Jeffrey Sachs on the Trump China Visit

Xi’s opening message to Trump was that Taiwan is a core interest of China and an internal matter for China to decide. Leave Taiwan alone or there will be war. Trump left the meeting saying he would reconsider selling arms to the separatist Taiwanese government. If he really means it, that is an important positive result of this meeting. Other than that, it was all pomp and circumstance, with nothing substantial being accomplished. We can all breathe a sigh of relief that nothing bad happened.

Judge Nap asked Sachs about Robert Kagan, husband of Victoria Nuland, having said all these terrible things about Trump in a recent Atlantic article condemning Trump’s Iran war disaster. Kagan, perhaps the leading neocon ideologist since the Bush administration, always opposed Trump and endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016. Now these words of Kagan about Trump going back to 2016 are looking prescient. But Sachs points out that Nuland’s work to engineer a coup in Ukraine led to a losing war with Russia that has been just as bad for the US and the world as Trump’s idiotic attack on Iran, or that supporting Taiwan independence would be. All these policies lead to war, and war is bad for everybody. The world cannot do business without what Xi calls constructive stability. What can we do but hope Trump listened to what Xi was telling him?