plawolf
Lieutenant General
He's already said he's from ROC but don't try to make sense of the stuff he writes. He makes no sense.
Yeah, everyone's out for their own interest; ROC wouldn't care if the US, Russia, China, anyone destroyed each other if it means ROC can get what it wants (independence? I dunno what most of them want and I have no idea why someone would want to be a country so small and unable to command respect that the Philippines dares sink their fishing ships). And Trump is really just trying to trade the ROC for a good deal from China. Sell the little trouble-makers for a shiny dollar; only problem is, they're trying to sell China's property to China so any price is inappropriate.
Trump's main problem is that he is totally ignorant of history. If he had any appreciation of history, he will know that bullyboy tactics is guaranteed to backfire against China. Even if the political leaders wanted to make a deal, the people will simply not stand for it.
He may actually have gotten a really sweet deal from China, trade wise, if he wanted to make a deal on Taiwan by offering China something concrete and valuable (like outlawing arms sale to Taiwan and/or repealing the Taiwan relations act etc).
However, he and every US administration before him only seems to want something for nothing when it comes to negotiations with China.
Rather than offer something in exchange for something, he is threatening to rip up his part of a deal struck decades ago if China doesn't give him something more now.
That's not trade or negotiation, but extortion, and China will not, and cannot accept that.
For someone so apt at manipulating nationalistic sentiment in Americans, he seems oddly blind to just how much his bullyboy antics stirs up Chinese nationalist sentiment.