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Xi Jinping
Opinion

We stick labels on China – or the US – at our own peril

Tom Plate says generalisations only mislead when we’re trying to understand complex giants like China and America

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Tom Plate says generalisations only mislead when we’re trying to understand complex giants like China and America
Tom Plate
We must be more careful with what we say and think about others, especially those with whom in one way or the other we disagree. Illustration: Craig Stephens
We must be more careful with what we say and think about others, especially those with whom in one way or the other we disagree. Illustration: Craig Stephens
It was a little awkward. The Council on Foreign Relations had organised a fine luncheon to present an august policy report (many months in the making) from a high-level independent task force of US experts very concerned about North Korea. And herein lies a story.

The Council on Foreign Relations is a pillar institution of the American establishment, its members offering views so carefully mediated as to comprise virtually a power-elite consensus on international issues, intended as all but official briefing papers for the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department.

How China can turn the tables on Donald Trump’s America

The luncheon, held in Los Angeles, was well attended, and the report (“A Sharper Choice on North Korea”) beautifully presented; even so, it was awkward. The hard work behind it was probably all for nothing – as it was clearly intended for the woman who eventually lost the country’s presidential election, as a kind of inauguration gift from well-meaning policy wonks.
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But it is a him, not a her, moving into the White House; and the prospect of Donald Trump bothering to ponder the report issued by the council – or any of the other similar work products from Washington or New York think tanks that were lining up like toy soldiers to salute a Clinton administration – are next to zero. All those reports timed for Hillary Clinton’s coronation might now as well be heaved into the Potomac.

An eagle sculpture stands on the facade of the Federal Reserve building in Washington, D.C. Until the first Tuesday of this month, the entrenched New York/Washington elite was not just the life of the party; it hired the bouncers. Now they become the bouncees. Photo: Bloomberg
An eagle sculpture stands on the facade of the Federal Reserve building in Washington, D.C. Until the first Tuesday of this month, the entrenched New York/Washington elite was not just the life of the party; it hired the bouncers. Now they become the bouncees. Photo: Bloomberg

Trump’s America: The good, the bad and the ugly

Consider this: until the first Tuesday of this month, the entrenched New York/Washington elite was not just the life of the party; it hired the bouncers. Now they become the bouncees – the new policy outliers, red-faced with loss: another America is on top – the one not of our two flashy coasts so much as of our core interior heartland.

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