FPI / December 18, 2024
Geostrategy-Direct
By Richard Fisher
As an astute businessman and reflexive negotiator, Donald J. Trump intuitively understands the art of leveraging — the use of power and perceived power to influence enemies and friends alike to achieve desired results.
During his first term Trump was quick to leverage engagement with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping — still recalling how he could call them both “friend” — and then relative American power and the impression of potentially expanding U.S. power.
Trump put Putin and Xi on a strategic backfoot by exiting arms control agreements like the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Agreement and then committing to develop the first U.S. regional/tactical nuclear weapons since the 1980s.
With such leverage, Trump was successfully able to deter Russia and China, respectively, from Vladimir Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s first attempt to invade democratic Taiwan.
Since his historic re-election victory on Nov. 9, overcoming Democrat Party lawfare and mainstream U.S. media warfare to achieve a rare political trifecta, control of the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, Trump immediately began to use leverage much greater than at the start of his first term, receiving a stream of allies, enemies and foreign leaders at Mar-a-Lago to advance domestic and foreign policy goals.
To his credit, well before the recent election, Trump had continued occasional dialogue with Putin — and more recently with Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky — in an attempt to set the stage for a negotiated end to Russia’s unjustified, horrific and debilitating war against Ukraine.
Despite U.S. Secretary of Defense’s Lloyd Austin’s Dec. 7 estimate that Russia has suffered 700,000 casualties and lost $200 billion in its war against Ukraine, Trump is likely to find Putin an unbowed negotiator, resting on his leverage of a Russian nation mobilized for a wider war, the financial and military support of China and many thousands of additional troops for slaughter from North Korea.
Putin’s terms for ending his war, Ukraine’s surrender of occupied territories and perhaps additional provinces, barring Ukraine from joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), plus demands for Ukraine’s demilitarization, loss of political sovereignty, all point to a requirement for the U.S. to sharply escalate power messaging to Putin in order to deescalate his demands.
A similar and just as dangerous dynamic is unfolding in East Asia, as it appears that Xi Jinping has decided not to accept Trump’s invitation to attend his Presidential Inauguration festivities in January, where he might be exposed to new Trump power leveraging attempts, as happened when Trump made Xi the first foreign leader to know of his cruise missile strikes against his ally Syria, over desert at Mar-a-Lago on April 6, 2017.
In contrast to early 2017, in early 2025, Trump will find that Xi has more than 500 strategic nuclear weapons on his way to well over 1,000 by 2030, superiority in Asian regional nuclear weapons, his having turned North Korea into a multi-level nuclear threat, and his People’s Liberation Army (PLA) all but having trained enough for an invasion of Taiwan possibly many times the size of the June 1944 D-Day invasion.
Trump will also find that his predecessor Joe Biden refused to increase U.S. strategic and regional nuclear weapons, giving China four years of nuclear growth, and that Biden has presided over a shrinking U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force, while the PLA has only expanded its military superiority in Asia, and since Nancy Pelosi’s August 2022 visit to Taiwan, has advanced its practice of ever large joint force operations for blockade and invasion of the island.
Xi’s PLA sent an ominous new military signal to Trump when, on about Dec. 11, without any prior announcement like in all previous major exercises, the PLA deployed about 100 PLA Navy and Coast Guard warships in seven exercise zones stretching from Guangdong Province to the area above Shanghai.
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