WATCH: President Trump has more leverage over Xi Jinping

OPINION:

President Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week in a historic summit between the two world leaders. Scholar of China and author Gordon Chang believes, however, that when it comes to leverage, President Trump comes out on top.

On the latest Politically Unstable, Mr. Chang sits down with Washington Times Commentary Editor Kelly Sadler to discuss this meeting, plus more on threats from China.

[SADLER] I want to get your thoughts on what you think this summit should look like and what deliverables the president should come back with. Is it largely symbolic? Is the real meeting and the real negotiation going to happen in September? The president announced that he will be hosting Xi here in September. Give us the rundown of how you think it’s been going and set some expectations for our audience, please.

[CHANG] So far, it does not appear that either side has made a significant concession to the other. Xi Jinping clearly wants certain things that President Trump is not going to give him. And the opposite of that is also true. You know, there’s a lot of commentary about how the United States comes into this meeting in a weakened condition, which I think underestimates America’s strengths and overestimates China.
Now, it’s true. Xi Jinping has a big built-in advantage because he’s got the home court. And also, Xi Jinping is very arrogant, and that makes it, for him, a lot easier because he has a conception of the world that he’s in control. But he’s not. 

And the thing is that President Trump has a far stronger society behind him than Xi Jinping does. Xi’s economy is stumbling badly. His demography is collapsing. He’s got a very unhappy populace. And the United States is resurgent. And by the way, this year, President Trump has been taking China’s proxies off the board. Venezuela, Panama, we see very important American gains there. Iran has now been bombed and that has really been a Chinese proxy. So you put all this together. Xi Jinping is, I think, overestimating his strength and American commentators are overestimating his strength.

[SADLER] One of the things from the president’s readout, President Trump’s readout of their initial meeting, was that China and Xi agree that Iran should never have a nuclear weapon and that China will do whatever it takes to support the U.S. in Iran. We did not hear the same thing come from the Chinese side. And we do know that Iran is a proxy for China. We know that China buys much of their oil, has been giving them the likes of drones and some things to use on the kinetic war field. What is your takeaway? What is your read on that? And did President Trump make any inroads there?

[CHANG] Probably the Chinese have made a few rhetorical concessions to President Trump. You know, this is typical American diplomacy, where we try to encourage the Chinese to do the right thing. President Trump’s done this, and all of his predecessors have done this, going back to Nixon. I think we need to take a different tack. The reason why there’s a war right now is because China transplanted its nuclear weapons program to Iran. It did that directly, and it also did that indirectly through the AQ Khan nuclear black market ring of Pakistan. I think the president needs to talk about that in public. And the reason is that the Chinese and others have made this war look — you know, like a war of choice, as you hear so often. Well, it’s not, because we know that the Chinese have armed up the Iranians.

So at some point, President Trump is going to have to pivot. If he doesn’t pivot, I don’t think he’s going to get the Chinese to do what we need them to, which is to back off Iran. They’ve been supplying these weapons, not just drones. It’s also these anti-ship cruise missiles that Iran fired at the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group in late March. And it’s everything else. Every Iranian weapon that has a microchip — or virtually every Iranian weapon that has a microchip — has a microchip that has been either manufactured in China, or sourced by Chinese intermediaries for Iran.

We need to start getting real and saying that in public, because our approach of trying to sugarcoat things just has failed.

[SADLER] One of the other takeaways from the two’s bilateral meeting was a lot of pressure put on President Trump to change the U.S.’s stance on Taiwan. It’s been one of strategic ambiguity, but he wants the president to publicly state that it is one China, one nation, and that we won’t be selling arms to Taiwan, nor would we defend it if China wanted to retake the island. What is your sense with what’s coming out from the Chinese side? We haven’t heard how President Trump addressed kind of what were veiled threats coming from Xi regarding the Taiwan issue.

[CHANG] Yes, we haven’t heard anything from President Trump. A White House official talked to the media on an anonymous basis and said there’s no change in U.S. policy. And that’s exactly what we should be doing. We shouldn’t be changing our policy because of Chinese pressure.

Watch the video for the full conversation.

Read more:

• Trump declares diplomatic win in China, better relationship with Xi but few concrete deals
  
  
• Trump is coy about whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan, says he refused to discuss it with Xi
  
  
• Trump to raise China nuclear buildup at summit
  
  
• Taiwan deserves freedom from Beijing’s revisionist history

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