The bright line that separates Donald Trump’s foreign policy from his predecessors is the question of regime change. Between the collapse of communism in 1989 and the departure of the Obama Administration, the American foreign policy establishment embraced the “end of history” premise that liberal democracy would replace all the autocracies of the past, and that the goal of American foreign policy was to hasten the inevitable march of history.
Trump, by contrast, puts American interests first and will make deals that reinforce the position of the Chinese, Russian, or North Korean regimes if the outcome is in America’s interest.
Now Trump’s opponents in the Republican Party – the neo-conservative caucus including Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) – have thrown a monkey wrench into the works, in the form of legislation that would overturn Trump’s carefully-constructed compromise with China over the Chinese telecom giant ZTE.
American diplomacy achieved a landmark result in Trump’s Singapore summit with Kim Jong-un, offering the repugnant North Korean leader legitimacy and the prospect of regime continuity in return for his nuclear weapons program.
The president’s “Art of the Deal” negotiating style had less to do with the constructive outcome than old-fashioned diplomacy under the skillful guidance of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: Consultation with allies, back-channel exchanges with the other side, and a proposal that both sides could live with. Asia Times published on June 10 former South Korean Foreign Minister Yoon Young-Kwan’s guide to getting a “yes” from Pyongyang, and a Pompeo adviser told me that South Korean insights were incorporated into the American initiative.
The Korean deal also entailed some quiet trade-offs with China. Importantly, President Trump intervened personally to rescind the Commerce Department’s late-April ban on American chip sales to China’s second-largest telecom equipment company ZTE, in retaliation for ZTE’s violation of sanctions against Iran and North Korea. ZTE’s mobile handsets use Qualcomm chips, and a ban on chip sales would shut the company down.
On the president’s initiative, the Commerce Department instead negotiated a $1.9-billion fine, changes in ZTE management, and the imposition of American compliance controls on the company’s operations. That was a severe penalty and an unprecedented assertion of American control over the operations of a Chinese company, but a deal that both sides could live with.
Now the US Senate has sought to sabotage Trump’s ZTE deal, by embedding a ban on US chip sales to ZTE in the national defense authorization act – despite intensive lobbying by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and other administration officials.
The revolt on the part of Senate Republicans began May 22 with Trump’s primary opponent Marco Rubio, who threatened a “veto-proof” majority for legislation stopping the Trump compromise. Other Trump opponents in the Senate lined up behind the bill, along with most Senate Democrats.
Surprisingly, some of Trump’s long-time supporters in the Senate, including Senator Tom Cotton (R.-Ark), joined the neo-conservative caucus. TheHill.com quoted Senator Cotton on Monday saying, “The secretary of Commerce essentially proposed the death penalty for them. They came back and offered serious concessions … which is akin to life without parole…[But] I and every other senator believes the death penalty is the appropriate punishment.”
Rubio (whom Trump derided as “Little Marco”) ran against the president, as the quasi-official neo-conservative candidate with the backing of Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard. Rubio remains a utopian who thinks that the object of US foreign policy is to bring down authoritarian regimes and to replace them with democracies.
Rubio’s motivation can be discerned from his exchange with Secretary of State Pompeo at the April 12 confirmation hearings for Secretary of State Pompeo:
Rubio: “Of the five main threats facing the United State – China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and radical jihadists – they all have one common thread: authoritarianism. Would you agree that today the major fault line in global affairs repeatedly is the competition, really a global competition, between autocratic systems of governance and the democratic systems — that that in many ways has played out over and over again in the foreign affairs of this country and in global issues?”
Pompeo: “Senator, it is with striking consistency the case that the countries that share our vision of the world and share our democratic values are not authoritarian and those that don’t, are not.”
Rubio: “In that vein, you would again agree that promoting democracy isn’t just a nice thing to do or good thing to do or promoting democracy is not us butting into other people’s business or invading their sovereignty. So it’s more than just a moral imperative, promoting democracy is in the context of that competition as we’ve just discussed, promoting democracy is in the vital national interest of the United States?”
The notion that action against ZTE, or any American policy action, could destabilize the Chinese government is delusional
Some of Trump’s advisers believe that shutting down ZTE would destabilize the Zi Xinping regime. “I want to shut ZTE down so that 75,000 unemployed engineers demonstrate against the government in Bejing,” a former administration official told me. The usual suspects among the neo-conservative punditeska, for example the perennial predictor of China’s collapse Gordon Chang, accuse Trump of crumbling before Chinese demands.
The notion that action against ZTE, or any American policy action, could destabilize the Chinese government is delusional.
Nonetheless, it is hard-baked into the thinking of the foreign policy establishment. As Professor Wenfang Tang of the University of Iowa explained in a seminal essay in The Journal of American Affairs, “Ever since the domino collapse of communist regimes in the Soviet Bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the world has been waiting for China to follow suit. Indeed, the fall of the Chinese Communist government would probably mean the real end of history given the size of the country. Yet nearly 30 years later, history hasn’t ended and the authoritarian government is still going strong.” Tang provides some persuasive arguments for regime resilience in China.
The complaint among the foreign policy elite that Trump is crude and unsophisticated has a perverse element of truth: It takes enormous intellectual sophistication to convince one’s self that American democracy is a universal panacea for the world’s political problems and the inevitable goal of human progress. The foreign policy establishment is not stupid, but only psychotic.
Both the White House and Trump’s allies in the Senate have warned that the Senate initiative against ZTE effectively wrests control of foreign policy from the White House. Republican Senator David Perdue (Ga.) tried and failed to remove the ZTE bombshell from the defense appropriations bill, declaring that “My goal … is to make sure America is the best place in the world to do business and we remain competitive with the rest of the world. This cannot happen if we tie the hands of our commander-in-chief during critical trade negotiations.”
If the Senate passes the defense appropriation bill with the ZTE bomb, and Trump is unable to excise it by presidential veto or other means, Beijing will draw the conclusion that the president no longer is in control of US foreign policy. Instead, it will confront an adversary that does not want to achieve this or that particular policy objective, but rather wants to undermine the regime. Its first response will be to mobilize national resources to achieve independence in semiconductor production as quickly as possible, replacing its $220 billion a year in chip imports with domestic substitutes.
Rather than a tariff war, the world will face a disruption of the global supply chain, major dislocations in high-technology trade, shocks to pricing, and a return to national autarky in a number of economic policies. The result will be ugly in economic terms, and it will raise strategic tensions everywhere in the world. Hard to imagine an American policy initiative stupider than its attempt to export democracy to Iraq, this will go down as the dumbest thing America ever did.
This could wreck some US chip companies. Any foreign company with worldwide sales must now think twice about incorporating US components into the design of its products. Why take the chance? Why not buy form South Korean or Japanese companies?
Absolutely, SK and Japan already manufactured those civilian chips. It just requires a little bit of redesign to use their chips.
In general, the US neocons hold the attitude that if you buy my stuff, you are at my mercy, and if you sell me your stuff, you have to beg me or I will slam you a tariff the way I want.
HuaWei has already moved away from Qualcomm chip set for its premier models with better performance.
The whole sanction on ZTE is dumb in the first place. Because Iran and NKorea is US enemy and threaten US security?. Well history shows its actually the other way around, its US’s own stupid meddling in Iran that screwed Iran for decades, eventually produced a hostile Iran. Similarly, US’s role in turning the joyful event for Korean independence from Japan’s colonial rule into division into two Koreas (read it up, US is the one proposed division of Koreas to Soviet Union! One wonder what would have happend if instead US INSISTED on a unified Korea and reconcile differences!) eventually produced a hostile NK. And now US is essentially penalizing China for US’s own stupidity at making unecessary enemies – as posters have also pointed out, shooting US’s own big tech companies while at it. It seems US is now determined to make China the next enemy to get the dumb cycle going.
Trump is an idiot. He is played by China and North Korea and at least he is bringing the EU together. An own army outside the NATO and new geopolitics are on the horizon. Now we need only to ditch the dollar. the EU, China, Russia and the countries in Middle and Latin America sick of Trump’s mental torture of little children might pull it off. At that point the US need to start paying back the money it borrowed from the rest of the world.
This article doesn’t address an obvious counter-argument: Even with the current deal, Beijing will still want to "achieve independence in semiconductor production as quickly as possible" anyway.
What should have been addressed by this so called expert is 2025 and the implications from this serious global policy thay Xi and his inner group want to put in motion——that is what is causing big time concern for exporting nations from Japan to Germany to South Korea to the US——the qustion is how far does the Middle Kingdom want to push 2025—–and how big are the American BALLS to push back!!
China can make Apple to go under and at the same time do what trump wants.. cut the trade deficit.
i believe thst other chip manufavturerers in india are starting to make chips for zte. we shall see.
Lol, my neighor is smart, study and working hard for a PHD in AI, Chip making and etc. I am staying home playing video game, I guess my neighbo is a imment threat, and need to be stopped… Are you really so irgnornt clueless?
What balls does American have to stop anyone from progress?
Richard Truong, Has to do with China stealing American technology! Play fair or don’t play at all!
Chiense do not have to touch manifacture, at least the ones that bring in jobs and revenue. Chinese can tax and tariff those fat cat financial companies to no end.
Keep busy pushing others back, my friend… Unfortunately, the fact is that you are already behind in many areas.
With no more immigration, Americans will become farmers or miners in one or two generations.
"It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wan’t happening. It didn’t matter. it was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It is brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis" – Harold Pinter, Nobel Lecture (2005)
The American lies. they lie about the present, about the past, even about the future. They lie day and night, relentlessly. Their founding dogmas are based on deception, their history on false pathos and insincere heroism.
The ZTE debacle clearly only punishes China short term, but it will strengthen China’s domestic chip industries long term as it will become imperative that technological independence is the only viable choice. It has already done so, but US senators and congressmen aren’t exactly the most intelligent people in the world, I don’t think they could even realize the consequences.
China has a big enough market to sustain " Made in China. " Before Japan, there was " made in Germany, " and before SKorea, there was " made in Germany and Japan," and nobody gives a shit. Now there is " Made in China," and the whole western world, especially the US raises hell. So according to the white supremacists, manufacturing should be monopolised by US, Europe, Japan and SKorea.
Just like the SChina Sea. Before China; Vietnam, Philippines, Taiwan, and Malaysia occupied many islands and nobody gave a damn. Now, China in response to Obama’s Asia pivot reinforces its occupation, the US and Europe raises hell.
Only one explanation for this, the West hates China for its independence. VLTChek wrote a long article on this.
From 1945 the United States attempted to overthrow at least 50 governments, many of them democracies, and to crush 30 popular movements fighting tyrannical regimes. In the process, 25 countries were bombed, causing the loss of several million lives and the despair of millions more. (Thanks to William Blum’s Rogue State, Common Courage Press, 2005).
The US also set up torture school in Panama City before moving it to Fort Benning, Georgia.