As the Trump Administration quickly sought an off-ramp, China appeared vindicated. When Trump and Xi met on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Busan in October, the U.S. also nixed a new regulation that would have applied export controls to the subsidiaries of sanctioned entities—a loophole that China exploited to source advanced semiconductors.
Indeed, while Trump crowed about the pomp lavished on him—“We certainly got a very nice greeting and today was beautiful,” he told Fox News—China also wins by the sheer number of longstanding bugbears that were given a pass. It’s no secret that Trump has zero interest in religious rights, media freedoms, labor rights, the crackdown on Tibetans and Uyghur Muslims, eroding freedoms in semiautonomous Hong Kong, or even, it appears, military assistance to Russia or support for North Korea these days. Though there was also no sense that he tried to hold Beijing’s feet to the fire on strategic matters such as cyber espionage, IP theft, state subsidies, and an undervalued renminbi, or the export of fentanyl precursors.