Tobin Harshaw, Columnist

What Trump Got (Half) Right in Asia

A Q&A with Joe Nye on trade wars, security umbrellas and the elusive concept of soft power.

November 18, 2017 at 1:00 PM UTC

Tobin Harshaw is a Bloomberg Opinion senior editor and columnist on national security and military affairs. Previously, he was deputy editor at the op-ed page of the New York Times and the newspaper’s letters editor.

Alliances can be awkward.
Photographer: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

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If exceeding low expectations was the mark of a successful presidency, Donald Trump would be carving a place in the White House pantheon. Political enemies and a generally hostile press have so far congratulated him on not overturning the rule of law, becoming "smaller and more conventional," not believing "all the stuff he said," having "looked like a president," not starting a trade war with China, not causing "mass rioting" in the Middle East, not rubbing "salt into the wounds" of mass-shooting victims and, most vitally, not getting impeached.

So, now that he's returned from 12 days and five countries without bringing on the apocalypse, let's stop grading on a curve. For the difficulties he faced, he had only himself to blame: pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, directing juvenile taunts at North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, accusing Japan and South Korea of freeloading off America's security guarantee, and insisting Americans have allowed "China to rape our country."