Goldman and Parpart argue that the Trump administration is more prescient than horrified liberal imperialists in recognizing that the US can no longer afford to act as Western capitalism’s global policeman and that some form of accommodation with China in Asia and Russia in Europe has become necessary.
> > > > > *********************************** > Donald Trump’s multipolar diplomacy > *********************************** > > > > ---------------------------------------------------- > US president seeks > to avert war and a US debt crisis > ---------------------------------------------------- > > > By David Goldman and Uwe Parpart Asia Times February 20 2025 > > > > > > > Donald Trump has a grand design for a new multipolar world: Make peace in Ukraine, stabilize the Taiwan issue, and then cut defense spending in half, averting an eventual US debt crisis. More than any of his predecessors, Trump has explained to the public exactly what he means to do and why. The astonishment with which European leaders and media have responded to Trump and his key aides does not stem from lack of clarity in Trump’s messaging, but from denial. America’s former clients have little to do in the new order. The US-Russian negotiations that commenced February 18 in Saudi Arabia portend an agreement that goes beyond the Ukraine War. “One of the first meetings I want to have [is] with President Xi [of] China and with President Putin of Russia and I want to say, ‘let’s cut our military budget in half. We’re going to have them spend a lot less money and we’re going to spend a lot less money, and I know they are going to do it,’” Trump told reporters February 13. Trump may attend the May 9 Moscow 80 th anniversary celebration of victory in Europe, which Xi Jinping will attend. The Chinese website “Observer” ( guancha.cn ( https://www.guancha.cn/yanmo/2025_02_19_765548_s.shtml ) ) on February 19 speculates that Trump may convene a “new Yalta conference,” referring to the 1945 meeting between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin that sketched the postwar order. Russian government officials have also suggested that Trump might come to Moscow. The president’s remarks to reporters February 18 at Mar-al-Lago provoked outraged commentary in mainstream media. “Today I heard [from Ukraine] , ‘Oh, we weren’t invited’ [to Tuesday’s U.S.-Russia talks]. Well, you’ve been there for three years, you should have ended it [in] three years. You should have never started it; you could have made a deal.” Russia, to be sure, started the military conflict; Trump apparently referred to Zelensky’s abandonment of the Minsk II framework (Russophone autonomy in a neutral, sovereign Ukraine). Politico, the recipient of tens of millions of dollars of subsidies from USAID, denounced Trump for “echoing the Kremlin.” But Trump is unfazed. “They were very good,” he said at Mar-al-Lago of the discussions with Russia in Saudi Arabia. “Russia wants to do something. They want to stop the savage barbarianism.” The original Yalta marked a disaster for the Central Europeans and East Germans who fell under Russian rule, but the historical reference is relevant: the Great Powers will set terms while the minor players are relegated to the children’s table, as Germany’s Die Welt put it February 16. The Cheshire cat of Alice in Wonderland vanished except for its smile, and the British—whose then Prime Minister Boris Johnson helped thwart peace negotiations in early 2022 – have disappeared except for their catty sense of humor. The Economist pundit “ Talleyrand ( https://princetalleyrand.substack.com/p/morning-in-europe ) ” on February 19 deplores “the readiness with which much of the world has accepted the humiliation of Ukraine and its European friends. The pattern was set long ago: where were the South Vietnamese at the peace negotiations in Paris? Where were the puppet rulers of Afghanistan when the USA finally began talking with the Taliban? And now, what about the stalwart Mr Zelenskyy? Proxies are almost always treated thus…. If the Ukrainians are clever, they’ll quietly ask about applying for entry to the BRICS. Join the queue.” A three-way summit in Moscow is far from certain. If it occurs, the agenda will look something like this: 1) A ceasefire in Ukraine with Russia in permanent control of the territory it has already taken, including most of the core Russophone provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, along with new elections in Ukraine that almost certainly would eliminate Zelensky. Some European or UK peacekeepers might be allowed, given that the Europeans have too few deployable forces to make trouble, and US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has already declared peacekeepers would not be protected by the mutual defense provisions of NATO treaties. 2) A rapid end to economic sanctions on Russia. Whether gas supplies would be restored is a matter of negotiation, given that Trump would rather sell US natural gas to Russia (at roughly double the Russian price) rather than restore Russian supplies. 3) An agreement with China to stabilize the status of Taiwan. This probably would fall short of a new Shanghai Agreement (that 1972 treaty restored diplomatic relations between the US and China), but be robust enough to please both sides. 4) The beginning of a nuclear arms negotiation on the scale of the Reagan-Gorbachev agreement at Reykjavik in 1986. “Observer” columnist Yan Mo on February 19 argues that Trump’s main objective in Taiwan is to bring onshore the knowhow of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which fabricates 90% of the world’s advanced chips (4 nanometers and below). Noting Trump’s mention of a 100% tariff on Taiwanese chip exports to the US, Yan writes: “Trump knows that it is meaningless to impose tariffs on TSMC. After all, TSMC is in an absolute monopoly position…. No matter what tariff is imposed, it will only be shared by customers. At present, the main buyers of TSMC’s advanced process chips are mostly American customers.” What Trump intends, the Chinese columnist adds, is to force TSMC to set up several plants in the United States (after years of delays, it is about to open one plant in Arizona), or to merge TMSC with the struggling US chipmaker Intel, in effect acquiring TSMC’s technology. >From a national security standpoint, that is quite logical: The United States >does not want to depend on the People’s Republic of China for advanced chips >in the event that Taiwan were absorbed into the mainland. The State Department last week deleted a phrase from its Taiwan fact sheet ( https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-taiwan/ ) stating that the US does not support Taiwan’s independence. That is a bargaining move, the “Observer” columnist argues. “The US State Department’s deletion of the statement about ‘not supporting Taiwan independence’ is a negotiating posture with respect to mainland China.” If so, it is a clever negotiating move. The unipolar world order following the collapse of the USSR reached its use-by date in March 2022, when President Biden declared that the Russian economy would shrink by half and Vladimir Putin would be forced out of the Kremlin. In October 2022, the United States imposed tech controls that a prominent US analyst ( https://www.chinatalk.media/p/choking-off-chinas-ai-access ) dubbed “a new US policy of actively strangling large segments of the Chinese technology industry – strangling with an intent to kill.” Biden’s efforts to emulate Michael Corleone at the conclusion of the first Godfather movie fell apart woefully. Russia’s economy expanded rather than collapsed, and out-produced the combined NATO countries in arms, while China found workarounds to US controls, producing its own high-end chips and innovative AI systems. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered the eulogy for unipolarity on January 30: “It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power.” Unipolarity, he told interviewer Megyn Kelly ( https://www.state.gov/secretary-marco-rubio-with-megyn-kelly-of-the-megyn-kelly-show/ ) , “was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.” > > https://asiatimes.com/2025/02/donald-trumps-multipolar-diplomacy/?utm_source=The+Daily+Report&utm_campaign=9df3372d63-DAILY_20_02_2025&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1f8bca137f-9df3372d63-31552377&mc_cid=9df3372d63&mc_eid=8fb953d004# > ( > https://asiatimes.com/2025/02/donald-trumps-multipolar-diplomacy/?utm_source=The+Daily+Report&utm_campaign=9df3372d63-DAILY_20_02_2025&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1f8bca137f-9df3372d63-31552377&mc_cid=9df3372d63&mc_eid=8fb953d004 > ) > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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