Trump's next China policy
It could be much more hard-line - and much worse - than last time
This is part of a series on the possible policy implications of a second Trump presidency. See also previous posts on immigration, trade, Christian nationalism and another on China.
Based on his first term at least, Donald Trump’s reputation as a China über-hawk is somewhat undeserved. While he was in office, Trump found himself pulled between his desire to remake the U.S.-China trade relationship through negotiation and the demands of Republican hawks that he push much more strongly to militarily contain China and cripple its economy. Trump’s real concern was always getting a win on trade, even a symbolic one, rather than what happened to Hong Kong or Taiwan or in the South China Sea. A “normal” Republican president wouldn’t have invested so much energy in a fairly pointless trade war which harmed America as much or more than it did China. Instead, they would have acted to boost America’s military posture in the region and to inflict targeted harm on China’s economy, much has the Biden administration has with its semiconductor embargo. By comparison, you might even call Trump’s China policy soft.
But Trump is unpredictable and, on some matters, fairly un-ideological, so this isn’t exactly what you should expect if he wins a second term. He tends to view America’s geopolitical commitments as favors that the country does for the rest of the world rather than something done in America’s own interests, and this is basically how he treated the containment of China in his first term (see also: Russia and Ukraine). But if he takes office again next January, he will face powerful pressure from Republican hawks and the security establishment to take a much harder line.
Because there’s an election coming in which the Republican Party might return to power, Washington is currently atwitter with the sound of right-leaning hawks preening their feathers and putting forward ideas for just what such a policy might look like.
One of the unfortunate aspects of this type of U.S. foreign policy discourse is that it often takes place behind the paywalls of publications like Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, insulated from any broader democratic debate. China policy is barely an issue in this presidential election, so you have to go to places like this to see what ideas are being proposed for the next administration.
And it was in this light that I read a recent piece in Foreign Policy called ‘Against China, the United States Must Play to Win’. The authors are Matthew Kroenig and Dan Negrea, both denizens of the liminal space between think tanks, academia and the national security state in which policy proposals are born. Both have previously served in government and might be expected either to do so again in the future, or to have their ideas taken up by others who do.
The article is not so much a discussion of individual policy steps that the United States should take, but rather a dissection of what America’s goals in its relationship with China should be. Whereas Biden has said that Washington aims to “responsibly manage” its competition with China, Kroenig and Negrea propose an alternative goal: “victory”, or “the capitulation or incapacitation of the Chinese threat”. They lay out three general pathways to achieving this goal:
The United States could overawe China so effectively - militarily, economically and in sheer number of alliances - that Beijing is never able to pose a credible threat to American interests. Instead, China would be reduced to the level of “Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba”, countries which “are hostile to the United States but lack the capability to harm its vital national interests.”
Secondly, the United States could convince the Chinese leadership to change its goals (which, Kroenig and Negrea assume, are currently to overturn the international order and supplant the United States - more on this later). If the Chinese elite can be convinced that they’ll never outmatch the United States, they might just give up.
Finally, the United States could achieve “victory” against China through regime change. If the Chinese government collapses, then Kroenig and Negrea assure us that it will be replaced by another government with much different intentions, or will be so caught up in managing internal conflict that it will cease to have international ambitions. How regime change might be achieved is left completely undefined.
Let’s unpack some of the problems with this. The first is that it completely fails to grapple with the sheer scale of what China is. The country’s ongoing economic and demographic problems mean that it’s never likely to be become the world-spanning titan that many credulous observers once predicted, but nor is it ever going to be reduced to the level of “Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba”. China will clearly be able to develop its military and economy to a level which allows it to exert significant influence in its home region. It also has nuclear weapons, which straight away put it in a different category to these other, smaller states. And let’s not forget that even Iran has managed, over the last year, to enmesh the United States in a regional conflict in which “victory” is highly elusive.
A deeper problem is that the article fails to grapple with what international politics fundamentally is. The authors compare international politics to an Olympic event, writing that “in any other competition, such as the 100-meter dash, the purpose is not just to manage, but to win.” But that is actually not the purpose of almost any international relationship, because those relationships hardly ever end in the complete capitulation or disappearance of one side or the other.
Americans thought they’d won the Cold War, only to realize decades later that Russia and its nuclear weapons were still there and that the fundamental issue of living together in the same world had not gone away. China is by some measures more powerful than the Soviet Union ever was, and America’s relations with China will be important and fraught for centuries to come. There’s no gold medal on the horizon, just the hard work of making it work without blowing the world to smithereens in the process.
A third problem is the caricature of China’s goals, which is reminiscent of the lack of nuance with which American strategists viewed the Soviet Union at many stages of the Cold War. Kroenig and Negrea concede that Beijing can be influenced by pressure and inducements - indeed, that’s the whole basis of their first and second approaches. But at the same time they attribute absurdly maximalist goals to present-day China, portraying it as irrational.
I happen to agree with them that the displacement of the U.S.-led international system and its replacement by a Chinese-led system “would severely undermine the well-being of all people in the United States and the broader free world.” But even if Xi Jinping harbors some deep ambition in this direction, is it really a plausible scenario given the current vast disparity of power between China and the United States? Is it not more likely that China’s goals are more regional and incremental in focus? By all means, let’s talk about the best way to defend Taiwan or reduce the suffering of the Uyghurs. But let’s not pretend the immediate issue is Chinese troops in Paris or whether we’ll all be using the renminbi by the end of the decade.
The problem with attributing such maximalist goals to Beijing is that it calls for maximalist solutions rather than the care and caution which is needed to manage the rise of a powerful state while avoiding the catastrophic escalation of tension between two nuclear powers. But it’s also a contradictory part of the authors’ argument: Xi Jinping is either a new Adolf Hitler, bent on world domination whatever the cost, or he’s a rational leader susceptible to threats and inducements. He can’t be both.
Finally, let’s consider regime change. Gesturing towards regime change without the faintest idea how it might happen is simply an attempt to escape the reality of a difficult situation. If the Chinese Communist Party can be expected to simply disappear, then there’s no need to manage a relationship with it. Great! Except, why on earth would that happen? And why is there any reason to think that whatever came after it would be more friendly or amenable to U.S. interests? A fledgling autocracy or democracy could easily be gripped by nationalism and aggression, and it might be more irrational in its decision-making. And those nuclear weapons would still be there.
Just because these views are deeply flawed doesn’t mean that they won’t be adopted by the next president, if Donald Trump happens to be that president. The state of China policy thinking in his own party is another reason to hope that he won’t be.