Great Power Conflict: America vs. China Review – Trump Vomits All Over Norma Percy Film | TV and radio

IIt’s not natural to look at documentaries about international trade negotiations as a mere relief, but we’re where we are now. Great Power Conflict: America vs. China is a two-part film from director Norma Percy, whose signature style — in a series that includes The Iraq War, Putin vs. the West, and Inside Europe: Ten Years of Turmoil — is to use first-hand testimony to revisit diplomatic flashpoints from a decade or so ago: soon after the events so that everyone who was there is still alive, but late enough so that they are not still in the same job and are now willing to do so. chat.

Percy’s most recent work opens with the arrival of Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Davos Forum in 2017. In his first appearance at the event, Xi galvanized delegates with a speech in which he presented himself as a champion of free trade and offered to work with other countries for mutual economic benefit. What may historically be a strange path for the Chinese leader is no surprise to the bankers, financiers and politicians in the room, who know that Xi is anticipating the inauguration of Donald Trump as US president, a few days later.

The United States and China are on the verge of a trade war, or at least a series of skirmishes, fueled by Trump and his cronies’ dissatisfaction with China’s economic power and its supposed nefarious influence on American trade. Trump alluded to this during his election campaign: “We cannot continue to let China rape our country, which is what they are doing. It is the greatest theft in the history of the world.”

Once you play this clip, Clash of the Superpowers is in a different area than its predecessors. It’s Donald Trump’s show. Anything about Trump becomes a discussion about Trump, and any discussion about Trump becomes a game in which everyone else takes on the hopeless task of guessing his whims and trying to gauge his motives, all of which is likely to turn out worse than anyone could have imagined. Percy’s films are typically subtle morality dramas, in which bigwigs from various countries exploit minor personal foibles to great effect; Trump reels and vomits all over it.

However, this is Trump in his first term, a leader who by 2026 has become innocuous and grotesque. The end of the world is never near. It’s been less than 10 years, but it feels much longer.

The interviewees represent both ends of the divide among Trump’s advisers: those of the old school who believed that normal business could be done with China and that tariffs would be an act of self-harm, and those who thought this was unforgivably naive and that the alternative to tariffs was meek surrender. The discussion continues as Trump and Xi take turns inviting each other over for appetizers: Trump ignores normal protocols by hosting Xi at his Mar-a-Lago resort, while Xi breaks with tradition by allowing Trump to tour the Forbidden City. No one knows what Trump will do next. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster describes him as “automatically inconsistent,” a leader who cannot be kept up to date in the normal way, because the consensus among his advisers that he should not say a certain thing guarantees that he will say it.

But Trump’s astonishingly direct speech in Beijing, in which he did not blame China for exploiting the United States for the benefit of Chinese citizens, does not faze his opponent; The same does not apply to the sudden imposition of tariffs on Chinese imports to the United States. It is true that Xi is making a naval parade in the South China Sea as a warning not to mess with him, but it is a move fueled by calm rationality. When Trump and Xi meet again at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires in 2018 to negotiate a way out of the tariff gap, Xi remains calm, but Trump’s men are blundering behind the scenes, realizing they have brought an orangutan to a taming competition. “It was troubling to watch Xi, in a very methodical and comprehensive way, achieve goals that were clearly thought out, and to watch Trump drive them,” recalls another national security adviser, John Bolton.

The program cuts straight from that quote to footage of Trump in Buenos Aires babbling: “The relationship is very special, the relationship I have with President Xi. I think that’s going to be the main reason we end up getting something…” It’s a moment of pure comedy, from an era when global politics was still just a convenient subject for balanced, satirical TV documentaries. At the time, Donald Trump was almost laughable.

Great Power Clash: America vs. China was broadcast on BBC Two and is now available on iPlayer