support that judgement.

Australia has evaded Trump’s criticism on the economic and military fronts. No threats have been issued against our guarantees and commitments. However, our careful efforts over the past three decades to engage the US in our region in a way that member states are comfortable with have been massively undermined. This is a region devoted to the rules-based order (China somewhat qualified). US participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership symbolised our strategy’s and diplomacy’s success. Trump repudiated the work, but America still seems to be committed to the multilateral meetings that are core features of regional diplomacy. A heavy security focus supplants economics.

That’s gratifying to a degree, but given the volatility in US policy, none can be certain what might transpire in a crisis or how the US might react to provocations in the region. A quicker resort to a military response to Chinese activity in the South China Sea, for example, might challenge US allies in an environment where the Americans place a premium on burden-sharing and react harshly to a failure in support.

While the US has stepped back from some regional engagements, a number of its allies and friends, including Australia, have stepped forward to address regional diplomacy more intensively. In the absence of the US, however, China looms large. Australia’s situation is complex. Earlier in this compendium, I argued that our growing dependence on the US in the post–Cold War era has narrowed our options. In the 1980s, given the balance of advantage in the relationship with the US, Australia could push the frozen architecture of the Cold War to its limits and embark on a multiplicity of global and regional initiatives. A low-threat environment, and none that would oblige the US to contemplate its own destruction if it aided us, underpinned this flexibility. In addition, the US was relatively uninvested in the region.

That has now changed. The Indo-Pacific region has been elevated in US priorities and we have witnessed the emergence of economically powerful and increasingly militarily capable nations in our zone. Most importantly for a nation that focuses on a high-technology defence like Australia, only the US, which leads the advance to next-generation weapons, can provide us with the relevant systems in all their complexity.

For us, Trump may be inimical to the values we espouse in support of collective security, liberal internationalism and the rules-based order, even though his words of mutual regard bilaterally have been strong. However, unchallenged by him is the military component of what is fundamentally a military alliance. We are effectively invited by him to put sentiment on a back burner. The communiqués and press conferences from AUSMIN meetings, as evidenced at the most recent on 24 July 2018, still, however, reflect that sentiment. That is another manifestation of the more conventional outlook of Trump’s national security team. Given the rapidly changing character of the distribution of power in our region, it would be wise for us to plan on greater volatility in both US policy and the international politics of the region.

Our focus is now on Trump. His spectacular character overshadows dramatic change in the other major regional player, China. Its internal order has been disrupted too. Deng Xiaoping’s move to collective leadership, constitutionalism and the private sector as economic driver has been superseded. President Xi Jinping has reasserted party control, entrenched state capitalism and redefined China’s maritime borders in a quest for legitimacy. It’s possible that as time goes by and inevitable domestic difficulties arise, expectations will also rise in the Chinese polity that Xi will secure outcomes on Taiwan and military domination of China’s maritime approaches. Much more is expected of time-unlimited authoritarian leaders than of time-limited party committees.

While Xi will likely outlast Trump, it doesn’t require too much imagination to envisage confrontational events in both areas and on the Korean peninsula. He will be expected to resolve the Taiwan problem in particular. Should the US respond—and Trump has been much more supportive of Taiwan than of other friends and allies—it will look to regional friends. Both Trump and Mattis have been more hard-line on the South China Sea than Obama. They will look to us.

In this collection, I have canvassed these changes. The diplomatic and foreign policy responses are obvious and are being pursued. We are using institutions to strengthen confidence-building in the region. That is reflected in concluding the TPP on a regional basis, enhancing Singaporean and Malaysian military collaboration, working on quadrilateral consultations, and reactivating our diplomatic and aid focus on the South Pacific. The defence response is harder and massively more expensive.

The collective response clauses in our treaty arrangements with the US are not the most salient part of the arrangement. We are still realistically focused on being able to handle direct threats ourselves, albeit in the face of rapidly rising technological demands on our capacity. Chinese attitudes aside, our alliance relationship and its military aspect are welcome—or at least not unwelcome—among our regional partners. A decision to persist with the alliance carries little political cost and isn’t directly the object of Trump’s undermining. However, the contemporary era of volatile American decision-making means we will need to recognise that the cost might occasionally involve difficult choices.

The key question lies with our defence force planning. In doing what needs to be done to get the best out of the relationship, two areas stand out. The first is our level of readiness. The second is how best to use the allied relationship to advance our technological capability. Both are heavily affected by available resources. This wouldn’t be such an issue if we had kept defence spending at the level we had in the 1980s—an average of 2.3% of GDP. At that level today, we would spending about $5 billion more on defence each year. We need to get back there.

Readiness calls into question the long lead time on our plans for new equipment and the resources devoted to supplies and ammunition for existing capabilities. We need to give higher priority and more disciplined attention to a strategy of denial in our maritime approaches; upgrade collaboration in the South Pacific neighbourhood in particular; bring a sharper focus to the vulnerabilities of our critical mineral provinces; and rapidly incorporate the ‘fifth generation’ capabilities coming in with the F-35 in systems across the ADF. DWP 2016 made clear that our focus on platforms has been ‘at the expense of funding the vital enabling and integrating systems that allow the ADF to bring capability elements together to deliver more potent and lethal joint combat effects’.

It’s in this area that the technological capabilities the US brings has immediate impact. While formulating the NDS, Mattis pointed out that although adversary capabilities with particular weapons and platforms will often advance ahead of the US (as happened in the Cold War), the US was yet to be bettered in systems of systems. In the longer term, from the Australian point of view, the issue is whether the US will sustain its focus on the technological changes necessary to be competitive and whether we will interact with the US sufficiently to obtain those critical capabilities modified for our own defence purposes.

There’s a refreshing humility around American decision-makers at the moment on these matters. While Mattis’s NDS doesn’t mention the ‘third offset strategy’, it is intense on competition in next-generation capabilities. The notion of the third offset, like the first and second, was based on the assumption that the US would jump ahead. Former deputy defence secretary Bob Work said recently:

I actually regret talking about the Third Offset Strategy, in hindsight. It made it sound like we had the advantage and we had time to think about it and go through the motions … I wish I would have said, ‘we need to start about upsetting the Chinese offset, which is coming uncomfortably close to achieving technological parity with the US’ … It’s time for the US to crack the whip.

The competition, however, has been transformed, at least over the next four years, by the surge in America’s defence budget. At US$714 billion (up from US$609 billion) a year, it compares with China’s US$228.2 billion and Russia’s US$66.3 billion defence budgets. It is arguable that Russia has poked the US into an arms race on nuclear capabilities, artificial intelligence, and hypersonic and directed-energy weapons that it doesn’t have the resources to win. Journalist Paul McCleary pointed out in May that Senate Armed Services Committee members saw some mismatch between the new national strategy and the amount of funding requested by the White House. In their view, there was not enough focus on the strategic competition with China and Russia. Over the months, that has been much modified, and there’s still argument over what many regard as a misdirected focus on the additional naval platforms and army troops which Trump is keen on. What the armed services want is a focus on the new capabilities. The senate committee has finalised the budget with extra funds for hypersonics, directed-energy weapons, quantum information sciences, space constellation efforts, and rocket propulsion.

It’s clear from the close relationship forged over the years with Australian defence science, defence forces and defence intelligence that industry now has something to latch onto. At the July AUSMIN meeting, Mattis emphasised Australia’s inclusion earlier this year in the US national technology and industrial base as an enabler. This now facilitates defence integration and coordination between the US, Canada, Australia and the UK. Brendan Thomas-Noone in his seminal paper, Mapping the third offset, has pointed out how Australia might leverage this into participation in the Pentagon Defence Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), a mechanism for a shared meeting of these technological challenges that engages our private sector.

Australia is already involved in joint development in electronic warfare, hypersonics, directed-energy weapons and satellite constellations, among an array of technological research and development projects. Previous AUSMINs led to two new joint facilities focused on space situational awareness. The last one resulted in a memorandum of understanding on ‘critical research and development of advanced cyber capabilities’. Hand-wringing over whether we should change course in our relations with the US is overwhelmed by the intensity of the intelligence engagement and Australia’s embedding in American next-generation technologies. That intensity is matched by mutual investment in the private sector, which now stands at around A$1.5 trillion.

What this means is that Australia should be able to engage the American diplomatic posture with confidence. We can look after ourselves based on this relationship whatever way the US props, provided we move to a more direct focus on our approaches (or as we used to say, ‘our area of direct military interest’) in how we base our defence assumptions in the shifting strategic environment.

The US and the region are not as they were when core calculations were made in DWP 2016 for the strategic basis of our defence planning. The way things have changed since 2016 demands that we simplify our priorities. The emerging strategic order also requires, paradoxically, an even deeper engagement with our disruptive ally.

US President Donald Trump blew off two multilateral summits in Asia this month. Given his soggy and sulking performance that week in Paris, during the international commemoration of the centenary of the end of World War I, it was probably for the best that Vice President Mike Pence attended instead. Pence was able to spread the gospel of American unilateralism at the ASEAN meeting in Singapore, and again at the APEC summit in Papua New Guinea.

But regardless of who’s delivering the message, it’s clear that America is losing its way. The Trump administration’s ‘America First’ foreign policy has yielded little fruit and left the United States isolated and increasingly discredited on the world stage. The international initiatives of past administrations have been replaced by empty slogans, hollow gestures, and, of course, ‘alternative facts’. With Trump scheduled to meet Chinese president Xi Jinping at the G20 summit in Argentina this week, the US may have one last chance to turn things around.

When future generations of historians sift through the wreckage left behind by the Trump administration, they will probably pay special attention to the breakdown of longstanding US policy towards China. For decades, successive US presidents have understood that the careful management of the bilateral relationship with China is vital to America’s national interests.

To be sure, given the daily fare of buffoonery on display at the White House, it would be easy to place all of the blame for the downward spiral in Sino-American relations on Trump. But China, too, is responsible for the current state of affairs. For starters, while economists are correct to point out that bilateral trade deficits can’t be considered in isolation, the fact remains that China’s surplus with the US—which hit a new record in September—is politically unsustainable.

For many American workers, China has become a symbol of job loss and economic insecurity. Although automation accounts for more of the decline in US manufacturing employment than does trade, China has developed a reputation as an economic predator. And after years of forcing US companies operating in China to transfer key technologies and intellectual property to Chinese firms, that reputation will be hard to shed.

Moreover, China’s expanding military has become a source of bipartisan concern in US national security circles, even though its defence spending is still but a fraction of America’s (a point often lost amid all the hand-wringing). Since having its territorial claims in the South China Sea struck down by a Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2016, China has continued to threaten smaller regional players’ maritime access there. As a result, the US Navy has had to launch new missions to demonstrate its right to navigate the waters demarcated by China’s ‘nine-dash line’.

China’s domestic policies also seem to be taking the country down a darker road. The treatment of Uyghur Muslims, for example, has invited international obloquy. It is up to the Chinese government to decide how to address the country’s political challenges. But if the Chinese find that their every move is being met with suspicion, they can hardly blame an international conspiracy. China’s own actions are emboldening its foes and exhausting its friends.

That said, none of China’s recent actions justify Trump’s sudden upending of Sino-American relations. The administration’s China policy is as reckless as it is feckless. China is home to over 1.3 billion people and a major contributor to the global economy. Regardless of what the US government says or does, Chinese power is not going away.

Earlier this month, Trump announced that China ‘wants to make a deal’ to bring the ongoing trade dispute to a close. No doubt it does. But Trump always trots out this line before holding talks with foreign leaders. Far from auguring a successful resolution, it signals merely that he will bring his usual impetuousness and carelessness to the negotiation with Xi.

Yes, China absolutely does need to change the path that it is on, particularly with respect to its trade and market-access policies. But as the Trump administration’s renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the US–Korea Free Trade Agreement showed, it is likely to emphasise cosmetic issues that yield catchy sound-bites, at the expense of the substantive action that the problems in the Sino-American relationship demand.

For example, the Trump administration has not brought an effective case against China to the World Trade Organization, nor has it marshalled the support of European allies who share its concerns about China’s behaviour. More broadly, the administration has proved utterly incapable of formulating a coherent policy, let alone an effective one. Whereas good policymaking is about setting priorities, Trump’s policymaking is about wanting it all, wanting it now, and gaining very little.

If fixing the bilateral trade relationship is too hard at this juncture, perhaps Trump should pursue cooperation with China in some other area. After all, we haven’t heard much from the North Koreans in a while.