NYT's Dangerous Distortion of the Trump-XI Summit
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This week, right before his summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, President Trump issued two social media posts. One was classic Trump—ignorant and incendiary—and got tons of publicity. The other was also classic Trump—streetwise and pragmatic in a way that actually held promise—and got virtually no publicity. In keeping with mainstream media tradition, Trump had gotten positive reinforcement—which is to say, he got to see his name in the headlines—for his least constructive behavior.
The headline-getting post (on his Truth Social platform) declared, “Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.” Well, if he really tests nuclear weapons on an “equal basis,” he won’t be testing any nuclear weapons. North Korea hasn’t tested a nuclear weapon since 2017, and it’s been decades since any other country tested one.
Presumably Trump had misunderstood the significance of reports that Russia had tested a nuclear-powered missile. That amounted to “testing a nuclear weapon” in roughly the sense that, whenever one of America’s many nuclear-powered submarines goes anywhere, the US is “using a nuclear weapon.” In any event, the New York Times, among other MSM outlets, decided that, even after the results of the Trump-Xi summit were announced, the nuclear testing story was the story to lead with:
Trump’s other pre-summit social media post said simply, “the g2 will be convening shortly.” This was a reference to groups of nations (the G-7 beginning in the 1970s, the G-20 beginning more recently) that represent much of the world’s economic power and gather regularly to discuss important international issues and sometimes make important decisions. Trump seems to have been saying—accurately—that the world’s two great economic powers, the US and China, were about to hold a summit where important things would happen.
If US foreign policy were conducted rationally, the G-2 would be an actual thing. China and the US, which together command tremendous power, would get together regularly and work things out between themselves and talk about how to bring calm and stability to the planet—how to create a world that, in addition to being a better place to live than the current world, would be a durable platform for the pursuit of the two countries’ most important interests, certainly including economic ones.
I’m not saying that this vision is exactly what Trump had in mind with his G-2 post. Like much of what Trump does, the post was largely ego-driven. Trump likes to think of himself as one of the planet’s titans—as someone worthy of rubbing shoulders with the Vladimir Putins and Xi Jinpings of the world. Saying that the G-2 was about to convene was a way of saying he’s one of the two biggest kids on the block.
Still, this schoolyard mentality goes hand in hand with a pragmatic sensibility—an affinity for realpolitik—that naturally opens him up to the prospect of systematic collaboration with China, whereas some presidents would be too moralistic, or too subservient to America’s moralistic foreign policy establishment, to contemplate such a thing. (The Biden administration, for example, inaugurated its relationship with China by sanctioning and hectoring Beijing about human rights even though there was no chance of that doing anything to improve human rights in China—and two years later we were still wondering whether Biden would ever steer the US-China relationship toward a “thaw.”)
But any hopes of the US and China collaborating to build a better world are complicated by the way mainstream media covers Trump—or, to put a finer point on it, how media outlets that (naturally enough) want to attract lots of readers and viewers harness Trump’s behavior to that end. I’m not just talking about the disproportionate coverage of Trump’s dopey post about nuclear testing, or of his various other bursts of sound and fury that signify nothing. (If I were a betting man, I’d give 100-to-1 odds on a bet that no American nuclear weapon gets tested during Trump’s tenure.) There’s also the constant MSM vigilance for anything that can be depicted as Trump’s caving in to a foreign adversary, ideally Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. A good example is the story that the The New York Times gave the number two slot on its home page (above) after Trump and Xi announced that both countries were suspending recent measures that the other country had found deeply problematic.
The story depicted the deal as something that should alarm Americans. The headline read: “With China Truce, US Security Controls Appear Up for Negotiation.” Reporting this story involved, first of all, calling up a couple of Trump critics and recording their complaints that Trump had agreed to suspend for a year a new US rule that expanded the number of Chinese companies facing restricted access to advanced US technology. The critic who provided the basis for the Times headline was quoted as saying that, by making a “national security issue” part of a “trade negotiation,” Trump had “discarded decades of precedent.”
The first problem with this criticism is that the summit hadn’t, in fact, been just a “trade negotiation.” The concession Trump got in exchange for his one-year pause was China’s one-year pause of rare-earth mineral restrictions that had been, among other things, a big national security problem for the United States. In fact, they’d been a national security problem in exactly the sense that the rule Trump paused had been a national security problem for Beijing: Both of these now-suspended provisions had significantly complicated the other country’s procurement of technologies considered vital to national security.
What’s more, the provisions Trump suspended—the provisions that had triggered the retaliatory rare-earth restrictions that China has now suspended—were almost an accident, a result of the Trump administration’s routinely chaotic operation. As China tech expert Paul Triolo explained to me on a recent episode of the NonZero podcast, they had been issued by the Commerce Department without passing through the national security review process that in other administrations is normal. In fact, they may not have even been approved by Trump himself, said Triolo—and Trump certainly did grasp their sweeping implications. By Triolo’s estimate, these provisions would have imposed new burdens on more than 10,000 Chinese companies and could have done grave damage to an untold number of those. That’s why China retaliated so harshly, with the sweeping rare earth mineral restrictions that would have been seriously dislocating for much of the world but are now suspended.
If you read far enough in the New York Times piece, you’ll see some quotes from people who essentially agree with Triolo’s as
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