CSotD: Like a Bull Shopping in China
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The general opinion around the world seems to be that Dear Leader is in way over his head in attempting to pull “The Art of the Deal” on Xi Jinping, and that, as MacKay illustrates, Xi is playing with him as a cat plays with a mouse, before eating it.
Trump has said he and Xi are friends, which is your first clue, because that’s a ridiculously dangerous thing to think. Even if China were a golden utopia of human rights, you can’t approach a rival with the idea that you are friends, and you should also avoid thinking you are smarter than someone who has achieved Xi’s level of success.
MacKay shows the Trump mouse pinned down by the Iran War and his absurd tariff policy, and the flaw in those metaphors is that mice get lured into mousetraps, but Trump blundered into those all by himself.
Dear Leader is in a vulnerable position, but it’s entirely his own fault.
Pett elaborates on the point, showing Xi sitting quietly while Trump demonstrates his inability to play the part of the tough bargainer he thinks he is. Political leaders in Western Europe watch Dear Leader as a maiden aunt might watch an undisciplined five-year-old frolic among her delicate antiques, but Xi isn’t worried about Trump breaking anything.
For one thing, China can afford to absorb a few blows. Unlike Western Europe, they’re not vulnerable to impulsive behavior from the US. And for another, China is a very old culture and has seen a lot of water flow down the Yangtze. This endows them with a level of patience that Americans cannot duplicate but had damn well better include in their calculations.
Pett does so, in a sense, by depicting a giant, bloviating Trump and a small, quiet Xi, in something of a David and Goliath meeting. And we know how that came out.
Meanwhile, just to keep things interesting, China-watchers have been analyzing the way Beijing handled Dear Leader’s arrival, attempting to read the tea leaves and figure out how the greeting may reveal Xi’s expectations for the visit and his overall feelings about Trump.
As for Trump’s expectations, several cartoonists suggest that Trump is hoping that a successful meeting with Xi will rescue him from his disastrous failures in Iran, but Chappatte makes the point that Dear Leader not only doesn’t publicly acknowledge that his adventurism in Iran was a blunder, but likely doesn’t even recognize it himself.
There is a critical point at which self-confidence degenerates into self-deception, which is how a man can go through a succession of business failures and launch out yet again on the next, having learned nothing and still cheerfully defying reality with a smile and a shoeshine.
Victory in Venezuela was a disaster for America because it was an easy success and gave Dear Leader and his crew a sense of power and invulnerability that led them to think they could repeat it in the Middle East.
Brown compares Iran to Vietnam, and he’s not the first to recommend that Trump declare victory and go home. However, this seems unfair to LBJ, who was dragged into the war by virtue of having inherited The Best and the Brightest from JFK, and whose attempts at a negotiated settlement were sabotaged by Nixon.
Moreover, less than five months after inheriting the presidency, LBJ sought and obtained Congressional approval to increase our involvement, with only a single pair of Senators — both from his own party — warning against the move. (The House approved the resolution unanimously.)
We can argue that we were misled — the Pentagon Papers explain it at length — but at least we had the chance for an independent third branch of government to weigh in on the decision.
Failure, then, was at least theoretically our own, though perhaps to understand that you’d have to be able to remember the days when we had three independent branches of government.
It seems a very long time ago.
This time around, as Rowe suggests, it seems the long-sighted Xi has seen an immediate opportunity and is taking it. As with Graeme MacKay’s cat, there is a time to play and a moment to pounce.
He has told Trump that the main barrier between our two countries is Taiwan, and that it must be properly handled, “Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts, putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy.”
Rowe says Xi, and his like-minded associates, are in a position to see the clown shoes under the opposite table, and to recognize Trump’s narcissism and his eternal focus on making profits. If agreeing to buy a few hundred tons of soybeans will open the gate to being able to absorb Taiwan without American opposition, it’s an investment well worth making.
And an opportunity, let us hope, that Americans will never offer again once the Constitutional clock runs out on Dear Leader in 2028.
But if Trump is willing to let both Ukraine and Western Europe fall to Vladimir Putin’s tottering empire, why wouldn’t he let a strong China take over Taiwan in exchange for a bowl of rare earth pottage?
Deering suggests that Xi will get to eat Trump’s lunch in both a literal, as well as a metaphorical, way. The literal half is a joke; the metaphorical part should scare the bejeezus out of Taiwan, even if it doesn’t scare you.
And Now For Something Completely Different
Xi isn’t the only one seeking to profit from a dubious grasp on reality.
Kearney comments on a voter-roll leak from the Centurion Project, a separatist group in Alberta that is pushing for the province to leave Canada and become either independent or the 51st American state.
There’s a lot of noise, but it’s dubious whether there’s any fire under all that smoke. There has been a separatist movement in Quebec since Wolfe met Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham, which gave the Meech Lake Accord some weight in 1987, but a report by the CBC suggests that the staunchest, most visible advocates of the Alberta separatist movement are not Albertans, not Canadians, and not even politically motivated.
Keep your head on a swizel and your hand on your wallet.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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