Donald Trump’s abrupt drawdown of troops in Europe—the result of his irritation at European countries declining to throw themselves enthusiastically into his war with Iran—continues: The Wall Street Journal reports that the Pentagon this week abruptly canceled the deployment of an armored brigade to Poland. Some of the brigade’s equipment and troops, the Journal reported, were already en route when the cancellation order came through. Happy Thursday.

Our Kowtower-in-Chief

by William Kristol

In 1859, President James Buchanan sent an ambassador, John Ward, to the court of the Emperor of China. No American ambassador had ever met with a Chinese Emperor, and Ward was invited to do so.

A foreign representative meeting the emperor was expected to “kowtow” to him (“kou” = to knock, “tou” = head), to bow and touch his head on the floor. Ward refused, writing that “I will not kneel or knock my head on the ground before him.” The Emperor in turn refused to see him. The meeting was never held.

China no longer has an emperor—at least, it doesn’t use the title. Its president, Xi Jinping, does not require guests to kneel and touch their heads on the floor. And so President Trump was welcomed today outside the Great Hall of the People with an honor guard and rows of cheering children and a twenty-one-gun salute.

Still, the spirit of the kowtow was alive and well. In the Great Hall, Xi greeted the American president politely but professionally, calling on the United States and China to be “partners, not adversaries.”

Trump responded much more personally. “I have such respect for China, the job you’ve done. You’re a great leader. I say it to everybody, you’re a great leader. Sometimes people don’t like me saying it, but I say it anyway because it’s true.” Trump also liked the ranks of Chinese children the state assembled to greet him with forced enthusiasm, telling Xi: “I was particularly impressed by those children. They were happy, they were beautiful. Those children were amazing.”

It’s a kowtow, twenty-first century style.

The fawning was, in a Trumpian manner, combined with grandiosity. “There are those that say this is maybe the biggest summit ever. They can never remember anything like it. I can say in the United States people aren’t talking about anything else.”

Well, I’ve been out and about a bit in the last couple of days. I can report that people in the United States are talking about everything else but this summit. And I know of no foreign policy analyst who expects this to be “the biggest summit ever.”

Quite the contrary. As Politico put it, the Trump–Xi meeting has become “the shrinking summit”: “President Donald Trump’s ambitions for his summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping have shrunk from ‘grand bargain’ to a plea for help in reopening the Strait of Hormuz and a push for small trade deals.”

I’ll probably have more to say about Trump’s pilgrimage to China tomorrow, after the summit ends and we can begin to judge its practical results, if any. But the sad truth already is this: With Trump backing down last fall after starting a trade war with China, and with our ongoing humiliation in the Gulf, if this summit is remembered at all, it’s likely to be recalled as a signpost in American decline. Trump did not quarrel in public, nor, so far as we know in private, with Xi’s claim to equal global status (“partners”) with the United States. How could he? Given Trump’s success in reducing the standing of the United States in the world, he had no grounds to do so.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported that a confidential U.S. government intelligence analysis produced this week for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff “details how China is exploiting the war in Iran to maximize its advantage over the United States across military, economic, diplomatic and other fields.”

The report points out that during the Iran war, “China has sold weapons to Persian Gulf allies of the U.S. as they struggled to defend their military bases and oil infrastructure from Iranian missile and drone attacks.” China “has also assisted countries around the world struggling to meet their energy needs after the U.S.-Israeli attacks prompted Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz.”

And the analysis notes that the war has drained the U.S. military of stocks of weapons that would be critical in the defense of Taiwan against China. In fact the Chinese news agency Xinhua reports that in their private meeting, Xi warned Trump about the possibility of conflict over U.S. support for Taiwan. Trump had already raised doubts about U.S. backing for Taiwan before leaving for the summit. We have no reports of Trump pushing back in the meeting.

But not to worry. The Trump administration assures us that all is well. When asked about the intelligence report, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, said that “Assertions claiming the global balance of power have shifted towards any nation other than the United States of America are fundamentally false.” White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales claimed that the United States joining Iran in blockading the strait was “one of the most successful naval blockades in history.” And in Beijing, Elon Musk, one of Trump’s fellow supplicants at the summit, shouted “Wonderful!” to reporters as he left the Great Hall.

All’s well, according to the Trumpists, as the American democracy declines and the Chinese dictatorship rises.

But I suppose we should be grateful that the president of the United States didn’t kneel down and tap his head on the ground. At least not i