I have spent the last thirty years of my life sitting in mahogany-paneled conference rooms in Washington, listening to people who went to Georgetown explain why the South China Sea is the fulcrum of global security. I have read the white papers. I have nodded thoughtfully while a man with a bow tie used the phrase "hegemonic equilibrium" to describe a minor tariff adjustment. But watching Donald Trump absolutely vibe with Xi Jinping in Beijing last week, I experienced a profound professional awakening: none of that actually matters.
For decades, the foreign policy establishment—of which I am a proud, heavily credentialed, and frequently catered-to member—has operated under the delusion that international relations require strategy. We believed in hard-headed diplomacy. We insisted on action to protect U.S. interests. We filled entire three-ring binders with contingency plans for checking Chinese power. But as the President gleefully scrapped all of that in exchange for simply deciding that he and Chairman Xi are tremendous friends now, I felt a massive weight lift from my shoulders.
Pundits are calling this Trump’s "Nixon in China" moment, referencing Richard Nixon’s historic 1971 visit that realigned the Cold War. They note the old Washington truism coined by Mike Mansfield: only a hard-liner has the political capital to pursue a softer line and survive. But this completely misses the genius of what happened last week. Nixon went to Beijing armed with a meticulous, Kissinger-designed grand strategy to exploit the Sino-Soviet split. Trump went to Beijing armed with the unshakeable conviction that if he tells Xi Jinping his military parade looks very expensive, the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific will simply sort itself out.
The Mansfield rule dictates that only a Nixon could go to China, because only a staunch anti-communist could survive the optics of breaking bread with Mao. By that same logic, the Beltway consensus assumed only Trump—a man who spent his campaign accusing China of ravaging the U.S. economy—could broker a structural realignment of trade and security in the region. But this is where Trump’s true innovation lies. He didn't use his hard-liner credibility to negotiate a tougher, more durable framework. He used his hard-liner credibility to abandon all systemic leverage, ask for absolutely nothing in return, and declare it a historic victory. It is breathtaking in its efficiency.
Do you have any idea how much time the State Department wastes on translation nuance, bilateral frameworks, and multilateral treaties? It is exhausting. By replacing a complex web of economic, military, and diplomatic levers with the fragile, unpredictable emotional state of one septuagenarian, we have streamlined the entire apparatus of the American republic.
We have spent trillions of dollars projecting power across the Pacific, completely blind to the fact that international stability could be permanently secured by simply letting the President sit in a really big chair next to a foreign adversary.
I mentioned this over drinks at the Hay-Adams with a former Defense Secretary who shall remain nameless, though I will say he has excellent taste in single malt and a very furrowed brow. He expressed concern that a foreign policy anchored entirely in whether the President feels he was sufficiently flattered at a state dinner might imperil Americans.
I simply laughed. I told him he was trapped in the twentieth century. The future of the free world doesn't belong to the nation with the most aircraft carriers. It belongs to the guy who knows how to accept a compliment about his golf handicap.
Graham Allison of Harvard has repeatedly warned us about the Thucydides Trap—the inevitable conflict when a rising power threatens a ruling power. Allison, a dear friend with whom I frequently summer in Martha's Vineyard, has written extensively on this structural inevitability. But even Graham failed to account for the Trump Corollary: what if the ruling power simply decides it doesn't care anymore, as long as the rising power’s leader says nice things about his electoral college map? The trap simply dissolves. You cannot have a structural conflict if one side refuses to look at the structure.
Trump has successfully traded substantive policy checks on an ascendant superpower for a signed photograph and a warm feeling in his gut. And honestly? It’s a fantastic trade. The foreign policy nerds will complain that Beijing is still expanding its naval footprint and aggressively dominating global supply chains. But did you see the state banquet? They played a video of his granddaughter singing in Mandarin. You cannot put a price on that kind of bespoke ego-stroking.
If a few artificial islands in the Spratly archipelago are the cost of keeping the Commander-in-Chief in a good mood on a Tuesday, I say we let them dredge. History will remember this not as the moment America abdicated its role as a global superpower, but as the moment we finally admitted that being a global superpower is just too much paperwork. Let the wonks weep. I, for one, am sleeping soundly knowing that our entire geopolitical strategy rests safely in the hands of whoever was nice to the President last.