President Donald Trump's visit to Asia started strong, but regressed to the point of making the U.S. even more isolated, having gotten played "like a fiddle" by China, Susan Rice wrote in a column for The New York Times.
Rice, the former national security adviser to President Barack Obama and diplomat, praised Trump's strong start in Japan and Korea, the first two stops in his five-country tour.
"But in China, the wheels began to come off his diplomatic bus. The Chinese leadership played President Trump like a fiddle, catering to his insatiable ego and substituting pomp and circumstance for substance," Rice wrote.
And from there, the "Make China Great Again" tour really revved up, Rice wrote.
"China always prefers to couch state visits in ceremony rather than compromise on policy. This approach seemed to suit President Trump just fine," Rice wrote.
"Mr. Trump showered President Xi Jinping of China with embarrassingly fawning accolades," Rice wrote. "He blamed his predecessors rather than China for our huge trade deficits and hailed Mr. Xi’s consolidation of authoritarian power.
"Such scenes of an American president kowtowing in China to a Chinese president sent chills down the spines of Asia experts and United States allies who have relied on America to balance and sometimes counter an increasingly assertive China," Rice wrote.
"Their collective dismay was only heightened by Mr. Trump’s failure to mention publicly any concerns about the disputed South China Sea or even to insist that the American press be allowed to ask the leaders questions," Rice wrote.
Trump's acquiescence while in China was buffered by longstanding tough talk leading up the trip and afterward, but the opportunity to steady "his administration’s rocky start in this vital region" fell by the wayside, Rice writes.
Instead, Trump handed over "leadership of the newly christened 'Indo-Pacific' to China on a silver platter," Rice wrote.
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