Trump and Xi: Is This ‘Reagan-Gorbachev No. 2’?
“We were already in Cold War 2.0 with China,” Charles Payne, the Fox Business anchor, told Jesse Watters, immediately after President Donald Trump’s Beijing summit in May. “I think it’s thawing out tremendously. I don’t think a lot of people understand just how powerful this visit is or was, and how much the next one will be as well.”
Payne was not the only one making historic comparisons. “It’s a stunning victory,” the Heritage Foundation’s Michael Pillsbury said in a similar vein to Elizabeth MacDonald of Fox Business. “Goes back to Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, which a lot of conservatives opposed at the time. Then it goes to Ronald Reagan’s visit to China in 1984.”
On the 40th president, Payne also suggested that the Trump-Xi summit in May was an echo of an earlier dialogue: “This has a chance to become a Reagan-Gorbachev No. 2.”
So are Trump’s dealings with China on the order of President Reagan’s with the Soviet Union?
Unfortunately not.
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