The birth of the G2?

Xi's US state visit signals that, for Mr Trump at least, the G2 age has begun

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit to the United States (US) produced, in most people’s estimation, very few concrete results. The trade truce between the two giant economies was extended for a measly two months. No major agreement on security or technological competition was forthcoming. Instead, US President Donald Trump and his administration seemed focused on delivering the maximum possible level of pomp and pageantry, down to the excessively close fighter-jet flypast — so close, indeed, that it produced an instantly historic photo of the American President wincing at the noise.

 

At some level, this fits in with everything one should expect of the Trump administration — which prioritises, like many populists elsewhere, glitzy spectacles that seize its base’s imagination over the real hard work of governance. Friendly news networks in the US focused on details of the state dinner and the unusually lavish reception for Mr Xi rather than on any substantive detail.

 

Other Trump-adjacent voices have made a related case: That China’s economy is slowing, the Peoples’ Liberation Army is in disarray; and therefore that the US didn’t need any signs of overt confrontation and the very lavishness of its reception demonstrated its power and leverage.

 

But what if all the pomp and pageantry was precisely the point? That it was signalled, either consciously or unconsciously, to the visitors from China that they were exceptionally important guests, even by the standards of those the White House hosts? Mr Trump likes to present himself to his domestic audience as a peace-broker and a deal-maker. By elevating the status of the Chinese President to an equal, he signals also that he is capable of dealing with the US’s principal strategic competitor, and turning them from adversaries into, if not friends, then at least colleagues.

 

After all, Mr Trump is not an ideologue. He has no deep distrust of the system put into place by the Chinese Communist Party at home, one which it is now exporting to the world. All he respects is success, particularly success that involves building things — and by those standards the CCP is worthy of admiration.

 

Thus, he will see Mr Xi as someone doing exactly what he himself would like to do for the US — creating a mercantile trading system that exploits its partners; enforcing asymmetric economic relationships on the world; and controlling and directing the private sector. To borrow a metaphor used by one keen observer of the US-China relationship, Mr Trump sees both Presidents as mafia dons, and the state dinner as the sort of carefully choreographed “sit-down” that was a staple of old-fashioned gangster movies. The American President has already demonstrated his leverage, by threatening tariffs; the Chinese President has shown his, by introducing rare-earth restrictions; and now they can sit down and talk to each other, conscious that they can hurt each other but that they have chosen not to.

 

This is not necessarily good news for the rest of the world. The subtext here is that nobody else really matters to America today; only China, because nobody else can truly hurt them. (Let us forget for a moment, as Mr Trump no doubt wants to, that the Republicans are facing a historic loss in the midterms because Iran has squeezed the world’s energy supply and sent petrol prices in the US skyward.)

 

In other words, all the pageantry of this state visit should signal to us that for Mr Trump, at least, the G2 age has begun. It is the American and Chinese Presidents that will decide the future of the world, from artificial intelligence onwards. The less puissant gangsters — various American allies, Chinese satellites, and neutrals — no longer matter, since they are incapable of hurting the big two. They are there to be indulged, threatened, or used, not listened to.

 

The last time an American President thought a G2 was a possibility — in Barack Obama’s first term — it also had dangerous and exclusive overtones. But at least it was meant then as the possibility that the two nations would collaborate to create a framework to solve global problems. But that was a very different President, and indeed a very different China. If a G2 emerges today, it will not be designed to help anyone but the two countries at the top of the global order it seeks to supplant.