Trump's biggest failure

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Watching Trump on the international stage with China is like watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon. He's consistently outwitted, outmaneuvered, and taken for a fool at every single opportunity by the Chinese. The fundamental problem with Trump and his obnoxious, stupid foreign policy is that he believes he is a businessman, and drives his foreign policy on that belief. The issue with China, though, is that it is not an economic challenge, but the geopolitical challenge, which leads Trump to such great political moves as imposing tariffs on China's biggest regional rival, India, thereby inadvertently strengthening China. Any reasonable diplomat or leader with a bare minimum of strategic understanding would have sought out to strengthen ties with India in confronting the ever growing Chinese geopolitical dominance. There were many attempts to use trade as a way to outfox China's ever growing influence, trade agreements like the TPP or Obama's failed attempt with a trade agreement with the EU.

What is essential to either is the existence of a coherent group of countries allied in a common purpose of furthering each other's economic growth and keeping out others. But the random nature with which Trump imposes tariffs from goods such as Italian luxury foods to Indian aluminium makes the idea of any coherent bound interest group or alliance in trade evaporate into thin air. Instead, Trump seems to be more interested in deliberately berating American allies and partners who increasingly look to China for a more calm, collected, predictable, and mature partner in commerce. You also don't open new markets or make new friends by calling them s**tholes.

Another factor is simply Trump's clownish Presidency itself. The fact that this man's Twitter feed can fill up the evening news as China expands its military presence in the South Pacific, Africa, Central Asia, builds more ports, and redraws the entire global trading system to be more and more under its thumb, speaks volumes of what this President's priorities are, namely certainly not his country's role in the world. China has taken full advantage of his Presidency, more so than anyone else, to aggressively push further than any previous Chinese government and set its global ambitions into stone, while everyone else was distracted with a funny looking blonde man, because apparently his Presidency is all about triggering the libs and no actual coherent policy. He lacks any vision for the future of his country in the world. In fact, his isolationism, the American first nationalism that he proposes, is a policy of which he doesn't even seem to understand how much it plays into the hands of the Chinese Politburo. China would love nothing more than to return to the old world order, where it was the center of everything and everyone revolved their global ambitions around getting as beneficial a position as possible in relation to China. The Chinese government would love nothing more than a United States that seals itself off from the world so it can take its place.