Even if it doesn’t help his re-election, it has reasons to want it.
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Imagine you’re running a very large nation and that the president of a very large rival nation is constantly imposing tariffs on your country and accusing you of ripping off and undermining his. Then, out of the blue at a summit one day, he asks you to help him win re-election. Would you:
In most circumstances, 1., 2. or 3. would be logical responses. But when President Donald Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to do him a 2020 solid, as John Bolton’s new book claims, Xi was probably leaning hard toward option 4. Sure, Trump threatens China constantly, but he mainly follows through with trade wars that are the equivalent of punching himself in the face out of spite. Meanwhile, Hal Brands notes, Trump is even more aggressively hacking away at America’s moral authority and the post-World War II global alliances on which America once thrived. Four more years of that, and China may be able to waltz in and pick up the pieces as a relatively stable alternative superpower.
If you wanted to knock a rival several pegs lower, what better way than to keep in power a leader with Yosemite Sam levels of self-control? Trump last week confirmed plans to pull troops from Germany, weakening arguably America’s most important alliance on what James Stavridis writes are false pretenses, apparently just because Angela Merkel refuses to show him proper fealty.
Closer to home, Trump just shoved Venezuela’s Juan Guaido under the bus, undermining his authority and edging toward legitimizing Nicolas Maduro, undoing years of policy just because he is SO MAD at Bolton, writes Eli Lake. With enemies like these, if you’re Xi, who needs friends?
Nearly two months ago, Dave Eggers wrote a column about all the conflicting advice we get about coronavirus, in the form of a Q&A:
And so forth. Now, as he and others predicted, we’re reopening economies around the world while the pandemic still rages, armed with barely more information than we had two months ago.
