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The Biden administration’s trade policy, particularly towards China, is significantly to the right of Donald Trump’s. Like Trump, Biden has long been skeptical of the benefits of unfettered globalization, warning repeatedly in recent years that it undermines democracy by giving American workers the impression that the status quo doesn’t defend their interests. His predilections fit right into a broader political consensus that new American free trade deals are politically impossible, that China’s rise must be slowed down through economic policy tools, and that bolstering the American middle class is more important than pursuing abstract ideals of economic openness.
Unlike Trump - whose trade policy was more or less based on these same assumptions - Biden has been aggressive and coherent at using the tools of American statecraft to apply this logic to relations with China. The story of Trump’s policy towards China contained many more twists and turns than is now generally acknowledged. He started out viewing Xi Jinping as a rival CEO with whom he could make a deal, and in the early years of his administration he viewed the hawkishness of people like Steve Bannon and Mike Pompeo as a distraction from this goal. Chinese intransigence led him to eventually start listening to the hawks, but he also backed down on all sorts of things in pursuit of what Trump has always liked best - a glittering signing ceremony which he can present as a victory, regardless of the actual content of an agreement. Trump was happy with his “Phase One” trade deal in January 2020 for that reason, but the hawks - who wanted to pressure China for much more - were appalled.1
Biden, by contrast, has been much more consistent, as I explored in a recent piece. Take a look a few examples:
Trump slapped a load of tariffs on China with the ostensible goal of forcing Beijing to negotiate a trade deal. The Biden administration kept those tariffs in place but isn’t even trying to negotiate a trade deal;
The Biden administration imposed new sanctions on a large swathe of China’s high-tech sector with the stated goal not of forcing China into a deal but simply of retarding China’s economic development;
Biden has announced a new, supposedly post-liberal trade and investment policy which sees America adopt many of the tools it used to criticize China for - like state subsidies and long-term protectionism.
This set of policies is notably more hard-line than those under the Trump administration, even if it’s not really in the interest of anyone in American politics to point this out. One can certainly argue with this sort of technocratic hawkishness. Will American leaders be able to manage the risks of conflict with China under this paradigm? Does “picking winners” in the economy work? What happens to U.S. allies who get left out of America’s new protectionist bloc? (By contrast,
has written some good defenses of the administration’s approach).But there’s also another risk: what happens when Republicans return to power? Because they’ve convinced themselves that “Biden is weak on China”, they’ll feel the need to be even more hard-line in the future. And early indications of what they plan to do are frankly terrifying.
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