Donald Trump had expected a “big fat hug” from China when he visits Xi Jinping this week in thanks for reopening the Straits of Hormuz.
He won’t get one though because he’s failed to end the throttling of Beijing’s oil supplies. Good news for China because Trump is indifferent to his own failure.
Bad news for Taiwan. Bad news for the West. Bad news for US allies around the world. Bad news for democracies in general.
The US president will arrive for his summit with China exasperated that he has achieved none of his many and varied war aims in Iran. He will arrive having been humiliated by a weaker but dogged regime that survives in Tehran.
The results are likely to be a sudden shift in the tectonic plates of geopolitics to China’s advantage and Beijing has done almost nothing to deliver it.
The key to understand this lies in Trump’s psychology. Vain and peevish he has blundered, alongside Israel, into a war with Iran that had obvious dangerous consequences, and now has to find a way to get out of it without looking weak.
He has threatened to reinforce failure with a genocidal threat to wipe out a whole civilization.
But when he is in the room with Xi, it is membership of the club that Trump wants, needs, most. He needs to feel that he is an equal, or a first among equals, among the world’s most powerful and unhindered authoritarian leaders and he’ll do almost anything to win their approval.
“Trump looks at people who are, you know, frankly in charge of everything, who have basically the bling… And that’s what he wants to be. And he believes that he is elevated in everybody’s minds, by their association by being in their company,” Fiona Hill, a former national security adviser to Trump now with the Brookings Institute told the World of Trouble podcast.
“What this is really about is Trump himself wanting to be recognized by absolutely everybody who matters. And that’s a very small group of people… And he only gets that [when he gets the approval of] of people like President Xi of China, President Putin of Russia, the royal families of here, there and everywhere… That’s the coin of the realm for him,” she explained.
The Chinese president is likely to slip Trump the gold sovereign of Big Man association in Beijing and it’s unlikely that Trump will extract any advantage for America from his membership of this gilded club.
Xi has helped armed Iran. China is Russia’s most important military supplier in its war against Ukraine. China controls most of the critical minerals that drive global technologies and is decades ahead of exploiting them in Africa.
China usually gets almost 50 per cent of its oil imports from vessels that sail through the Straits of Hormuz. By importing sanctioned oil from Venezuela, Iran and Russia it has also enjoyed a discount on prices.
The disaster that has been Iran’s response to the attacks by America – shutting the Straits and bombarding the Gulf – should be offset by Trump arm twisting China into reducing its backing for Tehran and Moscow.
Xi is “somebody that needs oil. We don’t,” Trump said earlier this month and confessed that he’d asked China to stop sending weapons to Iran.
Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, was in Beijing last week, ahead of Trump’s visit. China called on both the US, which is blockading Iran, and Tehran, which has closed the Straits, to open the flow of oil and end the conflict. Beijing took a studiously balanced approach.
Trump, meanwhile, continues to threaten Iran while offering negotiations. His main option for getting out of the war without total loss of face may be in getting Iran to agree to send its nuclear materials for safe keeping to China. This would appear to end Tehran’s ambitions to develop nuclear weapons.
That would be a bauble that China could offer a US president that, personally, wants to share the same space as Xi, and Putin.
These men know how to play on Trump’s weakness for their power.
Xi may be able to get Iran to agree to terms that allow Trump to get out of his war. In return, though, Beijing is likely to want to see the $11 billion military aid programme for Taiwan, which it claims as Chinese territory, go away.
China would like free reign to continue its long standing extensions of its claimed territory in the South China Sea where it has been building artificial islands. It wants to own that sea which, oddly enough, is a potential choke point of global trade.
These concessions would give China unlimited powers in its region. Just as the deliberate weakening of Ukraine gives Russia a strategic boost in the realms that Moscow has traditionally dominated in Tsarist and Soviet times.
Trump’s Big Man mission is, he has repeatedly said, to see the world carved up into spheres of influence with the US dominating the western hemisphere, China the east and Russia the middle with its western fault line running through Ukraine.
That means ceding US power in these regions. Weakening the US global reach suits Xi and Putin just fine.
Xi will throw his arm around Trump and walk him through gilded halls and make sure that the US president feels very much part of the gang of three who can rule the world.
For now.
