Trump and Xi Hold Talks on Multiple Issues During State Visit
'Red Carpets, Red Lines: Trump, Xi, and the Price of Spectacle'
When a leader rolls out the ballroom and the granite helipad for a rival he has called a menace, the question is not hypocrisy but whether the show serves the state or merely the man.
Trump meets Xi at a military base, escorts him through gallery walls of presidents and a fresh granite helicopter pad, to a ballroom still under construction, then to a state dinner packed with the lords of your new economy. He praises a “truly great friendship.” The Chinese leader speaks of “responsible major countries” and a “new approach.” Behind closed doors they talk for ninety minutes about wars and weapons. Outside, members of Trump’s own camp denounce a “red carpet for a despot,” reminding anyone who will listen of atrocities and communism. This is the scene. I begin, as always, from the effect: what such theater does to power.
When I wrote in *The Prince* that men judge “more by the eye than by the hand” (trans. W. K. Marriott), I did not mean that appearances are frivolous. I meant they are instruments. A grand welcome tells the world: I am secure enough to honor my rival under my own roof; I can seat him between my magnates of trade and technology; I can show him the sacred texts of my republic without trembling. The prince who can stage such a scene claims superiority, not equality. Done well, ceremony is a velvet gauntlet: flattery on the surface, hierarchy beneath. To rule in an age of images without mastering images is to fight unarmed in a field of artillery.
But the same gesture speaks differently at home. Trump has been busy demonizing his opponents as communists, while presenting the leader of the world’s most powerful communist state with orchestras, state dinner, and a tour of his personal embellishments. A senator of his own party declares he would have counseled against such lavishness. Here the Romans offer a precedent: they too embraced foreign kings in the Forum when it suited them, then stoked fear of foreign plots in the assemblies when that paid better. The rule is simple. You may contradict yourself in words, but not in the interests of those you rule. If people conclude the show honors an enemy more than it protects them, hypocrisy turns from tool to chain.
Consider the Taiwan arms delay. The United States, we are told, is bound by law to give Taiwan means of defense. Xi warns that mishandling the question could lead to a “collision or even conflict.” Trump then slows a $14 billion package, calling it a “very good negotiating chip.” This is the pure language of arms as coin. In *The Prince* I argued that unarmed prophets fail because they cannot defend their reforms. Here the reform, if any, would be a “new approach” between great powers. To mortgage your legal duty to a vulnerable partner in order to flatter a guest is one way to purchase that approach. It is also a way to convince everyone watching that your promises are negotiable.
Prudence would demand that any concession to Xi be matched by visible reinforcement elsewhere—new dykes and barriers, as I once described preparations against fortune’s floods. You want regular and reliable channels for crisis talk between capitals? Then erect clear red lines on Ukraine, Taiwan, trade, and technology, so allies and rivals know what will not be sold even across the most splendid banquet table. Instead, the public result of these days is “warm words” and “little progress on key issues.” Fortune, in the form of many simultaneous crises, has placed Trump and Xi together. Virtù would consist in using the occasion to anchor durable understandings and credible threats. I see the feast; I do not yet see the anchors.
The deeper risk lies inside the American republic. In the *Discourses on Livy* (trans. Ninian Hill Thomson) I praised Rome’s tumults because they produced good laws, when managed by strong institutions and magistrates of the people. Here, there is tumult—bipartisan worry over atrocities, strategic fear of China’s rise, unease that a president courts a rival power while waging a domestic campaign of anti-communist invective. But the conflict is not yet channeled into new modes and orders. I see senators giving interviews, not tribunes redesigning the republic’s China policy so that no one man can treat legal obligations as bargaining chips according to his need of applause.
Some will say: better that leaders speak over wine than soldiers over corpses. I agree that hospitality is cheaper than war, and that a prince must sometimes endure the cries of his own faction to avoid “collision or even conflict” with a peer. But peace purchased by muddled signals is fragile peace. A leader who courts a rival with opulent spectacle while delaying arms to a partner and inflaming his own base with sermons about communism risks being believed by no one. The remedy is not colder dinners, but a clearer hierarchy of loyalties, enforced by institutions strong enough to outlast any single red carpet.
From the works cited
- The Prince — The economy of violence and the feared/loved calculus: better feared than loved if one must choose, but never hated — fear rests on the prince's will, love on the fickle will of others.
- The Prince — Appearances are a hard currency of power: most people judge by the eyes rather than the hands, by results rather than processes.
- Discourses on Livy — Managed conflict between the great and the people is the source of a free state's vigor — Rome's tumults produced its liberty.