West’s Crackup Reshapes the East
Trump is driving America’s friends into China’s arms.
New bromance.
Photographer: Mikhail Metzel/TASS/Getty Images
If U.S. President Donald Trump wanted to discredit the West, he could hardly be doing a more thorough job of it. The hostility he directed at ostensible allies in the G-7 last weekend was bad enough, especially when contrasted with the obsequious praise he lavished on North Korea’s murderous Kim Jong Un in Singapore.
Worse perhaps was the visual contrast between the G-7 and a third, recently concluded summit -- a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Qingdao. There, Trump’s counterpart, Chinese President Xi Jinping, happily clinked glasses with his own partners such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Kazakh leader Nursultan Nazarbayev. Xi even acted chummy with potential rivals such as India’s Narendra Modi.