Josh Rogin - Chaos Under Heaven

One senior White House official told me that the FBI assessment of security concerns related to the Kushners’ relationship with Deng Murdoch included concerns about Xixi. Specifically, if Deng Murdoch was working on behalf of Chinese government interests, Xixi’s proximity to the Kushners and long relationship with Deng Murdoch provided an additional risk factor. The FBI never mentioned their concerns about Xixi to Jared and Ivanka. They also didn’t share any specific intelligence with them that would validate those concerns.

When the FBI’s warning to Jared about Deng was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, the Chinese state propaganda outlet Global Times defended her on its official Weibo account, calling the idea that Deng had ulterior motives “American paranoia.” Wolff tweeted in response that Rupert Murdoch had been telling anyone who would listen that he believed she was a Chinese spy—and had been throughout their marriage.

According to the senior official, Jared and Ivanka shrugged off the FBI’s concerns about Deng Murdoch. They didn’t want to hear that their close friend might be an agent for the Chinese government, and the FBI either didn’t have or didn’t want to produce any hard evidence of misconduct by Deng. As of this writing, there still is no firm evidence that Deng Murdoch is working for or with the Chinese government. She and the Kushners remain close friends. Xixi remains employed in their home. And the Wendi Deng Murdoch mystery remains unsolved.

Memories of Tibet

One place in Asia that Trump did not mention, much less visit, on his tour—which no American president had ever visited, in fact—was Tibet. The “autonomous region” had been occupied by China since the 1950s, and in spite of a robust advocacy movement—and widespread international sympathy—Tibet was regarded by Beijing as a core issue: an off-limits topic, much like Taiwan. On the ground, Beijing had spent decades crushing Tibetans’ political, cultural, and religious freedoms; securitizing the region; importing Han Chinese; and placing all Tibetans in a state of perpetual surveillance and fear while jailing any who dared protest. The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetan nation, had been living in exile in Dharamshala, India, since 1959. There, Tibetan leaders established a government-in-exile, claiming to represent the hundreds of thousands of Tibetans in the diaspora and the six million still living inside Tibet.

Every American president since George H. W. Bush had met with the Dalai Lama multiple times while in office, and at first there was no reason to think that Trump would be any different. The Dalai Lama had been circumspect in his comments about Trump during the campaign, and shortly after the election the religious leader had said that he hoped to visit with Trump once he was in office. Given Trump’s general hostility toward China on the campaign trail and his widely reported call with the Taiwanese president during his early days in office, the Dalai Lama might even have been encouraged that, in Trump, he had found an American president who would once again stand up for Tibet.

As the Trump administration had come into power, the movement to bring Tibetans limited autonomy and basic human rights was at a crossroads, struggling to maintain visibility in a chaotic world full of stories of suffering, even as the Chinese authorities steadily tightened their grip on Tibetans, appropriated Tibet’s resources, and worked to extinguish its culture. In Washington, the Tibet issue was simply getting drowned out—a dramatic change from a decade prior.

During the George W. Bush administration, Tibet had been a top-tier human rights issue. George W. Bush, Nancy Pelosi, and Mitch McConnell all had joined hands in 2007 to present the Dalai Lama with the Congressional Medal of Honor in the Capitol Rotunda. The Chinese government protested, of course, but nobody cared and nobody backed down.

But American support for Tibet had steadily ebbed. When Obama came into office, his top adviser, Valerie Jarrett, was dispatched to India to go see the Dalai Lama and gently break it to him that he would not be invited to the White House in the first year. When Obama finally did receive the Dalai Lama in 2010, he went out of his way to please Beijing at the Dalai Lama’s expense. The meeting was held in the Map Room, rather than in the Oval Office. To avoid the photo of the Dalai Lama emerging from the main entrance, he was sent out the back, where reporters snapped photos of him walking past heaps of garbage bags.

Beijing had not rewarded Obama’s deference; quite the opposite, in fact. Once the Chinese leadership concluded the United States was willing to downgrade Tibet and other human rights issues, the CCP abruptly cut off dialogue with representatives of the Dalai Lama, whom they had met with regularly throughout the Bush administration.

Tibet still enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support and attention in Congress and around Washington—but the Trump administration proved to be a different story. Trump didn’t pretend to see America’s role as to promote human rights, much less democracy, abroad. After Trump’s disastrous phone call with Taiwan’s president during the transition, those in his administration who cared deeply about the Tibet issue—and there were many—dared not even suggest a meeting with the Dalai Lama. God only knew what Trump might say or do. After all, he had offered at various times to mediate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the India-Pakistan dispute; for all anyone knew, he might try to solve this one, too. If he treated Tibet as a bargaining chip, his ham-handed intervention could set the movement back decades.

The Trump administration didn’t even bother to appoint a State Department special coordinator for Tibetan issues, even though it was mandated by the Tibetan Policy Act of 2003, until October 2020. Nikki Haley would tell me that she personally asked Trump for permission to visit the Dalai Lama during her June 2018 trip to India but he said no. “I won some and I lost some,” she said, “this one I lost.”

By the end of 2017, the Tibetan leadership worried that a meeting between Trump and the Dalai Lama was too risky, but they could not afford to wait out the Trump presidency. China’s power was growing, its repression of Tibetans was increasing, the Dalai Lama was aging, and their nation’s struggle for survival, dignity, and autonomy was steadily losing international visibility. They had to come up with a strategy to give new momentum to their struggle.

So it was that, before Trump even departed for his Asia tour, the Tibetan government-in-exile had decided to host their first ever international conference in October 2017, in the Himalayan mountain town of Dharamshala. I asked my boss, Fred Hiatt, if I could go. He just nodded his head and said, “I hope you find enlightenment.”

The Dalai Lama, eighty-three at the time of the event, seemed in good health and was somehow always in good spirits. But he would not live forever. Upon his death, the Chinese government was expected to announce their own choice for Dalai Lama, so the leaders-in-exile had decided they might “discover” his successor, the fifteenth incarnation, somewhere in India—setting up two opposing Dalai Lamas. Beijing had set the precedent for this when it had kidnapped Tibet’s second-highest reincarnated spiritual leader, the Panchen Lama, in 1995 at age six, replacing him with an imposter and foisting that imposter on Tibetans inside China.

The Dalai Lama addressed the conference, and when the time came for him to take questions, I asked him what he thought about Trump and whether the United States would continue its role as the leader of the free world. “In the very beginning, [Trump] mentioned ‘America first,’ and that sounded in my ear not very nice,” he said with a laugh. “America, the leading nation of the free world also becoming selfish, nationalist. But then, of course the American people and both houses really have been very supportive. So I think there is a willingness to show their concern and I think that will continue.”