Hal Brands
In his first term as president, Donald Trump made the new cold war consensus on China — the broad bipartisan agreement that Beijing is America’s most dangerous competitor and must be dealt with as such. He seems bent on breaking it in his second. Trump is barreling toward a bad bargain with Beijing. He’s weakening the US position in the fight for global primacy. And he’s using his dominance of the Republican Party to mute opposition to this dangerous course. China policy was perhaps the most historic achievement of Trump’s first term. For a quarter-century, US officials had argued that Beijing could be made a responsible stakeholder in the American-led order.
Trump and his aides overturned that shopworn assumption, recognizing that an increasingly autocratic, assertive China sought to “shape a world antithetical to US values and interests.” They enacted policies — chip curbs on Huawei, increased arms sales to Taiwan, and the revival of the Quad and investment in other US partnerships — that laid the foundation for President Joe Biden’s subsequent approach to Beijing.
Yet Trump himself was an ambivalent cold warrior, principally because of his transactional ethos and his desire to get along personally with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. So Trump oscillated, from 2017 to early 2020, between waging great-power competition and chasing a Sino-American bargain. Only with Covid, the presidency-killing pandemic for which Trump blamed Beijing, did the China hawks in his administration conclusively gain the upper hand.
Trump’s second term started promisingly, with the appointment of “super hawks” like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz. It has been bad news ever since.Trump overplayed his hand, in April, by imposing tariffs that spiraled into a de facto trade embargo. He then got walloped by punishing Chinese restrictions on the export of rare earth elements and fears of an economic apocalypse. Now, his administration is in retreat. Gone are the super hawks: Trump removed Waltz, as well as a key National Security Council official overseeing the technology portfolio. Rubio has distinguished himself with his utter fealty to Trump.
No comments:
Post a Comment