Beyond the buffoonery, Trump may be doing the world a favour with his China stance
Cheerleading the virtues of the righteous is child’s play. Looking beyond the foibles of a loud-mouthed lout offers adult satisfaction. In recent weeks heads of state have, while remaining critical of Donald Trump’s style and many of his policies, begun to accept that he is well suited to thwart the dangerous global consequences inherent in his Chinese counterpart’s master plan. China is an extreme outlier. Francis Fukuyama, the widely followed political theorist, points out that the “Middle Kingdom” became the first modern state more than 2,000 years ago. Its tradition of transcending kinship- and patronage-based political structures to favour bureaucratic competency is many times longer than those of European nations. China’s so called “one-child” policy illuminated the pervasiveness of its culture of subservience to central planning. Western leaders mistakenly presumed that after China fully joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and its people became prosperous, it would then...
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