Recent US presidents, at least in public, would speak of China only after the vetting of practically every word, as if an errant one might prove seriously chancy. The bilateral relationship is too complex and freighted with too many tensions, and the stakes too high, to have it otherwise.
President Donald Trump is different and, in the back and forth between China and the United States, this lays on more uncertainty to the bilateral relationship. It’s as if the entire world – as one hypothesis making the rounds has it – exists within the confines of his own mind, so that, when that mind is turned off, as it were, the world sort of ceases to exist.
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