By Nick Catoggio
Wednesday, September 03, 2025
The presidential social media account is consistently and
inconsistently shocking. There’s always something new over there to
make you say “What?” But the nature of that “What?” will vary
from post to post.
Sometimes it’s of the “I can’t believe he’s announcing
something so sinister in such a trivial forum” variety. Only on Truth Social
will you find the most powerful man in the world casually firing
Federal Reserve governors or warning
political enemies that he’s watching them amid ads for
cheap ivermectin.
Other times it’s of the “I can’t believe he’s announcing
something so trivial in such a sinister forum” variety. Only on Truth Social
will you find petty complaints about the
celebrities he hates or the
subcontractors screwing up renovations at the White House amid
news about his latest domestic troop deployment.
What he posted on Tuesday night was shocking in part
because it didn’t fall into one of those familiar genres.
It was inspired by China’s dayslong celebration of the 80th anniversary of victory over Japan in World War II.
Photos are circulating today of a smiling Xi Jinping in Maoist garb flanked by
Kim Jong Un on his left and Vladimir Putin on his right; Indian leader Narendra
Modi also paid
his respects a few days ago to try to repair the
strained relations between his country and Xi’s. The occasion has had the
feeling of a coming-out
party for Beijing, with every major regional power putting in face time out
of respect for China’s power.
Observing all of this from afar, the president fired off
a “Truth” that sounded a little, well, neoconservative.
(Bold is mine.)
The big question to be answered
is whether or not President Xi of China will mention the massive amount of
support and “blood” that The United States of America gave to China in order to
help it to secure its FREEDOM from a very unfriendly foreign invader. Many
Americans died in China’s quest for Victory and Glory. I hope that they are
rightfully Honored and Remembered for their Bravery and Sacrifice! May
President Xi and the wonderful people of China have a great and lasting day of
celebration. Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong
Un, as you conspire against The United States of America. PRESIDENT DONALD
J. TRUMP
Donald Trump doesn’t typically treat Putin and Kim as
enemies, let alone co-conspirators in a plot to reduce American influence in
the world. He doesn’t
even treat Xi as an enemy, despite his pretensions to nationalism and China
hawkery. To have him suddenly accuse the three of working against the United
States—accurately, of course—felt very “Axis of Evil.” Which, you may recall,
is a doctrine that’s associated with a starkly different kind of Republican
president and Republican Party.
While it’s nice to see a ray of clarity penetrate his
mind, I’m confused by his tone. Don’t he and MAGA want a multipolar world?
Reducing American influence abroad is a good thing, isn’t it?
Strategy or ego?
It’s always risky with Trump to attribute to strategy
what might properly be explained by narcissism. This is a guy who, as recently
as two weeks ago, was still telling other heads of state that he thinks Putin “wants
to make a deal for me” on Ukraine. His belief in his ability to charm world
leaders into tossing aside their own interests and cooperating with him to earn
his friendship is unshakable.
You can read his annoyance with the festivities in
Beijing through that lens. Like a child excluded from a classmate’s birthday
party, maybe he’s mad that he wasn’t invited. Or
maybe he’s jealous at seeing a rival treated to the sort of kowtowing from
powerful allies that only
he, as emperor of America, deserves. Or maybe he’s miffed about not getting
to sit at the “cool kids’ table”: Having observed him as long as you have, do
you really think he prefers having Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron on his team
rather than the strongmen currently surrounding Xi?
My guess is that Trump’s irritation derives mostly from
the fact that he’s gone to unusual lengths to court Putin and Kim and has zippo
to show for it.
He was criticized harshly by the American left and parts
of the American right for holding summits with both men, convinced as ever that
he could leverage his charisma and supposed dealmaking genius to get Putin to
end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Kim to end North Korea’s nuclear program.
What he got instead was bupkis. He promoted himself as a peacemaker, and
they made him look like a chump—and now, to add insult to injury, they’re
eagerly cuddling up to America’s archenemy in Beijing. No wonder he’s sore.
If you doubt that narcissism influences his policy
decisions (and none of us do in 2025, do we?), consider the surprising collapse
of his relationship with Modi.
The two are kindred spirits, messianic nationalists with cults
of personality powering their support, and they began
to build ties with each other during
Trump’s first term. For a president who’s keen to contain Chinese
influence, there was strategic sense in making an ally of a developing nation
on China’s doorstep that prefers Western democracy and boasts a consumer market
of more than 1 billion people.
But it started to fall apart in June—over a phone call,
according to the New
York Times.
Keen as ever to tout his peacemaking credentials, Trump
reportedly told Modi that he was proud to have ended the brief hostilities
earlier this year between India and Pakistan. He also noted that the Pakistanis
intended to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize (an award for which he’s actively
lobbying), which was his way of hinting that the Indians would be wise to
follow suit.
“The Indian leader bristled,” the Times claims.
“He told Mr. Trump that U.S. involvement had nothing to do with the recent
ceasefire. It had been settled directly between India and Pakistan.” (Which wasn’t exactly true.)
Modi had his own strongman reputation to protect, you see, and couldn’t risk
having his supporters believe that he was too weak to bring Pakistan to heel
without American help. He wouldn’t give the president credit.
Soon after, the White House slapped India with a 25
percent tariff, a heavy blow for a country that exports more
goods to America than to any other country. Trump then
turned around and doubled
it to 50 percent to punish India for buying Russian
oil—even though China, a bigger consumer, hasn’t been similarly sanctioned and
Russia itself is subject to a tariff of just 10 percent.
This weekend Britain’s Telegraph reported that Trump has phoned Modi no less than four times
recently in hopes of working out a deal, only to have the prime minister
decline the call each time. Instead Modi has buddied up to his neighbors Putin
and Xi to show Washington that his country doesn’t need the United States after
all.
If you can find any strategic logic in carefully
cultivating a relationship with India only to blow
it up in a matter of months, I’m all ears. Occam’s razor holds that the
simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and the simplest explanation
in this case (and for any dispute involving our current government) is that
there’s some petty narcissistic grievance at the heart of it.
But the probability that Tuesday night’s “Truth” was
motivated by jealousy shouldn’t absolve Trump from answering for its strategic
implications. Why should an “America First” president care if Eastern strongmen
in China’s “sphere of influence” are scheming with Beijing?
Spheres of influence.
Because I’m a child of the Cold War, I prefer a unipolar
world led by America to a multipolar one in which America is one power among
several.
Offer me a multipolar order in which all of the poles
involve nations governed by different flavors of liberalism and I might revisit
that. But give me one where the choice is between a world dominated by America
and a world in which half or more of the planet is dominated by totalitarians,
which has in fact been the choice for most of my life, and there’s nothing to
discuss.
That’s why I’m not a postliberal. Postliberals admire
authoritarianism and want it to succeed abroad because they believe its success
will make it more appealing in the West. They certainly don’t think the United
States should be in the business of actively trying to contain it. “America
First” is a reaction to 80 years of Washington striving to do that, sometimes
through military force; if isolationism means anything, it means ending that
project and allowing a multipolar order to bloom. Let Russia and China dominate
in their “spheres of influence” so long as they leave the U.S. to dominate in
its own.
I thought that’s what Trump believed, too. We get to
meddle in
Greenland and bomb
Venezuelan narcotics traffickers and Russia and China
get to do the same with their weakling neighbors.
So what was he doing yesterday spinning whiny theories about Xi, Putin, and Kim
“conspiring” against America? Isn’t this week’s Beijing summit a simple matter
of major powers in the Eastern “sphere” meeting to sort out how things should
run in their backyard?
I suppose it’s possible to be an isolationist who faults
foreign powers for their anti-American activity, but that’s a creature rarely
seen in nature. A core belief of many “America First”-ers is that we would have
fewer enemies abroad if we simply stopped antagonizing people. That’s why every
Russia simp on the right from Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon on down has a
theory that the West is ultimately to blame for the Ukraine war. NATO
encroached on Moscow’s “sphere,” they’d tell you, and so Russia had little
choice but to reassert itself.
For postliberals, to complain that authoritarians are
conspiring against you is necessarily to ask the question, “What have we done
to them to warrant such a conspiracy?” And to necessarily answer, “We
trespassed on their interests and should stop doing that.” If postliberal
regimes are ill-disposed to us, it’s our own fault and within our power to
change it by retreating.
That’s what made Trump’s post last night shocking.
Accusing three rivals with whom he’s sought better relations of conspiring
against America anyway implied that their anti-Americanism isn’t a pure
product of U.S. “aggression,” a point seldom heard on the postliberal right or
left. And if that’s true, it might also be true that allowing them to
consolidate power in their own “sphere” would be bad for our country
long-term—a classic hawkish position and the antithesis of “America First.”
When I say that he sounds neoconservative, I’m only half-joking.
What’s even stranger about all this is that the president
certainly hasn’t acted like he believes Eastern powers are conspiring against
the U.S.
If he were worried about that, he wouldn’t have been so
glib thus far about alienating American allies. Poll after poll after poll this year has found views of China growing more favorable
internationally as views of America have sunk, which is morally fatuous but
understandable given how volatile and strategically irrational the president’s
policymaking has been. Trump, not Xi, sowed economic havoc by declaring a
trade war on the world, by rapidly dismantling foreign
aid programs, by making the U.S. less
hospitable to immigrants, by menacing
allies Putin-style for territorial concessions, and by
winding
down the American-led international order that’s kept
the world relatively peaceful since 1945.
You can’t end the Pax Americana and then complain when
other countries decide it’s time to make friends with China. Or rather, you can—but
you’ll sound ridiculous doing so.
If the president were keen to head off an Eastern-led
“conspiracy” against the United States, he should have focused on containing
China by cultivating alliances, prioritizing stability in economic policy to
encourage continued investment from abroad, and generally avoiding anything
that would make America look like a third-world basket
case relative to Beijing. He … has not done those
things.
And so I can’t figure out what he wants. His instinct to
dominate rivals, including rivals abroad, has run up against his instinct to
separate himself and the country from foreigners as much as possible. Does he
want a unipolar world in which America leads and no one dares conspire against
it? Or does he want a multipolar one in which America minds its own business
and runs the risk of a conspiracy being hatched against it by enemies?
A symptom, not a cause.
He wants both, of course.
Like most of his constituents, I suspect the president
takes American hegemony for granted. It will persist because it must persist,
because it’s all most of us have ever known. We can retreat to our own “sphere
of influence” and shed the responsibilities of governing a unipolar world
without needing to worry much about the threats that a multipolar order might
create. Any “conspirators” can and will be dealt with ruthlessly. No one pushes
the U.S. around.
Americans have a lot of political beliefs like that.
Democracy will continue to function as it always has. Entitlements will endure
because they always do. The world’s best talent will continue to flock here, as
they’ve always done. We’ll lead in science and technology because that’s the
way it is. We landed on the moon, you know.
If you understand Trump’s movement as a
nostalgic fantasy about national greatness, then it makes sense that he and
they would believe that all it takes to extend American preeminence into the
future is to make America more like it was in the past. You don’t need a
specific plan for how that’s going to work, just faith that there’s no problem
tomorrow might present that yesterday can’t solve.
I agree with Jonathan
Last when he writes that Trump is more a symptom of
this foolishness than the cause. “Trump’s second election was confirmation to
the world that the American people can no longer be relied upon,” Last argues.
“We are too—well, you can fill in your own descriptor. Vapid? Decadent?
Unserious? Inconstant? Whatever word you choose, the idea is the same: America
as it existed from World War II to 2016 is a spent force. That age is over.”
I’ve said as
much myself, more than once.
For that reason, the president shouldn’t take it
personally when Narendra Modi and other leaders descend on Beijing to kiss Xi
Jinping’s ring. They’re not snubbing him, they’re simply shifting their bets on
global leadership as a declining America goes about committing
national suicide. A figure as infamously transactional as Trump should
understand better than most that a “conspiracy” is just another transaction.
He—or, rather, his voters—gave China and its allies an
opportunity to transact. Why wouldn’t they take it?
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