Donald John Trump surrendered to Iran and maga cult knows he is incompetent including Senator Susan Collins

Trump’s Iran deal looks like surrender

Echo editorial board published in the Boston Globe

Donald John Trump's new (former President Obama) agreement with Iran bears striking similarities to the Obama-era accord he famously abandoned.

The reviews of Donald John Trump’s MOU surrender deal with Iran are in, and they aren’t pretty.

On the right, the National Review said Doanld Trump committed the United States to “humiliations,” while The Wall Street Journal editorial board called the deal a “retreat.” 

On the left, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser under former president Joe Biden, said the deal indicated that “the United States basically lost this war.”

From the center right, Andrew Sullivan called it “surrender.” 

And this from the center left, economics blogger Noah Smith described the deal as a Katrina moment when even many of Trump’s defenders “will be forced to admit, in private if not in public, that the man and his administration are grossly, pathetically incompetent.”

If very few across the political spectrum can see value in the deal, the reason should be patently clear: It is a hollow promise, a deal to make a deal that is sounding suspiciously like the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA), the Iran nuclear pact negotiated by then-President Barack Obama in 2015, that Trump tore up in 2018.

The new surrender document, the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) calls on Iran to dilute, or “downblend,” ❓-whaaa- its enriched uranium under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency. So did the JCPOA (which also called for removing some of that uranium to other countries). In the MOU, Iran “reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons.” 

But Iran has always maintained that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes.

Details for a final deal will be negotiated in the coming two months — an absurdly short time frame for incredibly complex issues. In the meantime, the United States will release billions of dollars of frozen Iranian assets. The United States pledges to lift all sanctions if and when a final deal is signed. 

Oddly, all this must be endorsed by the United Nations, a body Trump has long mocked as useless. And by unfreezing Iranian assets before a final nuclear deal is struck, Trump is effectively agreeing to pay Iran to return things to the way they were before February 28, 2026.

Nowhere does the surrender MOU address Iran’s mass manufacturing of ballistic missiles and weaponized drones, or its subsidizing of military proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen. Iran pledges to reopen the Strait of Hormuz for commercial shipping — but the MOU seems to leave open the possibility that in 60 days Iran can start taxing tankers to transit the waterway, something it was not doing before.

So, in many ways, Trump’s deal will return the Persian Gulf to the status quo ante — only arguably worse, because Iran now understands that the mighty US military cannot prevent it from strangling the world’s economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply flows.

Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, admittedly no friend of Trump’s, summed it up fairly when he wrote on X: “Before the war, the strait was open, Iran was being crushed by sanctions, and 13 service members were still alive. Now, 13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped. This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”

Cassidy’s assessment touches on the cost of this underwhelming settlement. The approximately 15-week campaign left 13 American service members and more than 3,500 Iranians dead. It cost the US military more than $32 billion and nearly drained the nation’s storehouse of missile and drone interceptors.

And the threat the war posed for the global economy was enormous. The sharp reduction in tanker traffic through the strait caused possibly the biggest disruption in oil supply in history, driving the price to above 💲120 a barrel and forcing countries to dip deeply into their reserves.

Before the first US and Israel bombs fell on Iran, gas in the United States was selling on average for less than $3 per gallon at the pump. By early June, the average nationwide price had risen to more than $4 a gallon. All told, according to Moody’s Analytics, the war cost the United States a total of $132 billion in both military spending and higher consumer costs — nearly $1,000 per American household.

Amid the disruptions in oil, natural gas, and fertilizer supplies, the World Bank lowered its forecast for global economic growth to 2.5 percent — the lowest since the COVID-19 pandemic.

No wonder Trump told reporters in Europe after signing the surrender MOU that he was worried that the war was about to trigger a global economic downturn rivaling the Great Depression of 1929 — an outcome that would have made him look as bad as Herbert Hoover. “I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have ​happened,” the president said.

It was boldly honest of the president to admit that he was so worried about his image for history. But surely the Iranians were pleased to hear that their ability to create global economic havoc has become their superpower against this superpower.

Sending the country into war is a president’s most somber and significant power, and Trump, true to form, has used it rashly in this war. It took a primary loss against a Trump-supported rival for Cassidy to speak honestly about the emperor’s new clothes. Might this be the moment when other Republican members of Congress remove the veil from their eyes and rein in his recklessness before he overreaches again❓

One could be forgiven for not betting on that possibility. But there are midterm elections this fall, and chances are higher that voters will use their ballots to hold the Donald Trump accountable. Trump pledged in 2024, to end military missions overseas and to focus American resources on America’s working people. This war did neither.

Donald John Trump's blundering, costly, and pointless use of the American military has damaged the US economy and its international standing — and it should be beyond the pale for anyone who truly puts America first.

Maine Writer post script- Senator Susan Collins where are you❓

Donald Trump violates and tramples every law he can to create more power for himself but aggression in Venezuela is unjustified

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by David French:

“War,” the Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “is a mere continuation of policy by other means.” 

If there is one line that virtually every Army officer learns from Clausewitz’s posthumously published 1832, book, “On War,” it’s that description of the purpose of armed conflict.

Those words were among the first that popped into my head when I woke up Saturday morning to the news that the American military had attacked Venezuela, seized its dictator, Nicolás Maduro, and brought him to the United States to face criminal charges.

The reason those words occurred to me was simple — the attack on Venezuela harks back to a different time, before the 19th century world order unraveled, before two catastrophic world wars, and before the creation of international legal and diplomatic structures designed to stop nations from doing exactly what the United States just did.

One of the most important questions any nation must decide is when — and how — to wage war. It’s a mistake, incidentally, to view General Clausewitz as an amoral warmonger. He wasn’t inventing the notion he describes; he was describing the world as it has been. His statement is a pithy explanation of how sovereign states viewed warfare for much of human history.

When a strong state operates under the principle that war is just another extension of policy, it is tempted to operate a bit like a mob boss. Every interaction with a weaker nation is tinged in some way with the threat of force — nice little country you have there. Shame if something happened to it.

This is not fanciful. In a telephone conversation with The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer, Donald Trump threatened Venezuela’s new leader, Delcy Rodríguez, who served as Maduro’s vice president. “If she doesn’t do what’s right,” Trump said, “she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

But the Clausewitzian view isn’t the only option for nations and their leaders. There is a better model for international affairs, one that acknowledges the existence of evil and the reality of national interests, but also draws lines designed to preserve peace and human life.

Carl von Clausewitz, meet Saint Thomas Aquinas (b. 1215- d.1274)

In Summa Theologica, written in the 13th century, Aquinas outlined three cardinal requirements of what came to be known as just war theory.
Diplomacy and economic pressure are almost always still a first resort for powerful nations, but if they fail to achieve the intended results — well, you can watch footage from the American strike in Venezuela to know what can happen next.

Second, the war must be based on a just cause. National self-defense or collective self-defense are obviously just, for example.

Third, there must be a just purpose, namely the advancement of good and the avoidance of evil.

One way to think about the shifting patterns of warfare is that humanity seesaws between Clausewitz and Aquinas. Strong nations impose their will on the weak and then — eventually — try to impose their will on each other. When catastrophe results, as it invariably does, they turn back to Aquinas.

You can actually see the results of this shifting approach across the sweep of history. An analysis of global deaths in conflict shows that
war is always with us, but its intensity waxes and wanes. Periods of extreme suffering and death are followed by periods of relative quiet, followed again by an age of horror.

Consider history since World War I. After the ongoing slaughter of trench warfare, the world attempted to ban aggressive warfare and to establish an international institution — the League of Nations — to keep the peace.

The League failed, in part because the United States refused to join, and, after an even more horrible world war, the world tried again, this time under American leadership.

Echoes of Aquinas are all over the U.N. Charter. Article 2 of the United Nations Charter bans aggressive warfare (taking away a key tool in the Clausewitz toolbox); Article 51 permits individual and collective self-defense to keep great powers in check; and Chapter V established a body (the Security Council) that’s designed to keep the peace.

No one would argue that the system is perfect. We’ve seen wars of aggression since World War II, but the system has achieved its primary goal. The world has been spared total war. The Aquinas model, however, has to fight two foes — the will to power and the loss of memory. 

Just war theory demands restraint from the powerful. It asks great powers to forgo imposing their will — even to the point of subordinating their short-term national interests to the long-term aspiration of international peace and justice. 

That’s where our loss of memory comes into play. Restraint is more persuasive when people actually remember a world war, and the people who built the United Nations and NATO had been through two. In that sense, the moral argument against aggressive war has practical application.

In fact, the world saw what happened when the will to power dominated world affairs. World leaders know (or should know) that the most catastrophic conflicts can start from the most modest beginnings.

When Gavrilo Princip took aim at the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, for example, and Austria-Hungary mobilized against tiny Serbia, how many world leaders grasped that more than 16 million people would die in the war to come❓

When memory fades, the Clausewitz model grows more tempting — in part because it can achieve quick results, just as it did in Venezuela early Saturday morning.

Not even the angriest opponents of Trump’s intervention in Venezuela should whitewash the rule of Maduro. He was a corrupt and violent dictator who impoverished and oppressed his people.

The economic numbers tell one version of that story. In 2012, the year before Maduro took power, the gross domestic product of Venezuela was more than $372 billion. In 2024, it was just under $120 billion — a terrible collapse.

He retained power only by defying democracy. In 2024, election observers believe he lost his bid for a third term by a more than 30-point margin. His opponent, Edmundo González, won more than 65 percent of the vote, and Maduro won just over 30 percent. The official tallies, however, gave Maduro the victory.

But, talking about G.D.P. numbers and vote totals seems inadequate when addressing the pure human misery caused by the Maduro regime. Since 2014, almost 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country to escape poverty, corruption and oppression. This represents more than a quarter of Venezuela’s population before Maduro was president.

Nevertheless, even so, the ends do not justify the means.

The Trump administration — acting entirely on its own and without seeking congressional approval — decided it was in the best interests of the United States to remove Maduro from power.

But Donald Trump struck Venezuela, he violated every principle of just war.

First, Trump acted unilaterally, turning his back on the sovereign constitutional requirements of American law. He did not consult with Congress. He did not secure a declaration of war. He simply attacked a sovereign country on his authority alone.

Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has argued that the administration’s action wasn’t an act of war, but rather a “law enforcement operation” and that the Defense Department merely protected the arresting officers.

This defense is laughable. Under that reasoning, any president could transform virtually any war into a law enforcement operation by indicting opposing leaders and claiming that the large military forces needed to secure the leader’s arrest were simply protecting law enforcement. That’s not an argument; it’s an excuse.

Second, Donald Trump struck without a casus belli, without just cause recognized by international law and the U.N. Charter. 

Jack Goldsmith, a law professor at Harvard and a former assistant attorney general for the office of legal counsel under President George W. Bush argued in a post on his Substack, the attack “pretty clearly violates the charter,” even if there is no clear way to enforce the charter’s commands.

Third, while removing a dictator from power can be a just end, Trump’s decision to turn his back on the democratically elected opposition is profoundly troubling. That the remaining elements of a corrupt regime still govern the country — subject to American demands to negotiate oil deals with American companies — risks perpetuating corruption and oppression at the expense of freedom and democracy.

Nothing here is new. In a sharp piece for The Free Press, the historian Niall Ferguson argued that Trump’s attack on Venezuela was a piece of a much larger whole, the restoration of the politics and diplomacy of 1900, — the years before the catastrophe of the First World War.

The gunboat diplomacy of the Gilded Age certainly meant that the United States dominated Central and South America. It imposed a quasi-colonial reality on the region. Each nation developed under at least some degree of American oversight. Every nation was only asTrump’s attack on Venezuela didn’t take place in a vacuum, either. In December, the administration released its National Security Strategy paper that put the Western Hemisphere first.

The document addressed the Americas before it addressed Asia, Europe and the Middle East, and it declared that the United States will “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.”

The president already has a name for his revival of 19th Century American foreign policy: the Donroe Doctrine.

At the same time, the paper created a dangerous distance between the United States and its European allies. It declares that Europe must “stand on its own feet and operate as a group of aligned sovereign nations, including by taking primary responsibility for its own defense.”

In isolation, that statement isn’t terribly problematic. The nations of Europe are rich enough and strong enough to shoulder most of the burden of collective defense. American allies, though, contribute more than many Americans may think. According to a recent RAND study, America contributed roughly 39 percent of the total defense burden by 2023 — a number that has dropped substantially since the end of the Cold War.

Trump has embraced the "Donroe Doctrine" (was this a slur or intentional❓) enthusiastically. He’s engaged in economic warfare against Canada and Mexico. He’s said that Canada should be America’s 51st state. He has designs on Greenland, part of the sovereign territory of Denmark, a NATO ally.

That brings us back to the fatal flaw of running the world through spheres of influence and the amoral approach to war as an extension of policy. Smaller nations don’t want to be dominated by the strong, and strong nations don’t want to see their rivals get stronger. So they make alliances. In 1914, Serbia had Russia, and Belgium had Britain. In 1939, Poland had France and Britain.

That’s exactly how regional conflict turned into global war.

If Americans wonder why any South American regime would seek closer ties with other foreign powers, perhaps we should ask what their history has been with the United States and what the people of South America think about an aggressive revival of the Monroe Doctrine. (Donald Trump either slurred, or intentionally, called it the "Don-roe Doctrine❗)

There are better and worse ways to argue about Trump’s approach.

The worse argument is to say that Trump set a precedent with his intervention in Venezuela — a precedent that nations such as Russia, China and Iran will be eager to follow in their own respective spheres of influence, and we will have no standing to object when our adversaries take the same approach to countries in their spheres of influence that we took in ours.

But Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China and revolutionary Iran have never had the slightest concern for just war theory or any moral argument. They’re held in check (to the extent they are) by deterrence, or, when deterrence fails, raw military force.

The better argument recognizes that there will never be a unanimous embrace of just war theory. It recognizes that the U.N. Charter is doomed to often be more aspirational than operational.

This argument recognizes that the world order doesn’t depend on every great power for its existence, but it does depend on the greatest power — the United States. Put another way, our national commitment to Aquinas keeps Clausewitz at bay.

We can barely keep the world order together when only three of the five permanent members of the Security Council — the United States, Britain and France — comply with the U.N. Charter and international law. But, if the United States joins Russia and China in their approach to armed conflict and international relations, then the Western postwar consensus is truly dead.😡😢

America First isn’t necessarily isolationist — there’s nothing isolationist about arresting the leader of a sovereign nation and pledging to “run” it, but it is myopic.

It pursues the sugar high of national power at the expense of justice and peace. You can see that Trump is on that sugar high right now. On Sunday night, NBC’s Sahil Kapur reported that Trump was still saying, “We’re gonna run” Venezuela. “If they don’t behave,” Trump added, “we’ll do a second strike.”

But ,wasn’t just thinking about Venezuela. “Colombia is very sick, too,” he said. Cuba is “ready to all.” 

Moreover, Donald Trump also threatened to strike Iran if Iran kills protesters and brought up Greenland again: “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.”

If there is anything that could decisively wreck NATO, it would be an attempt to annex Greenland. Annexation could conceivably empower Denmark to invoke Article 5, the collective self-defense provision of the North Atlantic treaty, against the United States.

But, there’s even a further problem: The true international norm is that when the strong dominate the weak, the weak try to become strong.

That can mean alliances with enemies. That can mean global rearmament. That can mean nuclear proliferation. It can also mean that a foolish world once again endures the high cost of forgetting what it’s like when great powers go to war.


David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).

Americans must provide safe haven for Ukrainian refugees and Russian defectors

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by lya Somin:

And this: "Of course we should open our doors to both Ukrainian refugees and Russians attempting to escape the brutal dictatorship of Vladimir Putin. About half of the more than two million Ukrainian refugees are children, brought out of Ukraine by mothers and grandmothers. Some have come alone with just a backpack and a telephone number of relatives written on their wrists. Fathers have stayed home to fight the Russians", wrote Henry A. Lowenstein*, in New York.

A million people have fled Ukraine 

How the U.S. Can Help Refugees (and Weaken Vladimir Putin)

The United Nations reports that at least 1.5 million refugees have fled the fighting in Ukraine. Sadly, that figure is likely to

grow. To ease the suffering caused by Vladimir Putin’s invasion and strengthen our position against him, the United States should open its doors both to Ukrainian refugees fleeing the conflict and to Russians seeking to escape Mr. Putin’s tyranny.

There are several things we can do quickly: President Biden has taken a valuable first step by making Ukrainians in the United States eligible for temporary protected status, which will shield them from deportation and allow them to seek employment. But this measure applies only to those who arrived in the United States by March 1 and lasts only for 18 months (though that could be extended). He can also protect Ukrainian students in the United States by granting special student relief, which would make it easier for them to remain here. Further, he should grant parole status to newly arriving Ukrainian refugees, allowing them to remain in the United States.

The United States and European nations would do well to give Ukrainians unlimited access to job openings in their countries (without time limits). The United States in particular faces a labor shortage in many sectors that Ukrainian (and other) immigrants can help alleviate. Especially if the fighting in Ukraine continues for a long time or if Russia succeeds in occupying much of the country, many refugees will have to stay in the West indefinitely. In that event, access to employment will facilitate their assimilation to their new homes and enable them to make long-term contributions to our economies. To that end, the European Union would also do well to abolish or suspend its three-year limit on how long Ukrainian refugees can stay under its law.

In addition to taking in Ukrainian refugees, the United States and its allies should offer safe haven to Russians seeking to escape Mr. Putin’s oppressive regime. As the science writer and aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin explains, Russian emigration can help drain Mr. Putin’s “brains” by depriving his war machine of some of the scientific and technical expertise it relies on. Those people could instead help expand America’s scientific innovation and economic growth.

As Mr. Zubrin notes, Russian immigrants to the West are disproportionately represented in scientific and technological innovation. Many have been major contributors. 

Prominent examples include Sergey Brin (a co-founder of Google) and Igor Sikorsky (a pioneer of the helicopter).

Mr. Zubrin’s proposal is limited to Russian immigrants with technical expertise. But those with other skills are still valuable to Mr. Putin — and could be valuable contributors to Western economies. Immigrants of all backgrounds and skill levels make significant economic contributions. 

Moreover, many of the greatest immigrant innovators were people who arrived as children or did not have any special credentials at the time of entry.


For similar reasons, we should resist calls by some politicians to expel Russian students studying in the United States. To the contrary, the United States should grant them special student relief status and allow them to remain here after graduation if they wish. The more of them stay here, the more they contribute to the U.S. economy while depriving Mr. Putin of their services.

We should also, as the economist Timur Kuran suggests, grant refuge to Russian troops who surrender. Such a policy would help undermine the already questionable morale and cohesion of Russia’s forces.

Expanded Russian emigration to the West would be a tremendous moral victory for the United States and other liberal democracies. During the Cold War, America welcomed refugees from the U.S.S.R., Cuba and other Communist nations in part for this very reason. I was one of the beneficiaries of this understanding. 

Russia's invasion of Ukraine continues

An open door to Russian immigrants would also be a powerful signal that we do not regard the people of Russia as our enemies — undercutting a pillar of Mr. Putin’s domestic propaganda.

Some might fear that letting Russians emigrate would siphon off those most opposed to the government, thus strengthening it. But such effects did not prevent growing opposition to Communism during the Soviet era or resistance to the Communist regime in Cuba. Indeed, evidence suggests that having a large diaspora in freer societies actually increases opposition to repression and corruption among those left behind, including by increasing the flow of ideas from democratic nations to autocratic ones. The United States may need to do security screening. But evidence indicates that espionage by Russian immigrants is very rare, and there is already extensive screening for anyone considered for access to classified information

Critics may worry that it would be unjust to open doors to Russians and Ukrainians but not to those fleeing other oppressive regimes. Several of the European nations now welcoming Ukrainians have been far more hostile to refugees from Africa and the Middle East. I have long advocated welcoming all fleeing oppression, regardless of their race, ethnicity or country of origin, including Syrian refugees and those fleeing China’s cruel regime.

But the right way to achieve equity in this sphere is not by barring Russians and Ukrainians but by expanding migration rights for others. In the meantime, the best should not be the enemy of the good. We should seize this opportunity to simultaneously aid large numbers of victims of war and oppression and secure valuable strategic and economic advantages.

Ilya Somin is a law professor at George Mason University, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and the author of “Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration and Political Freedom.”

*  "America is one of the wealthiest nations on earth and we stand for freedom, democracy and love. Americans now must open our doors to these Ukrainian refugees."

Donald Trump's embarrassing isolationism

Dangerous isolationism! Echo opinion letter published in the Richmond Times Dispatch, Virginia.

"Donald Trump spoke in the tired and exhausted banalities of the past." (He was an embarrassment!)

There could not have been a more diametrically opposing sharing of ideas than those displayed at the recent U.N. General Assembly session.

United Nations- New York City
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres communicated like a visionary leader of hope, with respect for others and dignity. As quoted in The Times-Dispatch article, “At U.N., two leaders offer differing views of global risk,” Guterres spoke of maintaining “a universal economy with universal respect for international law; a multipolar world with strong multilateral institutions.”

In speaking about the Middle East, Guterres said, “In a context where a minor miscalculation can lead to a major confrontation, we must do everything possible to push for reason and restraint.”

Contrast that with Donald Trump, who spoke in the tired and exhausted banalities of the past. “Love of our nations makes the world better for all nations,” he said. “The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots,” Trump added. Instead of using the U.N. as a platform to express to the world the values — rule of law, mutual respect, equality and justice — that have served our country so well, Trump resorted to his usual isolationist rhetoric while turning his back on the growing environmental threat looming larger and larger each day.

I suspect Trump had no intention of acting in the statesmanlike manner of Guterres. I imagine he was fronting his tough guy image to the world for the benefit of his base. The few concerns Trump brought up are real — China, Iran and Venezuela — but should be handled in diplomatic negotiations, not in a tirade on the world stage. America once had presidents with the skill, knowledge and compassion to lead the world — but not today.

William P. Cawley, West Point, Virginia

When "wrong" is immoral and illegal- history and human rights

Michael Gerson is a Washington Post columnist. This opinion was published in the Utah newspaper Deseret News.

Historical amnesia- an echo opinion

WASHINGTON — One of the worst things about our awful political moment is its historical forgetfulness.

Many Europeans seem to have forgotten where chauvinistic nationalism and the demonization of minorities can lead. 

Many Americans seem to have forgotten that a foreign policy of America First allowed international malignancies to grow that made war inevitable and resulted in the deaths of tens of millions. 

Moreover, many in Western countries seem to have forgotten the difficult, desperate project of building a moral and legal structure around the principle of human dignity, in the aftermath of World War II.

Anti-Semitic attacks in Europe and the U.S. are both atrocities and reminders. They ring with distant but unmistakable echoes of the nightmarish events of the 1930s and 1940s: the racial purity laws, the economic indignities, the despairing suicides, the liquidation of the disabled, the digging up of Jewish graves in cemeteries, the deportations, the ghettos, the shootings in batch after batch, the pits of corpses, the emptied orphanages, the terrified walk to the gas chamber.

It is worth trying to recall how shocking these events were to the conscience of the world. The institutions of the modern state — bureaucracy, propaganda, military power — had been harnessed to the purposes of sadism and mass murder. This indicted a highly sophisticated and educated European society — along with the very idea of sophistication and education as brakes on evil. It indicted other nations who did little, even after the crimes became obvious. It indicted many German Christians who were indifferent or complicit. For some, it even indicted God, who seemed uncaring on a distant throne.

But the response was ultimately an idealistic one. The Allies would institute a new order of justice and human rights. The Tokyo tribunals and the Nuremburg trials were both legal and moral enterprises. The chief counsel for the prosecution, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, said he would not seek convictions for "mere technical or incidental transgression of international conventions. We charge guilt ... that involves moral as well as legal wrong. ... It is their abnormal and inhuman conduct which brings them to this bar."

The moral response to World War II-era crimes found expression in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which speaks of "inherent dignity" and "equal and inalienable rights." There were many influences on this document, from President Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms to the Declaration of Independence. But the theory was simple: The Axis powers not only lost, they were wrong. Their vision of nation, race and culture would be replaced by an assertion of universal human rights and dignity.

It was, however, more of an assertion than an argument. French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who was involved in the debates surrounding the Universal Declaration, said, "We agree on these rights, providing we are not asked why. With the 'why' the dispute begins."

Some of the challenge to this vision of inherent dignity has come from arguments associated with academic liberalism. It has become common to deny that human beings have natures that can be separated from their cultural circumstances. And without a human nature, it is hard to define a set of human rights. Without some standard from outside the culture — some statement by God or reason that every human life is sacred — we are left only with the current consensus of our culture. And we are left with no good reason to tell our children why they should hold to that consensus rather than abandon it.
But the most urgent, comprehensive attack on the universality of human rights now comes from the nativist right. 

In fact, places such as Hungary, Romania, Germany, Poland and the United States, there are politicians who are attempting to define nationality based on the dehumanization of cultural outsiders — Muslims, migrants and refugees. This type of politics is dangerous wherever it is practiced. In the United States, it also requires the renunciation of responsibilities rooted in the postwar acceptance of human dignity as the basis of global order and peace.

This is the cost of historical amnesia — the cost of electing an American president who is both ignorant of and indifferent toward the lessons of the last century, or any century. Donald Trump, is a president who always turns, by feral instinct, to an organizing message of bigotry and exclusion. A president who is throwing away an inheritance he does not value and unleashing forces that can easily move beyond control.

“Laughter is poison to fear.” Donald Trump upstaged

Trump is a laughing stock. But if we weren't laughing, we'd be crying by Michael H Fuchs* published in The Guardian

MaineWriter prologue: "Laughter is poison to fear"~ quote from the writer George R.R. Martin. Sort of like "whistling past the graveyard" for the United Nations audience who laughed at Donald Trump.

At the UN general assembly, world leaders laughed at the US president after he bragged about his own performance. Perhaps they needed comic

For the rest of the world, President Donald Trump’s America is a laughing stock, not a leader.

That was the takeaway from Trump’s speech to the 2018 United Nations general assembly. Trump opened his speech the same way he opens his campaign rallies, TV interviews, and probably conversations with every visitor he meets: “In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.”

The response from the leaders assembled in the room? Laughter. The entire world literally laughed at the US president – and they weren’t laughing with him.

Even Trump himself was taken aback: “I did not expect that reaction …”
And while reporters and foreign policy experts could not recall another leader ever before drawing derisive laughter at a UN speech, it did not end there. When Trump made another claim – “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy …” – the cameras revealed the German delegation laughing and snickering to one another.

With Trump’s own behavior and policies as a backdrop, the substance of Trump’s speech merited laughter – it was an incomprehensible joke.

The main theme of Trump’s speech was protecting US “sovereignty” and he said that all countries should do likewise. 

Moreover, Trump claimed: “The United States will not tell you how to live, work or worship. We only ask that you honor our sovereignty in return.” But shortly thereafter Trump spent portions of his speech telling Iran and Venezuela what to do at home.

In the Middle East, Trump claims his “new approach is yielding great strides and very historic change” as he announced that the United States is working with Gulf countries, Jordan and Egypt to establish a strategic alliance. Moments later, Trump reversed course and launched a broadside against Opec (of which the Gulf states are the key members) for “ripping off the rest of the world”.

Unfortunately, the consequences of the policies embedded within Trump’s speech are no joke. They can inflict lasting damage.

On Iran, Trump outlined policies that portend only more conflict. As America’s allies France, Germany and the United Kingdom work with Russia, China and Iran to preserve the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program that are now in jeopardy because of America’s withdrawal and sanctions, Trump is stoking a regional Sunni-Shia conflict and imposing more sanctions on Iran. The nuclear deal made conflict with Iran less likely; Trump’s actions are making violence and war more likely.

Trump portrayed “uncontrolled migration” as a threat in a meandering tirade that conflated migration with immigration, human trafficking and illegal immigration. Deriding the Global Compact on Migration intended to foster cooperation on migration issues – which only the United States and Hungary, a country swept up in its own anti-immigrant fervor, refuse to sign – Trump made clear his dark view of the flow of all people across borders.

It’s why Trump closes America’s doors to refugees, rips children from their parents when crossing the US border and attempts to restrict legal immigration. It’s why, even as the world grapples with the worst crisis of displaced people since the second world war, Trump repeatedly attempts to slash US funding for humanitarian assistance and withdraws America’s role as a leader in trying to address crises from Syria to Myanmar. And it’s why Trump ignored the warnings of his own state department that ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of people from countries like Honduras and El Salvador would destabilize those countries and actually exacerbate unauthorized migration towards the United States.

The list of Trump’s foreign policies and the ways they can wreak havoc can go on and on. Trump didn’t even once mention climate change – which his administration refuses to believe even exists – the greatest existential threat facing the world today.

Perhaps most telling was the list of countries that Trump highlighted at the end of his speech as those embodying the “dreams” of the kind of nations our children will inherit. Trump praised Saudi Arabia, a brutally repressive dictatorship where women have few rights, and which is fighting a war in Yemen that is creating a humanitarian catastrophe. He praised Poland, a Nato ally where democratic institutions are under assault from its own government. And he praised Israel, a US ally that runs a military occupation of the Palestinian people in the West Bank. If these countries are Trump’s idea of the future we want to leave for our children, Trump’s vision of the world he wants to build is quite dark.

Perhaps the laughter in the room during Trump’s speech was a tinged with a sense of anxiety and dread. 

But, more likely, it was the response that comes from those who recognize they are listening to a reckless, dangerous vision from the leader of the world’s most powerful country. And all one can do is muster is a despondent chuckle.

*Michael H Fuchs is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and a former deputy assistant secretary of state for east Asian and Pacific affairs

Pennsylvania echo opinion letter "World laughing at America"

Letter: Donald Trump speaks, and the world laughs

Trump's false bravado hurts our nation's image.

Opinion letter to the Pennsylvania newspaper, Editor of the Reading Eagle:

It is sad to realize how far the prestige of the United States has fallen since President Donald Trump took office. He recently bragged at the United Nations that he "has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country." His remarks were met with murmurs and laughter.

Addressing the General Assembly, Trump made inaccurate claims about his own record by rattling off a list of statements on the economy, tax cuts, military spending, and the border wall with Mexico. Many of his "facts" were cherry-picked, exaggerated or outright false.

Trump never mentioned Russia's extraordinary and continuing interference in our elections. The president remains determined to coddle Russia to the detriment of our national security. He persisted in giving the false impression that he has addressed the grave threat from North Korea. In fact, we are no closer to the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of North Korea. Without a shred of evidence, Trump accused China of attempting to interfere in this year's elections. He also claimed to be the first president to challenge China on trade. He underestimates China and assumes their leaders will take such public vilification lying down.

The world burst out laughing at our president, whose false bravado no longer induces shock but invites derision.

Richard A. Weiherer Wyomissing, Pennsylvania

Tennessee echo opinion - support primary health care

An echo opinion letter published in the Oak Ridger in Oak Ridge Tennessee:

As part of the United Nation’s sustainable development goals, all nations committed themselves to achieving universal health care by 2030. The Global Burden of Disease Study shows that as developing countries approach this goal, deaths from infant mortality, HIV/AIDs, malaria, and TB (tuberculosis) have fallen in its wake. 

In fact, more disability and death are now coming from the undiagnosed or under-treated hypertension and diabetes that plague rich nations.

It is clear that more emphasis on primary care, as well as expanded access to at least 44 essential surgical procedures would transform the world’s health systems.

In just 10 years, using five-member primary-care teams, Costa Rica’s population moved from health coverage of 25 percent to 93 percent without a per capita cost increase. 

Implemented in stages, it clearly produced improved health outcomes. 

Similarly, Thailand has universal coverage with comparable health outcome of rich nations. For this, they spend just $220 each year per capita. The U.S. spends $10,350 and leaves more than 10 percent of its population uninsured.

A study of 12 European nations shows that improved access to health care is not just a product of a nation getting richer, but it actually makes a nation richer. For example, almost a third of the increase in Britain’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over 200 years has been attributable to improving health care.

The U.S. system has many flaws, as well as poor overall health outcomes. Despite this, it has by far the world’s most expensive care. Additionally, it is the only rich nation without universal or near universal coverage.

Between 1975 and 2010, the number of U.S. physicians increased by one and a half times while the number of administrators increased by 32 times. Hospital and drug costs are 60 percent higher than in European nations.

There are several proposed starting points to help fix healthcare in America. First, we need to expand primary-care access by better use of secondary providers like nurse practitioners and physician assistants and shift 10 to 20 percent of the exorbitant reimbursement to many medical specialists toward primary-care physicians and secondary providers.

We need to control dramatic variations in drug costs and services provided by hospitals. For example, an appendectomy may cost between $1,500 and $183,000. A 90-day supply of three generic heart drugs may cost between $30 and $1,400.

About 40 percent of the out-of-pocket expenses paid by patients are wasted. This money should be pooled for greater bargaining power in controlling costs. Moving closer to a single-payer system is the only way to achieve this. According to the Kaiser Foundation, the majority of Americans now favor a one-party payer.

Medicare could be expanded to younger ages. Medicaid could be expanded to those too rich for subsidies, but too poor for private insurance.

It's time to complete health care reform ~ support access to primary care.

Half of Americans now have coverage through their employers. A Medicare plan could be expanded to everyone else and employers could be required to offer a comparable option. We could move to re-insurance where the government would pay all out-of-pocket expenses to those with other insurance.

We could start with well-endowed plans to a small group and expand it or provide a small core of benefits to everyone and add to it as cost savings are realized.

It is time that healthcare special interest groups, political stalwarts for the status quo, and self-proclaimed defenders of freedom step aside and let the rest of us implement what has already been proven to work.

William Culbert is an Oak Ridge physician who has a practice in Clinton (Anderson County) Tennessee.

Donald Trump is making China great again

China is filling the global leadership gap created by Donald Trump.

It's their national plan to influence the world order, but Donald Trump is giving the Chinese the chance to accelerate their schedule.

This The New Yorker article is a warning about the impact of the failed Donald Trump leadership and the consequences of his incompetent foreign policy.

Donald Trump isn't putting America first, as he claims. 

Rather, Trump is opening the door for China to be the world leader when Trumpist foreign retreatism creates a power void.

As Donald Trump surrenders America’s global commitments, China's leader Xi Jinping is learning to pick up the pieces. ~

By Evan Osnos (Making China Great Again) in The New Yorker

When the Chinese action movie “Wolf Warrior II” arrived in theaters, in July, it looked like a standard shoot-’em-up, with a lonesome hero and frequent explosions. Within two weeks, however, “Wolf Warrior II” had become the highest-grossing Chinese movie of all time. Some crowds gave it standing ovations; others sang the national anthem. In October, China selected the movie as its official entry in the foreign-language category of the Academy Awards.

The hero, Leng Feng, played by the action star Wu Jing (who also directed the film), is a veteran of the “wolf warriors,” special forces of the People’s Liberation Army. In retirement, he works as a guard in a fictional African country, on the frontier of China’s ventures abroad. A rebel army, backed by Western mercenaries, attempts to seize power, and the country is engulfed in civil war. Leng shepherds civilians to the gates of the Chinese Embassy, where the Ambassador wades into the battle and declares, “Stand down! We are Chinese! China and Africa are friends.” The rebels hold their fire, and survivors are spirited to safety aboard a Chinese battleship.

Leng rescues an American doctor, who tells him that the Marines will come to their aid. “But where are they now?” he asks her. She calls the American consulate and gets a recorded message: “Unfortunately, we are closed.” In the final battle, a villain, played by the American actor Frank Grillo, tells Leng, “People like you will always be inferior to people like me. Get used to it.” Leng beats the villain to death and replies, “That was fucking history.” The film closes with the image of a Chinese passport and the words “Don’t give up if you run into danger abroad. Please remember, a strong motherland will always have your back!”

When I moved to Beijing, in 2005, little of that story would have made sense to a Chinese audience. With doses of invention and schmalz, the movie draws on recent events. 

In 2015, China’s Navy conducted its first international evacuation, rescuing civilians from fighting in Yemen; last year, China opened its first overseas military base, in Djibouti. 

There has been a deeper development as well. For decades, Chinese nationalism revolved around victimhood: the bitter legacy of invasion and imperialism, and the memory of a China so weak that, at the end of the nineteenth century, the philosopher Liang Qichao called his country “the sick man of Asia.” “Wolf Warrior II” captures a new, muscular iteration of China’s self-narrative, much as Rambo’s heroics expressed the swagger of the Reagan era.

Recently, I met Wu Jing in Los Angeles, where he was promoting the movie in advance of the Academy Awards.

Wu is forty-three, with short, spiky hair, a strong jaw, and an air of prickly bravado. He was on crutches, the result of “jumping off too many buildings,” he told me, in Chinese. (He speaks little English.) “In the past, all of our movies were about, say, the Opium Wars—how other countries waged war against China,” he said. “But Chinese people have always wanted to see that our country could, one day, have the power to protect its own people and contribute to peace in the world.”

As a favored son of China, celebrated by the state, Wu doesn’t complain about censorship and propaganda.

He went on, “Although we’re not living in a peaceful time, we live in a peaceful country.

I don’t think we should be spending much energy thinking about negative aspects that would make us unhappy. 

President Dwight Eisenhower 34th president of the US, argued that America’s authority could not rest on military power alone

Rather, cherish this moment!”

China has never seen such a moment, when its pursuit of a larger role in the world coincides with America’s pursuit of a smaller one. Ever since the Second World War, the United States has advocated an international order based on a free press and judiciary, human rights, free trade, and protection of the environment.

America planted those ideas in the rebuilding of Germany and Japan, and spread them with alliances around the world. In March, 1959, President Eisenhower argued that America’s authority could not rest on military power alone. “We could be the wealthiest and the most mighty nation and still lose the battle of the world if we do not help our world neighbors protect their freedom and advance their social and economic progress,” he said. “It is not the goal of the American people that the United States should be the richest nation in the graveyard of history.”

Under the banner of “America First,” Donald Trump is reducing U.S. commitments abroad.

On his third day in office, he withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (T.P.P.), a twelve-nation trade deal designed by the United States as a counterweight to a rising China. To allies in Asia, the withdrawal damaged America’s credibility. “You won’t be able to see that overnight,” Lee Hsien Loong, the Prime Minister of Singapore, told me, at an event in Washington. “It’s like when you draw a red line and then you don’t take it seriously. Was there pain? You didn’t see it, but I’m quite sure there’s an impact.”

In a speech to Communist Party officials last January 20th, Major General Jin Yinan, a strategist at China’s National Defense University, celebrated America’s pullout from the trade deal. “We are quiet about it,” he said. “We repeatedly state that Trump ‘harms China.’ We want to keep it that way. In fact, he has given China a huge gift. That is the American withdrawal from T.P.P.” Jin, whose remarks later circulated, told his audience, “As the U.S. retreats globally, China shows up.”

For years, China’s leaders predicted that a time would come—perhaps midway through this century—when it could project its own values abroad. In the age of “America First,” that time has come far sooner than expected.

Barack Obama’s foreign policy was characterized as leading from behind. Trump’s doctrine may come to be understood as retreating from the front. Trump has severed American commitments that he considers risky, costly, or politically unappealing. In his first week in office, he tried to ban travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries, arguing that they pose a terrorist threat. (After court battles, a version of the ban took effect in December.) 

Trump announced his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris
Agreement on climate change and from UNESCO, and he abandoned United Nations talks on migration. 

Moreover, he might renege on the Iran nuclear deal, a free-trade agreement with South Korea, and NAFTA. 

His proposal for the 2018 budget would cut foreign assistance by forty-two per cent, or $11.5 billion, and it reduces American funding for development projects, such as those financed by the World Bank. 

In December, Trump threatened to cut off aid to any country that supports a resolution condemning his decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. (The next day, in defiance of Trump’s threat, the resolution passed overwhelmingly.)

To frame his vision of a smaller presence abroad, Trump often portrays America’s urgent task as one of survival. As he put it during the campaign, “At what point do you say, ‘Hey, we have to take care of ourselves’? So, you know, I know the outer world exists and I’ll be very cognizant of that, but, at the same time, our country is disintegrating.”

So far, Trump has proposed reducing U.S. contributions to the U.N. by forty per cent, and pressured the General Assembly to cut six hundred million dollars from its peacekeeping budget. In his first speech to the U.N., in September, Trump ignored its collective spirit and celebrated sovereignty above all, saying, “As President of the United States, I will always put America first, just like you, as the leaders of your countries, will always and should always put your countries first.”

China’s approach is more ambitious. In recent years, it has taken steps to accrue national power on a scale that no country has attempted since the Cold War, by increasing its investments in the types of assets that established American authority in the previous century: foreign aid, overseas security, foreign influence, and the most advanced new technologies, such as artificial intelligence.

China has become one of the leading contributors to the U.N.’s budget and to its peacekeeping force, and it has joined talks to address global problems such as terrorism, piracy, and nuclear proliferation.

And China has embarked on history’s most expensive foreign infrastructure plan. Under the Belt and Road Initiative, it is building bridges, railways, and ports in Asia, Africa, and beyond. If the initiative’s cost reaches a trillion dollars, as predicted, it will be more than seven times that of the Marshall Plan, which the U.S. launched in 1947, spending a hundred and thirty billion, in today’s dollars, on rebuilding postwar Europe.

China is also seizing immediate opportunities presented by Trump. Days before the T.P.P. withdrawal, President Xi Jinping spoke at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, a first for a paramount Chinese leader. Xi reiterated his support for the Paris climate deal and compared protectionism to “locking oneself in a dark room.” He said, “No one will emerge as a winner in a trade war.” This was an ironic performance—for decades, China has relied on protectionism—but Trump provided an irresistible opening. China is negotiating with at least sixteen countries to form the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a free-trade zone that excludes the United States, which it proposed in 2012 as a response to the T.P.P. If the deal is signed next year, as projected, it will create the world’s largest trade bloc, by population.

Some of China’s growing sway is unseen by the public.

In October, the World Trade Organization (WTO) convened ministers from nearly forty countries in Marrakech, Morocco, for the kind of routine diplomatic session that updates rules on trade in agriculture and seafood. The Trump Administration, which has been critical of the W.T.O., sent an official who delivered a speech and departed early. “For two days of meetings, there were no Americans,” a former U.S. official told me. “And the Chinese were going into every session and chortling about how they were now guarantors of the trading system.”

By setting more of the world’s rules, China hopes to “break the Western moral advantage,” which identifies “good and bad” political systems, as Li Ziguo, at the China Institute of International Studies, has said.

In November, 2016, Meng Hongwei, a Chinese vice-minister of public security, became the first Chinese president of Interpol, the international police organization; the move alarmed human-rights groups, because Interpol has been criticized for helping authoritarian governments target and harass dissidents and pro-democracy activists abroad.

By some measures, the U.S. will remain dominant for years to come.

In fact, the US Navy has at least twelve aircraft carriers. China has two. The U.S. has collective defense treaties with more than fifty countries. China has one, with North Korea. Moreover, China’s economic path is complicated by heavy debts, bloated state-owned enterprises, rising inequality, and slowing growth. The workers who once powered China’s boom are graying. China’s air, water, and soil are disastrously polluted.

And yet, the gap has narrowed.

In 2000, the U.S. accounted for thirty-one per cent of the global economy, and China accounted for four per cent. Today, the U.S.’s share is twenty-four per cent and China’s fifteen per cent. If its economy surpasses America’s in size, as experts predict, it will be the first time in more than a century that the world’s largest economy belongs to a non-democratic country. At that point, China will play a larger role in shaping, or thwarting, values such as competitive elections, freedom of expression, and an open Internet.

Already, the world has less confidence in America than we might guess. Last year, the Pew Research Center asked people in thirty-seven countries which leader would do the right thing when it came to world affairs. They chose Xi Jinping over Donald Trump, twenty-eight per cent to twenty-two per cent.

Facing criticism for his lack of interest in global leadership, Trump, in December, issued a national-security strategy that singled out China and Russia and declared, “We will raise our competitive game to meet that challenge, to protect American interests, and to advance our values.”

But, in his speech unveiling the strategy, he hailed his pullout from “job-killing deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the very expensive and unfair Paris climate accord.”

The next day, Roger Cohen, of the Times, described the contradictions of Trump’s foreign policy as a “farce.” 

In fact, some allies have taken to avoiding the Administration. “I’ll tell you, honestly, for a foreigner, in the past we were used to going to the White House to get our work done,” Shivshankar Menon, India’s former foreign secretary and national-security adviser to the Prime Minister, told me. “Now we go to the corporations, to Congress, to the Pentagon, wherever.”

On his recent visit to Washington, Prime Minister Lee, of Singapore, said that the rest of the world can no longer pretend to ignore the contrasts between American and Chinese leadership. “Since the war, you’ve held the peace. You’ve provided security. You’ve opened your markets. You’ve developed links across the Pacific,” he said. “And now, with a rising set of players on the west coast of the Pacific, where does America want to go? Do you want to be engaged?” He went on, “If you are not there, then everybody else in the world will look around and say, I want to be friends with both the U.S. and the Chinese—and the Chinese are ready, and I’ll start with them.”

Xi Jinping has the kind of Presidency that Donald Trump might prefer. Last fall, he started his second term with more unobstructed power than any Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping, who died in 1997. The Nineteenth Party Congress, held in October, had the spirit of a coronation, in which the Party declared Xi the “core leader,” an honor conferred only three other times since the founding of the nation (on Mao Zedong, Deng, and Jiang Zemin), and added “Xi Jinping Thought” to its constitution—effectively allowing him to hold power for life, if he chooses. He enjoys total dominion over the media: at the formal unveiling of his new Politburo, the Party barred Western news organizations that it finds troublesome; when Xi appeared on front pages across the country, his visage was a thing of perfection, airbrushed by Party “news workers” to the sheen of a summer peach.

For decades, China avoided directly challenging America’s primacy in the global order, instead pursuing a strategy that Deng, in 1990, called “hide your strength and bide your time.” But Xi, in his speech to the Party Congress, declared the dawn of “a new era,” one in which China moves “closer to center stage.” He presented China as “a new option for other countries,” calling this alternative to Western democracy the zhongguo fang’an, the “Chinese solution.”

When I arrived in Beijing a few weeks later, the pipe organ of Chinese propaganda was at full force. The state press ran a profile of Xi that was effusive even by the standards of the form, depicting him as an “unrivalled helmsman,” whose “extensive knowledge of literature and the arts makes him a consummate communicator in the international arena.” The article observed, “Xi treats everyone with sincerity, warmth, attentiveness, and forthrightness.” It quoted a Russian linguist who had translated his Party Congress speech: “I read from morning till midnight, even forgetting to have meals.”

Xi has inscribed on his country a rigid vision of modernity. A campaign to clean up “low-end population” has evicted migrant workers from Beijing, and a campaign against dissent has evicted the most outspoken intellectuals from online debate. The Party is reaching deeper into private institutions. Foreign universities with programs in China, such as Duke, have been advised that they must elevate a Communist Party secretary to a decision-making role on their local boards of trustees. The Party is encouraging dark imaginings about the outside world: posters warn the public to “protect national secrets” and to watch out for “spies.” Beijing is more convenient than it was not long ago, but also less thrilling; it has gained wealth but lost some of its improvisational energy.

Until recently, Chinese nationalists were crowded out by a widespread desire to be embraced by the outside world. They see the parallel ascents of Xi and Trump as cause for celebration, and accuse “white lotuses,” their term for Chinese liberals, of sanctimony and intolerance. They reject political correctness in issues of race and worry about Islamic extremism. (Muslims, though they make up less than two per cent of China’s population, are the objects of fevered animosity on its Internet.) Last June, Yao Chen, one of China’s most popular actresses, received a barrage of criticism online after she tried to raise awareness of the global refugee crisis. (She was forced to clarify that she was not calling for China to accept refugees.)

Back in 2008, I met a jittery young conservative named Rao Jin, a contrarian on the fringes of Chinese politics. Long before Trump launched his campaign or railed against the media, Rao created a Web site called Anti-CNN.com, which was dedicated to criticizing Western news coverage. Over lunch in Beijing recently, he exuded calm vindication. “Things that we used to push are now mainstream,” not only in China but globally, he said. In Rao’s view, Trump’s “America First” slogan is an honest declaration, a realist vision stripped of false altruism and piety. “From his perspective, America’s interests come first,” Rao said. “To Chinese people, this is a big truth, and you can’t deny it.” Rao has watched versions of his ideas gain strength in Russia, France, Great Britain, and the United States. “In this world, power speaks,” he said, making a fist, a gesture that Trump adopted in his Inauguration speech and Xi displayed in a photo taken at the start of his new term.

China’s leaders rarely air their views about an American President, but well-connected scholars—the ranking instituteniks of Beijing and Shanghai and Guangzhou—can map the contours of their assessments. Yan Xuetong is the dean of Tsinghua University’s Institute of Modern International Relations.

At sixty-five, Yan is bouncy and trim, with short silver hair and a roaring laugh. When I arrived at his office one evening, he donned a black wool cap and coat, and we set off into the cold. Before I could ask a question, he said, “I think Trump is America’s Gorbachev.” In China, Mikhail Gorbachev is known as the leader who led an empire to collapse. “The United States will suffer,” he warned.

Over a dinner of dumplings, tofu, and stir-fried pork, Yan said that America’s strength must be measured partly by its ability to persuade: “American leadership has already dramatically declined in the past ten months. In 1991, when Bush, Sr., launched the war against Iraq, it got thirty-four countries to join the war effort. This time, if Trump launched a war against anyone, I doubt he would get support from even five countries. Even the U.S. Congress is trying to block his ability to start a nuclear war against North Korea.” For Chinese leaders, Yan said, “Trump is the biggest strategic opportunity.” I asked Yan how long he thought the opportunity would last. “As long as Trump stays in power,” he replied.

The leadership in Beijing did not always have this view of Trump.

Rather, in the years leading up to the 2016 election, it had adopted a confrontational posture toward the United States. Beijing worked with Washington on climate change and on the Iran nuclear deal, but tensions were building: China was hacking U.S. industrial secrets, building airports on top of reefs and rocks in the South China Sea, creating obstacles for American firms investing in China, blocking American Internet businesses, and denying visas to American scholars and journalists. During the campaign, China specialists in both parties called on the next President to strengthen alliances across Asia and to step up pressure on Beijing.

When Trump won, the Party “was in a kind of shock,” Michael Pillsbury, a former Pentagon aide and the author of “The Hundred-Year Marathon,” a 2015 account of China’s global ambitions, told me. “They feared that he was their mortal enemy.” The leadership drafted potential strategies for retaliation, including threatening American companies in China and withholding investment from the districts of influential members of Congress.

Most of all, they studied Trump. Kevin Rudd, the former Prime Minister of Australia, who is in contact with leaders in Beijing, told me, “Since the Chinese were stunned that Trump was elected, they were intrinsically respectful of how he could’ve achieved it. An entire battery of think tanks was set to work, to analyze how this had occurred and how Trump had negotiated his way through to prevail.”

Before he entered the White House, China started assembling a playbook for dealing with him. Shen Dingli, a foreign-affairs specialist at Fudan University, in Shanghai, explained that Trump is “very similar to Deng Xiaoping,” the pragmatic Party boss who opened China to economic reform. “Deng Xiaoping said, ‘Whatever can make China good is a good “ism.” ’ He doesn’t care if it’s capitalism. For Trump, it’s all about jobs,” Shen said.

The first test came less than a month after the election, when Trump took a call from Taiwan’s President, Tsai Ing-wen. “Xi Jinping was angry,” Shen said. “But Xi Jinping made a great effort not to create a war of words.” Instead, a few weeks later, Xi revealed a powerful new intercontinental ballistic missile. “It sends a message: I have this—what do you want to do?” Shen said. “Meantime, he sends Jack Ma”—the founder of the e-commerce giant Alibaba—“to meet with Trump in New York, offering one million jobs through Alibaba.” Shen went on, “China knows Trump can be unpredictable, so we have weapons to make him predictable, to contain him. He would trade Taiwan for jobs.”

Inside the new White House, there were two competing strategies on China.

One, promoted by Stephen Bannon, then the chief strategist, wanted the President to take a hard line, even at the risk of a trade war. Bannon often described China as a “civilizational challenge.”

The other view was associated with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, who had received guidance from Henry Kissinger and met repeatedly with the Chinese Ambassador, Cui Tiankai. Kushner argued for a close, collegial bond between Xi and Trump, and he prevailed.

He and Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, arranged for Trump and Xi to meet at Mar-a-Lago on April 7th, for a cordial get-to-know-you summit. To set the tone, Trump presented two of Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s children, Arabella and Joseph, who sang “Jasmine Flower,” a classic Chinese ballad, and recited poetry. While Xi was at the resort, the Chinese government approved three trademark applications from Ivanka’s company, clearing the way for her to sell jewelry, handbags, and spa services in China.

Kushner has faced scrutiny for potential conflicts of interest arising from his China diplomacy and his family’s businesses. During the transition, Kushner dined with Chinese business executives while the Kushner Companies was seeking their investment in a Manhattan property. (After that was revealed in news reports, the firm ended the talks.) In May, Kushner’s sister, Nicole Kushner Meyer, was found to have mentioned his White House position while she courted investors during a trip to China. The Kushner Companies apologized.

During the Mar-a-Lago meetings, Chinese officials noticed that, on some of China’s most sensitive issues, Trump did not know enough to push back. “Trump is taking what Xi Jinping says at face value—on Tibet, Taiwan, North Korea,” Daniel Russel, who was, until March, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, told me. “That was a big lesson for them.” Afterward, Trump conceded to the Wall Street Journal how little he understood about China’s relationship to North Korea: “After listening for ten minutes, I realized it’s not so easy.”

Russel spoke to Chinese officials after the Mar-a-Lago visit. “The Chinese felt like they had Trump’s number,” he said. “Yes, there is this random, unpredictable Ouija-board quality to him that worries them, and they have to brace for some problems, but, fundamentally, what they said was ‘He’s a paper tiger.’ Because he hasn’t delivered on any of his threats. There’s no wall on Mexico. There’s no repeal of health care. He can’t get the Congress to back him up. He’s under investigation.”

After the summit, the Pangoal Institution, a Beijing think tank, published an analysis of the Trump Administration, describing it as a den of warring “cliques,” the most influential of which was the “Trump family clan.” The Trump clan appears to “directly influence final decisions” on business and diplomacy in a way that “has rarely been seen in the political history of the United States,” the analyst wrote. He summed it up using an obscure phrase from feudal China: jiatianxia—“to treat the state as your possession.”

After Mar-a-Lago, Trump heaped praise on Xi. “We had a great chemistry, I think. I mean, at least I had a great chemistry—maybe he didn’t like me, but I think he liked me,” he said on the Fox Business Network. Meanwhile, Chinese analysts were struggling to keep up with the news about the rise and fall of White House advisers. Following a report that Tillerson had disparaged the President’s intelligence, Shen, of Fudan University, asked me, “What is a moron?”

By early November, Trump was preparing for his first trip to Beijing. Some China specialists in the U.S. government saw it as a chance to press on substantive issues. “We have to start standing up for our interests, because they have come farther, and faster, than people thought, pretty much without anyone waking up to it,” a U.S. official involved in planning the visit told me. Among other things, the U.S. wanted China to open up areas of its economy, such as cloud computing, to foreign competitors; crack down on the theft of intellectual property; and stop forcing American firms to transfer technology as a condition for entry to the Chinese market. “It is time for a sense of urgency,” the official said.

Cui Tiankai, the Chinese Ambassador to Washington, billed Trump’s visit as a “state visit plus.” An American with high-level contacts in Beijing told me that they planned to “wow him with five thousand years of Chinese history. They believe he is uniquely susceptible to that.”

The strategy had worked before. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, the C.I.A. commissioned a China scholar named Richard Solomon to write a handbook for American leaders, “Chinese Political Negotiating Behavior.” Solomon, whose study was later declassified, noted that some of China’s most effective techniques were best described in the nineteenth century, when a Manchu prince named Qiying recorded his preferred approach. “Barbarians,” Qiying noted, respond well to “receptions and entertainment, after which they have had a feeling of appreciation.” Solomon warned that modern Chinese leaders “use the trappings of imperial China” to “impress foreign officials with their grandeur and seriousness of purpose.” Solomon advised, “Resist the flattery of being an ‘old friend’ or the sentimentality that Chinese hospitality readily evokes.” (Henry Kissinger, he wrote, once gushed to his hosts, “After a dinner of Peking duck I’ll agree to anything.”)

Following the Nineteenth Party Congress, Trump marvelled at Xi’s new power. “Now some people might call him the king of China,” he told an interviewer, shortly before his trip. Trump arrived in more modest standing. A few hours before his plane touched down, on November 8th, Republicans were thumped in state elections, losing governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey. His approval rating was thirty-seven per cent, the lowest of any President at that point in his tenure since Gallup started measuring it. Three former aides had been charged with felonies in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. It was the first summit since 1972 in which the American President had less leverage and political security than his Chinese counterpart.

Xi deftly flattered his guest. Upon Trump’s arrival, they took a sunset tour of the Forbidden City. They drank tea, watched an opera performance at the Pavilion of Pleasant Sounds, and admired an antique gold urn. The next morning, at the Great Hall of the People, Trump was greeted by an even more lavish ceremony, with Chinese military bands, the firing of cannons, and throngs of schoolchildren, who waved colored pompoms and yelled, in Chinese, “Uncle Trump!” Government censors struck down critical comments about Trump on social media.

Trump and Xi met for several hours and then appeared before the press. “The hosting of the military parade this morning was magnificent,” Trump said, and he praised Xi as a “highly respected and powerful representative of his people.” He mentioned the need to coöperate with regard to North Korea, and to fix an “unfair” trade relationship, but he said nothing about intellectual property or market access. “I don’t blame China,” Trump said. “Who can blame a country for being able to take advantage of another country for the benefit of its citizens?” There were gasps from business leaders and journalists. “I give China great credit.” Some Chinese members of the audience cheered. Xi and Trump took no questions from the press.

In preparations for Trump’s meeting with Xi, the State Department had urged the President to bring up a human-rights case: that of the poet Liu Xia, the widow of the late Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, who is under house arrest, without charges. According to two U.S. officials, Trump never mentioned it.

Trump’s deference to Xi—the tributes and tender musings about chemistry—sent a message to other countries that are debating whether to tilt toward the U.S. or China. Daniel Russel said, “The American President is here. He’s looking in awe at the Forbidden City. He’s looking in awe at Xi Jinping, and he’s choosing China because of its market, because of its power. If you thought that America was going to choose you and these ‘old-fashioned’ treaties and twentieth-century values, instead of Xi Jinping and the Chinese market, well, think again.”

In concrete terms, why does it matter if America retreats and China advances? One realm in which the effects are visible is technology, where Chinese and American companies are competing not simply for profits but also to shape the rules concerning privacy, fairness, and censorship. China bars eleven of the world’s twenty-five most popular Web sites—including Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia—because it fears they will dominate local competitors or amplify dissent. The Chinese government has promoted that approach under a doctrine that it calls “cyber-sovereignty.” In December, China hosted an Internet conference that attracted American C.E.O.s such as Tim Cook, of Apple, even though China has forced Apple to remove apps that allow users to circumvent the “Great Firewall.”

In Beijing, I hailed a cab and headed to the northwest corner of the city, where a Chinese company called SenseTime is working on facial recognition, a field at the intersection of science and individual rights. The company was founded in 2014 by Tang Xiao’ou, a computer scientist who trained at M.I.T. and returned to Hong Kong to teach. (For years, China’s startups lagged behind those in Silicon Valley. But there is more parity now. Of the forty-one private companies worldwide that reached “unicorn” status in 2017—meaning they had valuations of a billion dollars or more—fifteen are Chinese and seventeen are American.)

SenseTime’s offices have a sleek, industrial look. Nobody wears an identification badge, because cameras recognize employees, causing doors to open. I was met there by June Jin, the chief marketing officer, who earned an M.B.A. at the University of Chicago and worked at Microsoft, Apple, and Tesla. Jin walked me over to a display of lighthearted commercial uses of facial-recognition technology. I stepped before a machine, which resembled a slender A.T.M., that assessed my “happiness” and other attributes, guessed that I am a thirty-three-year-old male, and, based on that information, played me an advertisement for skateboarding attire. When I stepped in front of it again, it revised its calculation to forty-one years old, and played me an ad for liquor. (I was, at the time, forty.) The machines are used in restaurants to entertain waiting guests. But they contain a hidden element of artificial intelligence as well: images are collected and compared with a facial database of V.I.P. customers. “A waiter or waitress comes up and maybe we get you a seat,” Jin said. “That’s the beauty of A.I.”

Next, Jin showed me how the technology is used by police. She said, “We work very closely with the Public Security Bureau,” which applies SenseTime’s algorithms to millions of photo I.D.s. As a demonstration, using the company’s employee database, a video screen displayed a live feed of a busy intersection nearby. “In real time, it captures all the attributes of the cars and pedestrians,” she said. On an adjoining screen, a Pac-Man-like trail indicated a young man’s movements around the city, based only on his face. Jin said, “It can match a suspect with a criminal database. If the similarity level is over a certain threshold, then they can make an arrest on the spot.” She continued, “We work with more than forty police bureaus nationwide. Guangdong Province is always very open-minded and embracing technology, so, last year alone, we helped the Guangdong police bureau solve many crimes.”

In the U.S., where police departments and the F.B.I. are adopting comparable technology, facial recognition has prompted congressional debates about privacy and policing. The courts have yet to clarify when a city or a company can track a person’s face. Under what conditions can biometric data be used to find suspects of a crime, or be sold to advertisers? In Xi Jinping’s China, which values order over the rights of the individual, there are few such debates. In the city of Shenzhen, the local government uses facial recognition to deter jaywalkers. (At busy intersections, it posts their names and I.D. pictures on a screen at the roadside.) In Beijing, the government uses facial-recognition machines in public rest rooms to stop people from stealing toilet paper; it limits users to sixty centimetres within a nine-minute period.

Before Trump took office, the Chinese government was far outspending the U.S. in the development of the types of artificial intelligence with benefits for espionage and security. According to In-Q-Tel, an investment arm of the United States intelligence community, the U.S. government spent an estimated $1.2 billion on unclassified A.I. programs in 2016. The Chinese government, in its current five-year plan, has committed a hundred and fifty billion dollars to A.I.

The Trump Administration’s proposed 2018 budget would cut scientific research by fifteen per cent, or $11.1 billion. That includes a ten-per-cent decrease in the National Science Foundation’s spending on “intelligent systems.” In November, Eric Schmidt, then the chairman of Alphabet, told the Artificial Intelligence & Global Security Summit, in Washington, that reductions in the funding of basic-science research will help China overtake the U.S. in artificial intelligence within a decade. “By 2020, they will have caught up. By 2025, they will be better than us. By 2030, they will dominate the industries of A.I.,” he said. Schmidt, who chairs the Defense Innovation Advisory Board, added that the ban on visitors from Iran was an obstacle to technology development. “Iran produces some of the top computer scientists in the world. I want them here. I want them working for Alphabet and Google. It’s crazy not to let these people in.”

China’s effort to extend its reach has been so rapid that it is fuelling a backlash. Australian media have uncovered efforts by China’s Communist Party to influence Australia’s government. In December, Sam Dastyari, a member of the Australian Senate, resigned after revelations that he warned one of his donors, a businessman tied to China’s foreign-influence efforts, that his phone was likely tapped by intelligence agencies. Australia’s Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, announced a ban on foreign political donations, citing “disturbing reports about Chinese

In August, Cambridge University Press, in Britain, caused an uproar among scholars after it removed from one of its Chinese Web sites more than three hundred academic articles that mentioned sensitive topics, such as the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, in an effort to satisfy China’s censors. Cambridge abandoned the move. (Another academic publisher, Springer Nature, defended its decision to censor itself, saying that it was necessary “to prevent a much greater impact on our customers and authors.”)

Foreign governments and human-rights groups have expressed alarm that Beijing is pursuing critics beyond its borders and bringing them to mainland China for detention. One night last January, unidentified men escorted a Chinese-Canadian billionaire, Xiao Jianhua, from a Hong Kong hotel, in a wheelchair, with a sheet over his head. (His whereabouts are unknown.) In several cases, beginning in 2015, the publishers of books critical of China’s leaders were abducted from Hong Kong and Thailand, without public extradition procedures.

Across Asia, there is wariness of China’s intentions. Under the Belt and Road Initiative, it has loaned so much money to its neighbors that critics liken the debt to a form of imperialism. When Sri Lanka couldn’t repay loans on a deepwater port, China took majority ownership of the project, stirring protests about interference in Sri Lanka’s sovereignty. China also has a reputation for taking punitive economic action when a smaller country offends its politics. After the Nobel Prize was awarded to the dissident Liu Xiaobo, China stopped trade talks with Norway for nearly seven years; during a territorial dispute with the Philippines, China cut off banana imports; in a dispute with South Korea, it restricted tourism and closed Korean discount stores.

In Beijing’s political circles, some strategists worry that their leaders risk moving too fast to fill the void created by America’s withdrawal from its global role. I dropped by to see one of the city’s wisest observers of America, Jia Qingguo, the dean of the Department of Diplomacy at Peking University. “The U.S. is not losing leadership. You’re giving it up. You’re not even selling it,” he said. “It seems Donald Trump’s view is: if China can take a free ride, why can’t we? But the problem is that the U.S. is too big. If you ride for free, then the bus will collapse. Maybe the best solution is for China to help the U.S. drive the bus. The worse scenario is that China drives the bus when it’s not ready. It’s too costly and it doesn’t have enough experience.” Jia, who has a wry smile and a thick head of graying hair, said that universities have not had enough time to train scholars in areas that China is now expected to navigate: “In the past, the outside world was very far away. Now it’s very close. But the change happened too fast to digest.”

Joseph Nye, the Harvard political scientist who coined the term “soft power,” to describe the use of ideas and attraction rather than force, told me that China has improved its ability to persuade—up to a point. “American soft power comes heavily from our civil society, everything from Hollywood to Harvard and the Gates Foundation,” he said. “China still doesn’t understand that. They still haven’t opened that up. I think that is going to hurt them in the longer term.” Nye predicts that Trump’s unpopularity will not erase America’s soft-power advantage, except under certain conditions. “Probably he won’t be seen as a turning point in American history but will be seen as a blip, another one of the strange characters that our political process throws up, like Joe McCarthy or George Wallace,” he said. “Two things could make me wrong. One is if he gets us into a major war. The second is if he gets reëlected and winds up doing damage to our checks and balances or our reputation as a democratic society. I don’t think those are likely, but I don’t have enough confidence in my judgment to assure you.”

At the White House, aides said that late last year a two-tiered strategy took hold, in which the President will seek to maintain congenial relations with Xi while lower-ranking officials introduce hard-line measures. By the end of 2017, the State Department, the National Security Council, and other agencies were considering policies to push back on China’s influence operations, trade practices, and efforts to shape the technology of the future. Michael Green, who was George W. Bush’s chief adviser on Asia, told me, “They’re looking at it like it’s a war plan: working with the allies, working with members of Congress.”

In its national-security strategy, the Administration suggested that, to stop the theft of trade secrets, it could restrict visas to foreigners who travel to the U.S. to study science, engineering, math, and technology; it dedicated itself to a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” which, in practice, will likely expand military coöperation with India, Japan, and Australia. Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. Trade Representative, is considering several potential tariffs in order to punish China for its alleged theft of intellectual property and dumping of exports on U.S. markets. “We’re not looking for a trade war,” a senior White House official involved in China issues told me. “But the President fully believes that we have to stand up to China’s predatory industrial policies that have hollowed out U.S. manufacturing and, increasingly, high-tech sectors.”

If the White House takes such actions, they could collide with Trump’s admiring relationship with Xi. In the meantime, many China specialists describe the Administration’s approach as inchoate. In the first eleven months of Trump’s Presidency, none of his Cabinet secretaries had given a major speech on China. The post of Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, the State Department’s top job for the region—once held by W. Averell Harriman, Richard Holbrooke, and Christopher Hill—remained unfilled. David Lampton, the director of China studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, at Johns Hopkins, told me, “I think this is like a bunch of drunks in a car fighting for the steering wheel.”

In dozens of interviews in China and the U.S., I encountered almost no one who expects China to supplant the U.S. anytime soon in its role as the world’s preëminent power. Beyond China’s economic obstacles, its political system—including constraints on speech, religion, civil society, and the Internet—drives away some of the country’s boldest and most entrepreneurial thinkers. Xi’s system inspires envy from autocrats, but little admiration from ordinary citizens around the world. And for all of Xi’s talk of a “Chinese solution,” and the glorious self-portrait in “Wolf Warrior II,” China has yet to mount serious responses to global problems, such as the refugee crisis or Syria’s civil war. Global leadership is costly; it means asking your people to contribute to others’ well-being, to send young soldiers to die far from home. In 2015, when Xi pledged billions of dollars in loan forgiveness and additional aid for African nations, some in China grumbled that their country was not yet rich enough to do that. China is not “seeking to replace us in the same position as a kind of chairman of planet Earth,” Daniel Russel said. “They have no intention of emulating the U.S. as a provider of global goods or as an arbiter who teases out universal principles and common rules.”

More likely, the world is entering an era without obvious leaders, an “age of nonpolarity,” as Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has described it, in which nationalist powers—China, the U.S., Russia—contend with non-state groups of every moral stripe, from Doctors Without Borders to Facebook, and ExxonMobil to Boko Haram. It is natural for Americans to mourn that prospect, but Shivshankar Menon, India’s former foreign secretary, suspects that the U.S. will retain credibility and leadership. “The U.S. is the only power that I know of which is capable of turning on a dime, with a process of self-examination,” he said. “Within two years of entering Iraq, there were people within the system saying, ‘Are we doing the right thing?’ ” He has seen the country recover before: “Three times just in my lifetime. I was in the U.S. in ’68, on the West Coast. I’ve seen what the U.S. did in the eighties to reinvent itself. What it did after 2008 is remarkable. For me, this comes and goes. The U.S. can afford it.”

Menon continued, “I think we’re going back to actually the historic norm, separate multiverses, rather than one, which was an exception. If you go back to the concept of Europe in the nineteenth century, people basically lived in different worlds and had very controlled interactions with each other. China is not going to take responsibility for everything that happens in the Middle East or South America.” In small ways, Menon said, we live this way already. “Technology has made it easy, because iTunes keeps selling you more of the same music—it doesn’t keep exposing you to something new. When you go to Beijing, you still listen to your own music, and you’re actually in your own bubble. So it’s a historical aberration and a rarity, where you say you’re ‘globalized.’ But what does that mean?”

Late one afternoon in November, I went to see a professor in Beijing who has studied the U.S. for a long time. America’s recent political turmoil has disoriented him. “I’m struggling with this a lot,” he said, and poured me a cup of tea. “I love the United States. I used to think that the multiculturalism of the U.S. might work here. But, if it doesn’t work there, then it won’t work here.” In his view, the original American bond is dissolving. “In the past, you kept together because of common values that you call freedom,” he said. Emerging in its place is a cynical, zero-sum politics, a return to blood and soil, which privileges interests above inspiration.

In that sense, he observed, the biggest surprise in the relationship between China and the United States is their similarity. In both countries, people who are infuriated by profound gaps in wealth and opportunity have pinned their hopes on nationalist, nostalgic leaders, who encourage them to visualize threats from the outside world. “China, Russia, and the U.S. are moving in the same direction,” he said. “They’re all trying to be great again.” ♦






Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008, and covers politics and foreign affairs. He is the author of “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China.”

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Making China Great Again

By Evan Osnos



In an unfamiliar moment, China’s pursuit of a larger role in the world coincides with America’s pursuit of a smaller one.