A foreign analyst has recounted how the recent gathering of world leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in China for the SCO Summit and military parade got under the skin of US President Donald Trump.
Foreign policy analyst David Rothkopf believes Trump might have felt left out as leaders of Asian giants converged in China. “It’s been a bad back-to-school week for Donald Trump?” Rothkopf told the Daily Beast podcast, adding that the world leaders alienated him. Trump wanted to “hang out with the cool kids” but “the kids who he thinks are cool don't want to have anything to do with him”, he said.
“And he has not only alienated them, but he has elevated them. And, you know, you mentioned [Chinese President] Xi Jinping, who’s the big host of this and who’s the big winner of Trump,” he added.
Rothkopf then went on to explain how Trump was given a reality check by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which triggered him to impose tariffs on India. The analyst said Modi downplayed any role Trump may have in easing hostilities between India and Pakistan. “Modi did this terrible thing to Trump. He said, ‘You know, Donald, you keep saying you solved the India-Pakistan war. You didn’t.’ And he’s pulling the rug out from Trump’s myth of himself as a peacemaker. And this p---ed off Trump,” Rothkopf said.
The commentator said the tariffs on India was caused by Trump’s anger. “So he imposed all these trade sanctions, tariffs on India. And India is like, well, we may have hated China for the past several thousand years, but enough is enough. We’re going to go over and we’re going to get together in a way that we haven’t gotten together before,” he added.
He believes Trump has no sense of geopolitics at all and sees everything in personal terms. The Tianjin meeting, which saw 20 leaders, caused a sense of “fear of missing out” in Trump. Rothkopf said Trump would feel like Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and even North Korean leader Kim Jong-un don’t love him back.
Rothkopf said Trump had the worst military parade in history on his birthday, while China put on a display that we have not seen in decades. “Can you imagine what it was like for Donald Trump to look at the military parade that took place in China yesterday?” he wondered.
