Is President Donald Trump helping China to replace the U.S. on the world stage?

If we had pondered before the last election what actions the United States could take to help China become the next world leader, it would look something like what Trump has done since becoming president.

This is not to suggest that Trump is actually working to favor the Chinese. Rather, I’m suggesting that by accident or incompetence, he is making decisions that are achieving that result.

Let’s focus on just two of Trump’s actions: his decision to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a major trade deal that then-President Barack Obama spent years negotiating, and, similarly, Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, the most significant international agreement on climate change in the last 20 years.

The TPP was a negotiated but not ratified major trade deal between 12 Pacific Rim nations that intentionally excluded China. The parties to the agreement would not publicly admit that China was excluded in order to help keep the U.S. dominant in Asia. But it is clear that a major motivation for the TPP was to promote increased trade between its members at the expense of China.

Trump’s decision to officially pull the U.S. out of the TPP was a major win for China, which is now freer to pull these nations further into its own economic orbit at the expense of the U.S.

China’s One Belt One Road initiative, started in 2013, is proceeding rapidly and already includes hundreds of development projects throughout Asia, totaling over $1.4 trillion in investment by China and its partners.

China’s Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank also is growing rapidly and has now exceeded the size of the U.S.-dominated World Bank in terms of project financing.

As Harvard professor Graham Allison recently wrote in his important new book, “Destined for War: How the U.S. and China Can Escape Thucydides’ Trap,” China has increasingly decided to reject U.S. and European- dominated institutions and create its own.

Leaving the TPP has very likely accelerated this process by allowing China to expand its trade relations with the countries that were part of the TPP process.

Similarly, Trump’s decision to leave the Paris Agreement on climate change is helping China to consolidate its position as Eurasian economic leader. Virtually all nations and leaders around the world recognize climate change as a serious threat and also recognize that renewable energy and improved energy efficiency technologies are major new industries.

By choosing to pull out of the Paris Agreement — based on a blatant misunderstanding of the agreement, which is voluntary and non-binding — Trump has ceded climate leadership to China.

This is ironic because China is known mostly for its massive investments in coal power production in recent years. Less well-known is the fact that China has invested as much in renewable energy and nuclear power. China is the world’s largest investor in wind, solar power and hydro power. Industry watchers like myself (my day job is in renewable energy law and policy) have concluded in recent years that solar power is well on its way to taking over around the world because the costs of solar power are already competitive with traditional power generation, and the costs of solar continue to come down rapidly.

Trump’s leaving the Paris agreement cedes not only moral leadership to China, but also cedes massive economic opportunities to China to continue to lead in production of these technologies that are rapidly transforming the entire world’s energy systems.

Whether Trump has intended to or not, he has now made China’s future dominance on the world stage all but inevitable.

Tam Hunt is a lawyer and writer based on the Big Island.