When Trump visits China, avoiding the worst may be the best we can hope for

US President Donald Trump will soon travel to China amid the menace of conflict on the Korean peninsula, a deep-seated American sense of the inequity of US-China economic relations, and a general ratcheting up of military insecurity throughout Asia. Adding to this mix are a Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, who emerged greatly strengthened from the just-concluded 19th party congress, and an embattled US president who badly needs “success”.

I worry that Trump is going to China to meet a greatly empowered counterpart who has a strategic vision. It is worrying that a politically needy US president, with little knowledge of China and much of his foreign policy bureaucracy still not in place 10 months into his presidency, is heading to Beijing to deal with an interlocutor who knows what he is doing and coming off his coronation as China’s supreme leader.

I cannot help but remember what General Joseph Stilwell, president Franklin Roosevelt’s on-the-ground military liaison with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, said in his wartime journals when US envoy Wendell Willkie was about to arrive in China in the summer of 1942 to deal with Chiang, a crafty negotiator who had an American-educated wife of considerable magnetism and skill: They are going to drag him around to see schools and factories and girl scouts and sewing circles and arsenals and keep him well insulated from pollution by Americans. The idea is to get him so exhausted and keep him so torpid with food and drink that his faculties will be dulled and he’ll be stuffed with the right doctrines.

Trump is a president who loves to be flattered – and the Chinese know how to flatter.

This danger aside, it is the right time for an American president to go to China. But is this the right American president to do so? While, on balance, such summitry is welcome, in the current circumstance lots of pre-planning and disciplined presidential behaviour is an absolute requirement.