As the leaders of China, Russia and North Korea gathered for a grand military parade in Beijing, President Trump on Wednesday took pains to brush off the striking show of solidarity among America’s adversaries.
In remarks from the Oval Office, Mr. Trump praised the parade as “beautiful,” and “very, very impressive.”
“I understood the reason they were doing it, and they were hoping I was watching, and I was watching,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “My relationship with all of them is very good. We’re going to find out how good it is over the next week or two.”
The president’s comments came despite mounting frustration that his extraordinary summit with one of those leaders — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — has yet to yield any concrete results on the war in Ukraine.
Mr. Trump went into the summit vowing that he would achieve a temporary cease-fire in Ukraine or would impose sanctions designed to hurt Russia’s critical oil and gas exports. He emerged having dropped the cease-fire demand, and imposed no sanctions, while Russia stepped up its attacks on civilian targets.
Mr. Trump has publicly described that meeting as a success, but two associates, who described private conversations on the condition of anonymity, said the president was aggravated that Mr. Putin did not commit to more.
Nearly three weeks after the meeting in Alaska with Mr. Trump, the alignment of anti-Western powers in Beijing was on full display, with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, flanked by Mr. Putin and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, along with the leaders of Iran, Pakistan and other mostly authoritarian nations.
On Tuesday evening, Mr. Trump showed a flash of pique over the alliance.
“Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America,” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday on social media.
But experts said that the show in China this week was hardly conspiratorial, nor was it particularly covert.
“In fact, these countries could hardly be more open in their calls for a new international order, one that does not deny them the spheres of influence, power, status, and legitimacy that their leaders believe they deserve,” said Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a bipartisan think tank.
“They are also fairly clear in their view that the United States is the chief obstacle to the attainment of their global objectives, and that they see the existing world order as unfair, Western domination,” Mr. Fontaine said. “What is so clear in this gathering is that they are prepared to do something about it, including by working together.”
The renewed alliance comes at a critical time for Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin, in particular. They shared a private ride, a meal and public embrace that was supposed to result in brokering a peace deal in Ukraine.
Mr. Trump has for months issued empty threats of sanctions, regular two-week deadlines — the latest of which passed last week — and repeated complaints of “disappointment” about Mr. Putin’s unwillingness to end the war.
On Wednesday, when asked whether he had any message for the Russian leader, Mr. Trump did not appear confident that change was in the offing. “I have no message to President Putin,” Mr. Trump said. “He knows where I stand, and he’ll make a decision one way or the other. Whatever his decision is, we’ll either be happy about it or unhappy, and if we’re unhappy about it, you’ll see things happen.”
The president chastised a reporter who asked Wednesday why there had been no action against Russia, saying that putting secondary sanctions on India “was equal” to sanctioning Russia because it was costing the country “hundreds of billions of dollars.”
In Beijing, Mr. Putin weighed in, telling reporters that during this week’s gathering of world leaders in China, “no one, ever, uttered any negative judgment of the current American government.” He added that all of the leaders “supported our meeting in Anchorage” and “expressed hope” that Mr. Trump would help end the war in Ukraine.
Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the lack of any apparent progress on Russia and Ukraine during Mr. Trump’s summit in Alaska, in which he applauded the Russian president and even rolled out a red carpet, was the subtext of the president’s ire about the gathering in China.
“Everything with Trump is about Trump, and everything with Trump is about a combination of power and his reputation,” Mr. Kagan said. “And so the problem that he’s having with Putin right now is not that his relationship has been damaged by Putin’s behavior. It’s that Putin is humiliating him on a steady basis. This meeting is humiliation at a larger level.”
In the case of China, with which Mr. Trump has engaged in a bitter trade war, the threat was more clear, said R. Nicholas Burns, who served as the U.S. ambassador to China under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The parade in particular was symbolic, Mr. Burns added. Not only did it rewrite history of World War II, propping China and Russia as the “main victors,” he said, it downplayed U.S. support.
“The overt symbolism of the spectacle in Beijing was designed to showcase China’s expanding military might and the close alliance between China and Russia as well as China’s spreading influence among other authoritarian governments in Central Asia and beyond,” he said.
Mr. Trump complained that he believed that China’s parade should have mentioned the United States more during the festivities for its role in World War II. And he has sought to squelch any concerns that Russia and China were forming an axis against the United States.
“I am not concerned at all,” Mr. Trump said this week on a conservative radio show.
“We have the strongest military in the world, by far,” he told the host, Scott Jennings. “They would never use their military on us. Believe me.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and the author, most recently, of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” said that Mr. Trump also probably felt slighted that he was not included in the gathering, given that he has publicly praised three of the participating autocrats for years, and modeled himself after. .
“A rule of thumb when evaluating the words and actions of strongmen is that at some level it is always about them,” she said. “Add in China’s display of military strength, and contrast this parade with the lackluster U.S. one Trump staged on his birthday, and you get an inflammatory reaction designed to divert press attention back to him.”
David E. Sanger and Anton Troianovski contributed reporting.
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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