Roger Cohen writes:

Henry Kissinger this month called François Delattre, the former French ambassador to the United States who is now the secretary general of the Foreign Ministry. Kissinger was concerned about the deteriorating state of U.S.-Chinese relations and the risk that the situation could slip out of control.

Delattre told me he has his own concerns in that regard. An October surprise might involve a military incident in the South China Sea that President Trump uses to demonstrate American resolve against President Xi Jinping’s China. The resolve that would supposedly vanish in the event of a Joe Biden victory, whereupon, Trump claimed in a 70-minute speech on the South Lawn of the White House, “China would own our country.”

Trump is like the Bellman in Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.” China would no more own Biden’s United States than Trump’s United States owns Greenland.

“It’s lonely being a European today,” Delattre mused. Russia is hostile. China is hostile. Emerging powers view the postwar multilateral organizations which Europe prizes as relics of a world made by and for Western powers — and want to change them. As for the United States, it’s absent.

Increasingly, Europeans speak of the need for “containment” of the United States if Trump is re-elected, the term coined by the U.S. diplomat George Kennan to define America’s Cold War policy toward the Communist Soviet Union. That would be a shocking development, except that nothing is shocking any longer. [Continue reading…]