President Trump justifies his dramatic tariff increases by declaring America’s economic partners and allies to be greedy and exploitative.
“Frankly, friend has been oftentimes much worse than foe,” he said when he announced “Liberation Day” last week. Earlier, he had gone so far as to proclaim that “the European Union was created to screw the U.S.”
But Trump places the blame for the dire trade imbalance he sees not on selfish foreign governments but on his “stupid” and “pathetically weak” predecessors in government — mostly Democratic presidents but also “Republicans-in-name-only” who were taken advantage of by wily foreign negotiators.
Trump had laid out his own negotiating prowess in “The Art of the Deal,” his 1987 book with Tony Schwartz, in which he boasted about throwing his interlocutors off-balance by taking extreme opening positions, then accepting something less in the final agreement.
Trump sees America’s allies and partners as takers rather than givers, not only on trade but in the security realm. His vice president, JD Vance, echoed this disparagement of European allies in the infamous Signal communication chain, in which Vance wrote, “I just hate bailing out Europe again.”
But Trump’s negotiating style takes on an entirely different tone when he is dealing with actual enemies of the U.S. and the West. He demonstrated that much in his first term, when he called Xi Jinping his friend, deferring to the Chinese leader’s hollow explanations after the China-origin pandemic stopped America’s economic rise under Trump and insisting that Xi had not deceived him.
Nowhere is Trump’s double standard on foreign policy clearer, though, than on the war in Ukraine. He said that it must end immediately to “stop the killing” even before a ceasefire was agreed upon. Consistent with his position that Ukraine and the West caused the conflict, he and Vance angrily blamed Volodymyr Zelensky for not instantly accepting Trump’s ultimatum for a mineral deal without a security guarantee. He followed this disgraceful humiliation by suspending arms and intelligence support for Ukraine.
After Zelensky was forced to agree to the flawed U.S. deal, Trump unilaterally changed the terms, making them even more onerous for Ukraine — almost as if he wanted to punish Zelensky for rejecting it in the first place.
Meanwhile, Russia’s president played into Trump’s one-sided credulity and said he accepted the ceasefire proposal “in principle,” subject to working out the details in some indefinite future. All the while, Vladimir Putin continued carrying out his war crimes, deliberately bombing Ukrainian civilians. Following the tried-and-true communist doctrine of negotiating while fighting, he went on making incremental gains of Ukrainian territory while adding to his growing list of new settlement conditions. For this, Putin tossed Trump a flattering portrait he had commissioned, mocking his self-proclaimed reputation as a formidable negotiator.
All this undoubtedly fascinated Xi, who will soon have the opportunity to test Trump’s geopolitical spine again. He had already escalated China’s menacing naval and air exercises around Taiwan, even before Trump explicitly threw Ukraine’s sovereignty under the bus. Now, his pathway to seizing Taiwan, at least incrementally, is clearer.
First, he must continue letting Trump believe his obsequious flattery is reciprocated, as he steps up his disinformation campaign about the origins and history of the Taiwan issue — especially including the diplomatic sleight-of-hand perpetrated by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
Then Xi will play the manifest destiny card on Taiwan that Trump has brandished on Panama, Greenland and Canada. When he considers the time right — and the economic chaos created by Trump’s tariff policies are accelerating that timeline — he will make an overt move on Taiwan by seizing Kinmen-Quemoy or another island or impose an economic blockade against Taiwan.
At that point, Chinese military officials will make it known that they are preparing for nuclear war with the United States. Finally, Xi will declare that he and his good American friend will reason together to prevent that catastrophe.
That scenario will produce for Taiwan the same protracted abandonment Ukraine is suffering under Trump. Trump can short-circuit it only by declaring publicly and unequivocally that the U.S. will defend Taiwan, and that the burden is on China to prevent the conflict.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies, a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute and member of the advisory board of The Vandenberg Coalition.
