US president, Donald Trump has gone to Beijing and back. One newspaper in Asia has called much of the trip banal. Another one, this time in the UK, says Xi Jinping is the winner on all counts. A notable columnist in a US magazine could only see China’s hegemony unfolding. Could it mean that all the hugely entertaining spectacle, seemingly flawless reception, dinner and bilateral sessions, hand holding and all the glitz, were views from the distance? And the world didn’t gain anything much?
The answer will always depend on who is analysing. None of the nearly two dozen CEO of top companies on Mr. Trump’s entourage, especially those who might have now got a better foothold in China, would say it was all banal. Trump is never likely to say it was anything less than the deal maker’s biggest haul ever vis-a-vis America First.
For China, nothing can be greater than the visitor whose presence presented the best opportunity for it to let everyone know that strategic patience is inexhaustible as long as nobody tries to come between it and retaking of Taiwan. Not if Trump is already advising Taiwan against declaring independence, according to the BBC.
The problem with great power diplomacy is that the leader of the great power country on world stage is an actor with many scripts, all of them for enactment at the same time. Those insisting on victory only in the image of Thucydides might have missed the symbolic import and barrier breaking implications.
Except if Intervention missed it, it doesn’t appear that any of Mr. Trump or even Xi Jinping made reference to Thucydides even once during this trip. Nothing less than an unqualified success may describe Trump’s trip to Beijing if it achieves breaking the entrapment of great power relations in the Thucydides discourse. Anybody who doesn’t see it that way might have that difficulty because s/he is still thinking of the US in Prof David Campbell’s superb book, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity. It is a classic of poststructuralism as almost all Campbell’s books are but the US itself is as fluid as any other discourse!
Intervention asks what other factors of success in win-win cooperation strategy would anyone be looking for if the condition for keeping Thucydides away from China-US relations has been made known in a way never before: what the US does about Taiwan. Taiwan may never even come to use of force but getting the US out of the way through diplomacy as appears to have happened now may pave the way for the conversation that China and Taiwan may now have and which could make things easier for everybody, including the Africans who would be most vulnerable victims of conflict on any part of the globe.
Malu, ejoo oh!
