Brian Klaas

Opinion contributor

BANGKOK — In May 2016, Donald Trump promised a lot of winning. “We're going to win so much,” he said, “you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning." And "you’ll say, ‘Please, Mr. President, we beg you sir, we don’t want to win anymore. It’s too much.' "

He turned out to be right. We just didn’t know at the time that the "Mr. President" he was talking about was President Xi Jinping of China.

As Trump makes his diplomatic tour of Asia, the West faces a simple and unfortunate reality. There are four powers in the world that are strong enough to meaningfully shape global affairs: the United States, the United Kingdom/European Union, Russia and China.

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Europe and Britain are turning inward, battling the self-inflicted wound of Brexit and trying to minimize the damage from illiberal populism in Hungary and Poland. The U.S. under Trump has taken a transactional, short-term view of diplomacy that willfully cedes U.S. influence and leverage — except on a narrow band of issues near and dear to Trump.

These simultaneous trends mean that the West is smashing its geopolitical might on the anvil of its own foolishness. The authoritarian regimes in China and Russia are gleefully picking up the pieces.

Here in Bangkok, it’s striking how everyone I talk to — from generals in the country’s ruling military junta to even the most liberal-minded political party leaders — says the same thing off the record: China is the new power. Trump’s America is waning. And we can extract what we need from him using flattery without giving up anything meaningful.

I spoke to a former Thai foreign minister, for example, who told me that Trump sees Thailand exclusively through the lens of helping to put pressure on North Korea. As a result, the message Trump gave to the military junta was simple: Get in line and help us isolate North Korea. The problem? Thailand already was happy to do so.

Even though Thailand’s military regime has recently arrested journalists and forced an elected head of state into exile, Trump happily gave the regime international legitimacy and a full White House visit in October (a diplomatic victory that President Obama had correctly denied the junta since it took power in a 2014 coup d’état). That diplomatic legitimacy is worth a huge amount to Thailand’s generals. It was a major bargaining chip. Trump threw it away in exchange for Thailand agreeing to buy an infinitesimal 155,000 tons of American coal — which accounts for 0.02% of the U.S. coal production.Quite the Art of the Deal.

Thailand is drastically ramping up military purchasing and infrastructure deals with China. It is eyeing more long-term trade engagement with Beijing, particularly now that Trump’s decision to scrap the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement has created far more uncertainty. In the past, Thailand’s government might have worried more that these moves would alienate the United States. After all, Thailand is America’s oldest ally in the region. But under Trump, Beijing is accelerating a long-term shift as it peels Bangkok away from the orbit of Washington.

Of course, Thailand is only a mid-level player in the region. But it’s a microcosm of a broader long-term trend across Southeast Asia. And with Trump, can we really pretend to be surprised?

Xi is seasoned, capable, calculating. Trump is inexperienced, incompetent, impulsive. Xi thinks 10 years into the future; Trump thinks about 10 seconds ahead.

During his visit this week, citizens in this part of the world are being exposed to Trump's unthinkable and unthinking ignorance of their region’s politics. According to a report in The Japan Times on the North Korea nuclear threat, Trump “could not understand why a country of samurai warriors did not shoot down the missiles.”

Aside from being ignorant of Japan’s political culture as an overtly pacifist nation, the samurai warrior line is cringe-worthy. Perhaps Trump could also inquire whether geishas could use their fans to blow away the missiles, or whether Prime Minister Shinzo Abe could just find the right Pokéball to contain Kim Jong Un?

Xi doesn’t make such idiotic comments. And there are clear signs that Xi, like Thailand’s government, has figured out that China can keep chipping away at American diplomatic power in the region, so long as he indulges Trump’s ego. It’s clearly working. Even though China is no friend to U.S. interests, and despite the fact that Xi is arguably China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao, Trump can’t stop praising him.

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“People say we have the best relationship of any president-president, because he’s called president also,” Trump said in a recent Fox News interview. “Now some people might call him the king of China. But he’s called president.”

Thanks, Mr. President, for that helpful explainer.

Unfortunately, I fear that with such an unfair and lopsided fight between President Xi and President Trump, historians are going to use this week’s Asia trip to explain how America lost Asian allies on the geopolitical chess board — and how China turned them into pawns.

Brian Klaas, a fellow in comparative politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, is author ofThe Despot’s Apprentice: Donald Trump’s Attack on Democracy, coming Nov. 14. Follow him on Twitter: @brianklaas.