The biggest surprise since Donald Trump’s election victory is his decision to pick a fight with China. Not once in his campaign did he mention the word Taiwan. Yet all of a sudden there is now a threat over America’s “One China” policy — a bedrock in today’s unstable global order. Beijing has so far chosen to blame a wily Taiwan for the call between Mr Trump and his Taiwanese counterpart — the US president-elect is “as ignorant as a child”, says China’s state media.
On Sunday China agreed to return an underwater drone it had seized from a US naval vessel. Mr Trump claimed it had been stolen. China accused him of “overhyping” the incident. Next time, Beijing is unlikely to let him off the hook so easily.
Without realising it, the US electorate appears to have opened the gates to a new cold war in which America’s hand will be far less strong than it was first time round. One of the reasons the US won the original one was its skill at breaking China away from the Soviet block. Detente between Richard Nixon’s US and Mao Zedong’s China in 1972 cemented the Sino-Soviet split and weakened Moscow’s global appeal. Mr Trump plans to do the reverse.