Scott Kennedy, writing in Foreign Policy magazine, calls President Trump’s recent visit to China “disappointing” at both the “strategic and tactical levels.” He explains:

That said, the summit was still disappointing for the United States at both the strategic and tactical levels. Trump accepted a framing of the relationship that better suits China than the United States and helps China consolidate the considerable gains that it has made over the past year. Although it is still too early to conclude, as Xi has argued, that “the East is rising and the West is falling,” given China’s momentum, Mao Zedong’s dictum, “The east wind is prevailing over the west wind,” may be more accurate in the near term.

The summit signifies two dramatic turns, one in the long arc of the United States’ China policy and the second in Washington’s currently ineffectual negotiating skills. Trump traveled to Beijing as the leader of a diminished power, brought about as much by the administration’s own debasement of the country’s sources of power as it was by China’s persistent efforts at self-strengthening.

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