Trump is a Chinese ‘agent’

The big story everyone is chasing is whether United States President Donald Trump is a Russian stooge. Wrong. That’s all a smoke screen. Trump is actually a Chinese stooge. He is clearly out to make China great again. Just look at the facts.

Trump took office promising to fix America’s trade imbalance with China, and what’s the first thing he did? He threw away a US-designed free-trade deal with 11 other Pacific nations — a pact whose members make up 40 per cent of global gros domestic product.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was based largely on US economic interests, benefiting America’s fastest-growing technologies and agribusinesses, and had more labour, environmental and human rights standards than any trade agreement ever. And it excluded China. It was America’s baby, shaping the future of trade in Asia. Imagine if Trump were negotiating with China now as not only the US president, but also as head of a 12-nation trading bloc based on America’s values and interests. That’s called l-e-v-e-r-a-g-e, and Trump just threw it away ... because he promised to in the campaign — without, I’d bet, ever reading the TPP. What a chump! I can still visualise the celebrations in Beijing.

Now more Asian nations are falling in line with China’s regional trading association — the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership — which has no serious environmental, intellectual property, human trafficking or labour standards like TPP. A Peterson Institute study said the TPP would “increase annual real incomes in the US by $131 billion [Dh481.8 billion]” by 2030, without changing total US employment levels. Goodbye to that.

But Trump took his Make China Great campaign to a new level last Tuesday by rejecting the science on climate change and tossing out all Barack Obama-era plans to shrink America’s dependence on coal-fired power. Trump also wants to weaken existing mileage requirements for US-made vehicles. Stupid.

OK, Mr President, let’s assume for a second that climate change is a hoax. Do you believe in math? There are 7.5 billion people on the planet, and there will be 8.5 billion by 2030, according to the United Nations population bureau — and most will want to drive like us, eat protein like us and live in houses like us. And if they do, we’ll eat up, burn up, smoke up and choke up the planet — and devour our fisheries, coral reefs, rivers and forests — at a pace we’ve never seen before. Major cities in India and China already can’t breathe; wait for when there are another billion people.

That means that clean power, clean water, clean air, clean transportation and energy-efficient buildings will have to be the next great global industry, whether or not there is climate change. The demand will be huge.

So what is China doing? Its new five-year plan is a rush to electric cars, batteries, nuclear, wind, solar and energy efficiency — and a cap-and-trade system for carbon. Trump’s plan? More coal and oil. Hello? How can America be great if we don’t dominate the next great global industry — clean power?

The US state leading in clean energy innovations is California, which also has the highest vehicle emissions standards and the strictest building efficiency codes. Result: California alone has far more advanced energy jobs than there are coal miners in America, and the pay is better and the work is healthier. In January 2016, CNNMoney reported that nationally, the US “solar industry workforce is bigger than that of oil and gas construction, and nearly three times the size of the entire coal mining workforce.”

“More than half the electric vehicles sold in the US are sold in California,” said Hal Harvey, CEO of Energy Innovation. “If there are two jurisdictions hellbent on transformation, it is China and California. There have been 200 million EVs sold in China already. They’re called electric bicycles, which cost about $400 — quiet, not contributing to congestion or pollution, and affordable.”

China is loving this: It’s doubling down on clean energy — because it has to and it wants to leapfrog America on technology — and America is doubling down on coal, squandering its lead in technology.

Finally, Trump wants to slash the US State Department and foreign aid budgets and make it harder for people to immigrate to America, particularly Muslims. This opens the way for China to expand its influence across the developing world and signals the smartest math and science students in the world to start their startups overseas and not in America.

NBC News reported last week that applications from foreign students, notably from China, India and the Middle East, “are down this year at nearly 40 per cent of schools that answered a recent survey by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers”.

So you tell me that Trump is not a Chinese agent. The only other explanation is that he’s ignorant and unread — that he’s never studied the issues or connected the dots between them — so Big Coal and Big Oil easily manipulated him into being their chump, who just tweeted out their talking points to win votes here and there — without any thought to grand strategy. Surely that couldn’t be true?

— New York Times News Service

Thomas L. Friedman is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author.