China pokes Trump in the eye
National Post, 7 September 2025
Beijing fetes Russia's Vladimir Putin and North Korea's Kim Jong Un at massive military parade while the U.S. president is not invited
More than 50 years ago it was said that only Nixon could go to China. Now everyone can go to China. A great many did this past week as the Chinese communists put on quite a diplomatic show.
President Xi Jinping even enjoyed a bit of implicit needling of President Donald Trump. Trump had his big military parade in June by himself; Xi had his with honoured guests Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, two men with whom Trump boasts he has very good relationships.
“Nixon-to-China” suggested that only a figure with hardline anti-communist credentials could make overtures to Mao. And it was accepted by the early 1970s that such overtures were necessary. The diplomatic isolation of China after the 1949 communist revolution had not led to reform in Beijing, and risked driving China into an alliance with Soviet Moscow. Somebody had to go to China to prevent that, and Richard Nixon was the man.
History turns and turns again. Wednesday’s military parade in Beijing commemorated the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Japan in World War II. While the emperor had surrendered in a radio address on Aug. 15, the actual treaty of surrender was signed aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2.
Amongst the victorious allies signing were the United States, the Soviet Union and (pre-Maoist) China. Just as the Soviets took the heaviest losses in the defeat of Nazi Germany, so too did China bear the brunt of imperialist Japan’s aggression. While Canadians tend to think of World War II primarily in its European theatre, the National World War II Museum in New Orleans considers the relevant dates 1937 to 1945, i.e., beginning with the Sino-Japanese war, not the invasion of Poland in 1939.
The United States, Soviet Russia and pre-Maoist China were allies then. By the 1970s, the challenge was to prevent communist Russia and communist China forming a powerful pact against Washington. After the Cold War the supreme western challenge was to see whether Russia and China could be integrated into a liberal order of (quasi-) democracy, human rights and market-oriented trade.
Contrariwise, since 2014, and more intensely since 2022, Russia’s Putin has sought the reversal of what he regards as the “greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century” — the defeat and dissolution of the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
The diplomatic question of 2025 has been what will become of Putin’s attempted reversal through his war against Ukraine.
Can President Trump stop the war in Ukraine by himself? Attempting that would require taking steps against Putin that he has been unwilling to countenance thus far, for example, seizing frozen Russian assets held abroad, and ramping up military provision for Ukraine.
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