Among the difficulties encountered in any attempt to pin down the foreign-policy implications of a Republican return to the White House in November, just one problem arises in the attempt to discern Donald Trump’s intentions by relying on his sundry headline-grabbing utterances.
You just can’t know whether to take him seriously, or whether he’s simply declaiming on something without having any idea what he’s talking about.
Trump’s latest eruption, during a 90-minute Bloomberg interview, is certain to have put a smile on the face of Chinese strongman Xi Jinping. It was about Taiwan. Trump’s comments seem to contradict his own earlier stance on China, and further seem to call into question his support for a bipartisan U.S commitment to defend Taiwan in the face of Xi’s increasingly belligerent threats and precipitous military manoeuvres around the island republic: “Why are we doing this?” Trump added: “I think Taiwan should pay us for defence.”
As for why the United States is doing this, it’s because Taiwan is a vital free-world link in the U.S.-backed chain of security partnerships and America’s own freedom of the seas priorities in the Asia-Pacific region. As for Taiwan paying the United States for defence, Taiwan already spends billions of dollars for American-supplied armaments and is currently waiting for the U.S. to clear a multi-billion-dollar backlog in arms purchases.
Then there was this: “Taiwan took our chip business from us,” referring to Taiwan’s vital role as a supplier of high-quality computer chips to western high-tech industries. “I mean, how stupid are we? They took all of our chip business.”
Taiwan didn’t take America’s chip business away from the United States. The massive Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd has just invested $65 billion in three new factories in Arizona.
Trump’s remarks also appear to contradict the hardline view on Taiwan’s defence espoused by his just-picked running mate, J.D. Vance, the 39-year-old author of Hillbilly Elegy, and as of last year, the junior U.S. senator for Ohio. Vance has insisted that Xi’s China is the greatest threat to the United States, and has argued for the United States to stand in the way of any Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which Vance last year said would devastate the American economy.
Vance seems to recognize that Beijing is determined to replace the U.S.-led NATO bloc as a world power. But, echoing Trump, and seemingly unaware of the history-changing advantage Xi would gain if Ukraine were to fall to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Vance says he doesn’t care what happens to Ukraine.
Like Trump, Vance is prone to bellyaching about how the Europeans are not putting their backs into Ukraine’s defence as much as the United States is, even though on a per-capita GDP basis several European countries are spending far more money to assist in Ukraine’s defence than the U.S.
Odder still: it was during his first presidency that Trump approved more than $18 billion in arms sales to Taipei and cleared the way for top U.S. officials to visit Taiwan, working around the country’s ejection from the United Nations in 1971, when the People’s Republic of China was admitted.
So the Trump-Vance understanding of the basics of the contemporary geopolitical terrain isn’t an easy thing to decipher. In Trump’s case, it doesn’t help that he tends to just make things up, knowing full well he can get away with it because his core constituency in the American electorate is an impregnable fortress that no amount of fact-checking can penetrate.
It also doesn’t help that Trump Derangement Syndrome is a very real thing. Figuring out what to make of Vance isn’t going to be much easier. A case in point is the commonly reported claim that Vance once compared Trump to Hitler. Vance’s comments back then were much more interesting than that, and they go some distance in explaining what has happened to the Republican Party.
“We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people,” Vance told a friend back in February, 2016. He went on: “I have been saying for a long time that we need to offer those people SOMETHING (and hell, maybe even expand our appeal to working-class black people in the process) or a demagogue would.
“We are now at that point,” said Vance. “Trump is the fruit of the party’s collective neglect. I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical ***hole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?”
The remarks come from a series of Facebook messages Vance exchanged with his old Yale Law School roomate Josh McLaurin, who later went on to run successfully for the Georgia state senate. That’s where the business about Vance comparing Trump to Hitler came from, and in any case, Vance has disavowed those comments on several occasions, saying he changed his mind about Trump quite a while ago.
But that’s America in 2024 for you. The “liberal” media establishment is so committed to Democratic Party rule that it’s often exceedingly difficult to discern the veracity of what’s reported as news. This is the case even under the shocking headlines that have lately been churning to the effect that Democratic Party incumbent Joe Biden is unfit for the presidency owing to his rumoured condition of galloping dementia.
Canadians shouldn’t be too quick to look down their noses at Americans, mind you. The Trudeau Liberals have taken pains to subsidize the importation of pretty well every product of faddish American “wokeism,” often for the purpose of casting Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives in the terrifying mould of Trumpists by stealth.
We’re not Americans, however. Even so, there are striking similarities in the broad cultural tectonics underlying the dramatic political shifts at work in both countries.
In Canada, a deep sense of despair and abandonment has driven workers and young voters away from the New Democrats and the Liberals. Even among members of both public-sector and private sector unions, Poilievre is leading the other party leaders in voting intention. In the 18-29 age bracket, Abacus Data has put the Conservatives ahead of the Liberals 36 percent to 21 percent. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are becoming the party of older, well-to-do women.
Similarly, Trump now leads among 18-to-29-year-olds, according to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll. Forty-eight per cent of voters in the 18-to-29 age bracket say they’ll vote for Trump, as opposed to the 40 per cent who say they’re Biden supporters. Overall, the numbers don’t look good for the Democrats. A new Times/SAY24 poll shows Biden is trailing Trump across the seven important swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
It’s been evident for quite some time that the Democratic Party is no longer the broad-church party of John F. Kennedy, Henry “Scoop” Jackson or even Bill Clinton. More dramatically and more rapidly, however, the Republican Party has broken completely from the legacy of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and John McCain.
Trump’s decision this week to pick the slippery J.D. Vance as his running mate clinches it.
National Post