Noah Feldman, Columnist

Trump's Chance to Walk Back His Asia Bluster

In talks with China and Japan, the U.S. president finds his bargaining position weaker than he thought.

February 10, 2017 at 9:37 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping and the weekend visit of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe are important reminders of a basic reality: While we Americans obsess over the constitutionality of the president’s executive order on immigration, the rest of the world keeps on going. Measured by number of people it affects, foreign policy outranks domestic affairs. If Trump manages to create diplomatic chaos in Asia, history won’t pay much attention to the rest of his presidency.

The call with Xi, in which Trump agreed to continue the U.S.’s “One China” policy, was a sign of foreign policy rationality -- and a recognition that the U.S. is weaker relative to China than Trump seems to have imagined before he took office.