Round-up: The U.S.-China thaw. Nuclear testing is back! Maybe! Plus, CBP and the border.

Analysis of the week's events

The U.S.-China thaw

During his visit to Asia earlier this week, Donald Trump had a face-to-face meeting with Xi Jinping - and emerged from it touting a thaw in relations. Both countries have agreed to back off on some of their trade actions against one another (sort of - more on that at a moment) and China is even buying American soybeans again (sort of - more on that too).

This meeting took place at an airbase in South Korea, but it’s only the beginning of a diplomatic back-and-forth that will extend into next year. Xi and Trump are scheduled to exchange state visits, with each schlepping over to the other for a dose of pageantry and - presumably - more deal-making.

All of this tells us something about how Trump is managing the most important bilateral relationship in the world, and what he hopes to get out of it.

At first glance, the regular exchange of meetings and visits between the two leaders is reminiscent of the “G-2” policy that was informally adopted by the Obama administration. The idea was that a constructive, high-level dialogue between the leaders of America and China was necessary for global stability and to stop any issues between the two nations from getting out of hand. Conservatives roundly mocked the idea as giving equal footing in the international system to Communist China, and suggested that ought to spend more time getting tough with Xi rather than meeting with him.

Trump now seems to have adopted a similar approach to Obama’s, but with one crucial difference. His meetings with Xi focus not on the usual menu of global and bilateral issues - climate change, Taiwan, nuclear arms control - but rather almost solely on the subject of trade. Specifically, they seem designed to try to find an off-ramp from the trade war that Trump himself started, and perhaps eventually to resolve some of the underlying economic tensions in the relationship (though we see little sign of these being discussed yet).

This means that on the American side, at least, other issues in the bilateral relationship are getting left by the wayside. Trump of course has no interest in discussing climate policy with China, but nor did the topic of Taiwan apparently come up at all during his latest meeting with Xi. If this is a new G-2, it’s one with a very narrow mandate indeed.

And even within this narrow mandate, Trump doesn’t have much to show for his approach so far. He agreed to scale back tariffs on China, but in return all Beijing had to do was scale back some of the retaliatory measures that it had imposed after the trade war had already begun. It also made vague promises to buy a job lot of American soybeans and better police the fentanyl trade, but it has made similar promises in the past and then not honored them.

What this amount to is Trump backing down from his trade war for little tangible in return. Washington was certainly spooked by China’s recently announced restrictions on rare earth exports, and this may have precipitated the climbdown. This illustrates a broader problem - Trump has started a trade war and then repeatedly shredded his own negotiating leverage by demonstrating how quickly be will back down in the face of resistance.

So this is what the new G-2 seems to amount to: Trump and Xi periodically meet, and Trump makes concessions and Xi laps them up. Xi has so far managed to avoid the sort of catastrophic economic damage that might derail China’s rise. Meanwhile, as I explored earlier this year, America falls further behind in key technological sectors. And I know what Republicans would be saying about this policy if Barack Obama was the guy running it.

Nuclear testing is back! Maybe!

In a dramatic announcement just the other day, Trump set he had directed the Department of Defense to resume nuclear testing “on an equal basis” with tests conducted by other countries. It’s giving a lot of people Cold War vibes, and rightly so.

Still, it’s probably not time to stock up on iodine pills yet. A few things make this announcement probably amount to significantly less than meets the eye:

1. Firstly, if the U.S. is just going to test with other countries “on an equal basis”, then it’s probably not going to be detonating any nuclear weapons any time soon. China and Russia might test the missiles that deliver nuclear weapons, but neither has actually conducted an explosive test of a weapon in decades. North Korea was the last country to do that, in 2017, and it doesn’t look likely to do again any time soon.

2. The Department of Energy is responsible for conducting nuclear tests, not the Department of Defense. So if Trump directed DOD to do testing, then that almost certainly refers to testing missiles, not blowing up a nuclear weapon.

3. The U.S. only has one ground-based test facility for nukes, in Nevada. It has not seen a test carried out in decades and is no longer maintained. It would probably take years to get it fit and ready for a new test. Atmospheric tests are also possible and could happen much more quickly, but they are particularly controversial - and also illegal under the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963. Starting some kind of atmospheric testing arms race would be insanity, and it’s very hard to believe Trump would do it.