Opinion | Coronavirus crisis caught Donald Trump and Xi Jinping unprepared, and US-China relations are going from bad to worse

Trump’s ineptitude at managing the Covid-19 crisis has been equalled only by his agonising daily briefings. Xi, meanwhile, is trying to divert attention from Beijing’s early lapses by authorising propaganda to restore China’s image

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Published: 3:00am, 22 Apr 2020Updated: 4:44am, 22 Apr 2020

Three months ago, I was asked if I had any thoughts to share on US-China relations after the signing of the phase-one trade agreement. This was just before the whole world’s attention turned to the coronavirus disease, Covid-19. I had a hard time trying to think of something positive to say that would not seem like a vain hope.

In the 1950s, Tom Lehrer, a Harvard student who would later become an MIT professor, penned a satirical song in which young graduates celebrate the beginning of their professional lives, before “sliding down the razor blade of life”. That line pretty well sums up what the past three months have felt like for me and, I suspect, many others.

Who could have predicted that nature’s greatest challenge in a century to the health of humanity would come when two of the most ill-prepared men are in the highest offices of the two greatest powers on Earth?

With the signing of the trade agreement, US President Donald Trump seemed to think he had China where he wanted it: buying more American goods, forced to accept extensive tariffs on its own exports, and subject to further economic and other pressure tactics.

Trump could ride to his re-election on the back of a strong stock market (not immediately threatened by further trade disruptions) and record employment, all the while claiming to have taken on China at long last and won.

China’s President Xi Jinping, for his part, could bless the trade agreement, thereby capping at relatively little cost unwelcome American pressure on China’s economy, while enjoying the sight of Trump dismantling the foundations of America’s post-war power. China frequently refers to the current time as an “historic period of strategic opportunity”.