For his upcoming return to the White House, US president-elect Donald Trump has compiled a long and decisive to-do list, ranging from dramatic cost-cutting operations on bureaucratic institutions to immigration policy reform. But for those goals, and others, to be accomplished, and to truly advance US national interests, it would be wise for him to reflect on the past eight years.
Now that the dust has settled on the campaign trail promises, and real-world concerns have begun to factor in, Trump and his emerging Cabinet have time before his inauguration on Jan 20 to think through some of the outstanding challenges as well as divisive issues facing their country and how he can adjust his administration's policies in his second leap-yeared term in light of what has transpired since he last occupied the White House.
While many anticipate that he will follow through on what initiated during his first term in office, it would serve both his presidency and country better if he and his team took his inauguration on Jan 20 as a fresh starting point.
The successes and failures during his first presidency, as well as those of the incumbent Joe Biden administration, offer much food for thought if he is prepared to take nourishment from them, foregoing the misleading ideas presented by those around him, alien perspectives from an elite community, or lingering ideological fears rooted in Cold War dynamics.
To "Make America Great Again", Trump needs to jettison such malnutritioned thinking that has led to the country's sense of crisis amid the agencies of change beyond its control that are transforming the world.
In this vein, many in Beijing, and elsewhere, will concur with Chinese political scientist Yan Xuetong that Trump's pragmatism, which many regard as "transactional", may be conducive to getting rid of the ideological fetters that have plagued US China policy and so help get bilateral relations back onto the real world track so they can get along.
As one of Trump's predecessors in office observed: The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people. That applies to countries when it comes to success in international relations.
China has made it clear that it wants to get along with the US. Beijing has even provided a helpful etiquette guide so the administration can avoid any faux pas on such sensitivities as the Taiwan question.
If the trade war with China, which the first Trump administration launched in 2018, was driven primarily by concerns about trade "imbalances", its extension and escalation under the Biden government has largely been an outcome of a perceived ideological rivalry stoked by those framing China's development as a "national security threat". If trade issues are generally negotiable, subjects in the latter category seldom allow for compromise. That is why so many topics easily manageable in the past now seem anything but.
In his Sunday speech in Phoenix, Arizona, Trump again displayed a turn of mind that provides a glimmer of hope that he may by design or good fortune break the ideological fetters on Washington. Claiming that he had received billions of views on TikTok during his presidential campaign, Trump told his audience he was in favor of the social media platform continuing to operate in the US.
To really usher in the "golden age of America" Trump promised to his audience, the incoming administration has to seriously rethink the self-constraining obsession with ideological confrontation with China, and base US China policy on reality, rather than Cold War-style hysteria.
This is not to say that Trump's predilection for tariffs as a tool of leverage is an appealing, or even workable, solution to get China-US relations out of their present quagmire. But at least it makes better sense to look at business as business.
At the end of the day, the two countries have to find solid ground on which to rebuild relations, and trust.
It had been said that there is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; but if missed, for whatever reason, all that can be expected is miseries.
For the world, it feels like one of those times.
