That Summit

 Back during Trump's first term, a Republican friend of mine would often say: "Look, I'm not defending Trump, but..." and there would follow in the rest of that sentence a litany of things that sounded a great deal like defenses of Trump. 

One of the items my friend would always adduce was: "Well, at least Trump got serious about China." 

My friend meant by this that the PRC government was not just the benign and gradually liberalizing trading partner we had all regarded it as in the 2000s—but an aggressive, expansionary authoritarian regime—a "monstering horror" of the sort E.E. Cummings wrote about. A "joyless experiment in force and fear." An Orwellian Stalinist super-state that was opposed in principle to the existence of political freedom in any territory to which it claimed the slightest historical affinity.

Viz. its actions in Hong Kong. 

My friend thought that Trump was the first U.S. president in generations to recognize this fact. 

Even back then, though—I thought this was giving him way too much credit. 

Of course, Trump had delivered a bunch of bellicose and xenophobic rhetoric about China—often of the ugliest and most racist variety. He had also stocked his administration—at least in the first term—with a few monomaniacal China hawks. 

But none of this seemed to have to do with any serious moral concerns on his part about the PRC's human rights record. 

Indeed, whenever Trump was asked about these issues directly, he took the Xi government's side. He publicly praised the Chinese government for applying the death penalty for drug offenses, for instance—and said the U.S. government ought to start doing the same. And behind closed doors—at least according to John Bolton—he similarly lauded the concentration camps in Xinjiang. 

Then there's the fact that every time Trump had the chance to actually assist victims of the PRC government's tyranny—namely, asylum seekers trying to reach the United States—he did all in his power to turn them away. 

Most recently, his administration tried to deport a Chinese refugee to Uganda, after the latter had risked his life to document government atrocities against the Uighurs in Xinjiang. True, the U.S. government finally backed off of these threats against the asylum-seeker—but only after massive public outcry, including from some unlikely conservative circles. 

So, no, I never thought Trump deserved credit for "getting serious about China"—at least not in anything like the right way. 

This week's summit between Trump and Xi makes this even more obvious. Not once this week did Trump make any reference to human rights in China. He did not breathe a word about Uighurs or Hong Kong. Instead, he spoke of the "special relationship" between the two countries—borrowing a term traditionally applied to the U.S. alliance with another liberal democracy—the U.K.—rather than our standing with a bullying autocracy. 

And look, I'm not saying I would prefer a sabre-rattling "China hawk" either.  

The problem with Trump, rather, is that he seems to embody the worst of both worlds—here as in so many domains. 

He both does not care at all about the PRC's human rights abuses. He does not seem to care about the fate of political freedom and autonomy in Taiwan, for instance. And yet—he is also more likely than any recent U.S. president to unilaterally upset the status quo in a way that risks provoking the PRC leadership into war. 

Trump is simultaneously more hawkish and bellicose than any other recent president and less interested in promoting human rights. And before anyone calls this a contradiction—used as they are to the obfuscatory rhetoric of the Bush-era neocons—let them pause and reflect that actually this is perfectly consistent. What was odd was that anyone ever made the mistake of thinking war and human rights went together.

So it makes perfect sense that Trump is both more likely to go to war with Xi than any previous U.S. president—and yet more supinely flattering of him and prone to admire Xi's strongman tendencies. This week at the summit, for instance, Trump praised Xi as a handsome man straight out of "Central Casting." He said, as mentioned, that the U.S. and China enjoy a "special relationship" under his watch. 

If it is indeed a "Special Relationship"—it sounds a great deal like the one Harold Pinter wrote about, in a poem of that title: "A man bows down before another man / And sucks his lust."