U.S. ambassador to China David Perdue’s shocking statement Sunday to Fox News that President Donald Trump has asked Chinese President Xi Jinping if he wanted to buy American weapons has spurred denials from Trump. But regardless of what exactly happened, Perdue’s claim speaks to something profoundly amiss in the Trump administration’s approach to navigating U.S.-Chinese relations.
Let’s consider the possibility that Perdue was accurately conveying something that happened. While discussing Xi’s state visit to Washington last week, Perdue said on Fox that Trump and Xi talked about U.S. arms sales to Taiwan — a long-running point of frustration for Beijing, as China opposes Taiwanese independence. Perdue, summarizing what he described as Trump’s attempt to coax Xi into relaxing about sales to Taiwan, claims Trump told Xi, “Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world,” and that Trump allegedly then “actually asked President Xi, would he like to buy some at one point?”
This scenario, if true, is mind-boggling. And if Perdue’s claims are not true and he was saying something false, that’s a significant and confounding problem, too, because it would not just be a major lie, but a foolish one. (The White House and State Department statements to The New York Times did not deny that Trump made the claims, but said that there is currently no offer or plan to sell arms to China.)
It would not make sense to boost Beijing’s arsenal.
China is the only country in the world that threatens the U.S.’ status as the world’s preeminent military power, and the U.S. takes great pains to guard its technological edge against its rivals. (This is why it is a huge deal that sensitive F-35 fighter jet technology was reportedly somehow recently diverted to Hong Kong.) Selling highly coveted U.S. arms to China would undermine the U.S.’ military advantage. It is common sense to not empower a country that lands on the opposite side of a lot of global geopolitical jockeying. Given that, for example, Trump asked Xi to curb assistance to Iran, it would not make sense to boost Beijing’s arsenal.
If Trump made the offer, it would demonstrate total incoherence on China policy in the administration. Under the One China policy that has governed U.S. policy since 1979, the U.S. officially acknowledges China’s position on Taiwan but maintains informal diplomatic ties with the island nation, and crucially, routinely supplies it with billions of dollars worth of defensive arms. This allows the U.S. to effectively talk out of both sides of its mouth, showing some formal deference to Beijing but also acting as a thorn in its side by materially challenging its domination of the region. If the U.S. were to sell arms to China, it would undermine that entire calculation and would be akin to scoring an own goal.
Yet there’s a part of this whole alleged scenario that is not surprising at all. In his entire time in politics, Trump has shown he lacks even a rudimentary knowledge of how things like trade and diplomacy work, and has an even poorer grasp of — or commitment to — U.S. traditions in those spheres. But one tendency in Trump’s major changes to U.S. diplomacy is infuriating longtime democratic allies and warming ties with adversarial authoritarian states like Russia.
Trump is impressed by power and somehow seems to think that he can even win over the U.S.’ opponents by getting chummy with their leaders despite the hard realities of geopolitical competition and diverging interests. Moreover, given that Trump is dealing with a cost-of-living crisis and is badly losing its trade war with China, perhaps he could have been scrambling for a way to sound amenable to an unconventional arrangement with Xi — even one that would be disastrous for U.S. interests. After all, Trump did pause a $14 billion arms sale in Taiwan in May after a meeting with China’s president.
In the case that Trump did privately make this offer to Xi, it is remarkable that Perdue didn’t seem to realize how his comment marks a rupture into the U.S.’ China policy regime. It would seem like the kind of thing a competent diplomat and functional administration would try to keep secret, at least until there was some kind of substantive plan.
The capitals of the world are always watching Washington closely. This episode shows a president who seems to have fewer and fewer wits about him — and a staff that lacks the competence or willpower to make up for it.
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