US President Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy – based on tactics and transactions, rather than strategic vision – has produced a series of dazzling flip-flops. Lacking any guiding convictions, much less clear priorities, Trump has confounded America’s allies and strategic partners, particularly in Asia – jeopardizing regional security in the process.
To be sure, some of Trump’s reversals have brought him closer to traditional US positions. In particular, he has declared that Nato is “no longer obsolete,” as it supposedly was during his campaign. That change has eased some of the strain on the US relationship with Europe.
But in Asia – which faces serious security, political, and economic challenges – Trump’s reversals have only exacerbated regional volatility. With so many political flashpoints threatening to trigger violent conflict, the last thing Asia’s leaders need is another strategic wild card.
Yet, in Trump, that is precisely what they have. The US president has shown himself to be more mercurial than the foul-mouthed Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte or the autocratic Chinese President Xi Jinping. Even the famously impulsive North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un seems almost predictable, by comparison.
Perhaps the most consistent feature of Trump’s foreign policy is his obsession with gaining short-term advantage. In one recent tweet, he asked why he should label China a currency manipulator, when the Chinese are working with the US to rein in North Korea. Just days earlier, Trump had called the Chinese the “world champions” of currency manipulation.
That tweet may offer additional insight into Trump’s Asia policy. For starters, it highlights North Korea’s sudden emergence as Trump’s main foreign policy challenge, suggesting that the strategic patience pursued by former president Barack Obama could well be replaced by a more accident-prone policy of strategic tetchiness.
This reading is reinforced by Vice President Mike Pence’s claims that the recent low-risk, low-reward US military strikes in Syria and Afghanistan demonstrate American “strength” and “resolve” against North Korea. Such claims reflect a lack of understanding that, when it comes to North Korea, the US has no credible military option, because any US attack would result in the immediate devastation of South Korea’s main population centers.
Trump’s reliance on China to manage North Korea won’t just be ineffective; it could actually prove even more destabilizing for Asia
The Trump administration’s strategy – counting on China to address the North Korea challenge – won’t work, either. After all, North Korea has lately been seeking to escape China’s clutches and pursue direct engagement with the US.
Given the bad blood between Xi and Kim, it seems that Trump’s best bet might be some version of what he proposed during the campaign: meeting with Kim over a hamburger. With the North Korean nuclear genie already out of the bottle, denuclearization may no longer be a plausible option. But a nuclear freeze could still be negotiated.
Trump’s reliance on China to manage North Korea won’t just be ineffective; it could actually prove even more destabilizing for Asia. Trump, who initially seemed eager to challenge China’s hegemonic ambitions, now seems poised to cede more ground to the country, compounding a major foreign policy mistake on the part of the Obama administration.
Of all of Trump’s reversals, this one has the greatest geostrategic significance, because China will undoubtedly take full advantage of it to advance its own objectives. From its growing repression of political dissidents and ethnic minorities to its efforts to upend the territorial status quo in Asia, China constantly tests how far it can go. Under Obama, it got away with a lot. Under Trump, it could get away with even more.
Trump now calls China a friend and partner of his administration – and seems to have developed a fondness for Xi himself. “We have a great chemistry together,” he says. “We like each other. I like him a lot.”
That fondness extends beyond words: Trump’s actions have already strengthened Xi’s position – and undercut his own – though Trump probably didn’t realize it. First, Trump backed down from his threat not to honor the “one China” policy. More recently, Trump hosted Xi at his Florida resort, without requiring that China dismantle any of the unfair trade and investment practices that he railed against during the campaign.
The summit with Trump boosted Xi’s image at home ahead of the Chinese Communist Party’s 19th National Congress later this year, where Xi may manage to break free from institutionalized collective rule to wield power more autocratically than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. It also indicated the Trump administration’s tacit acceptance of China’s territorial grabs in the South China Sea. This will embolden China not just to militarize fully its seven man-made islands there, but also to pursue territorial revisionism in other regions, from the East China Sea to the western Himalayas.
Trump believes that “lots of very potentially bad problems will be going away,” owing to his relationship with the “terrific” Xi. In fact, his promise to “Make America Great Again” is antithetical to Xi’s “Chinese dream” of “rejuvenating the Chinese nation.”
Xi’s idea, which Trump is unwittingly endorsing, is that their countries should band together in a “new model of great power relations.” But it is hard to imagine how two countries with such opposing worldviews – not to mention what Harvard University’s Graham Allison has called “extreme superiority complexes” – can oversee world affairs effectively.
It is conceivable that Trump could flip again on China (or North Korea). Indeed, Trump’s policy reversals may well turn out to be more dangerous than his actual policies. The need for constant adjustment will only stoke greater anxiety among America’s allies and partners, who now run the risk that their core interests will be used as bargaining chips. If those anxieties prompt some countries to build up their militaries, Asia’s strategic landscape will be fundamentally altered.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2017
www.project-syndicate.org
America is a declining power with 330 Million people of which 130 million are minorities & of the 200 million white men 100 million have past their prime age…..they can’t compete with china which has 1.5 billion homogenous population in next 1-2 decade.China will be saving 40 trillion dollars cash,while trump after tax cuts will be having 30 trillion dollars debt after a decade.Smell the coffee……someone has councelled trump why he needs to be realistic on the china affair.
LOL. This author has the loudest and most hawkish anti-China hawk from India. He has been dreaming and scheming to have US and Japan beat China for him for decades. The guy stills lives with daily nightmares of India’s clumsy defeat in the brief 1962 war. I found this whiny article most entertaining. Eat your heart out Rrahmy.
While the article does survey the possible challenges in international relations, particularly between America and its partners on the one hand and that with China on the other, it fails to note what seems like a more fundamental undercurrent of shifts in power relations between nations that is building up in the world not only due to the indomitable rise of China and the resurgence of other power centres like Russia, Iran and Turkey but also due to relative decline in America’s own hegemonic capabilities. For one thing, due to mounting distortions in its capitalist economy, America has ceased to be a middle class society with the nation’s wealth increasingly concentrated in the hands of just a handful of individuals, accompanied by greater pauperization of large proportions of the American people, and the consequent rise of someone like Donald Trump with his persuasive slogan of America First and Making America Great Again. By all indications, the stage is being set in the world for the making of a new norm in international relations that would increasingly be based on wider consensus and would be aimed at promoting the greatest good of the greatest numbers in the world. There is already an unspoken message for India in this regard which, despite its size and population, has so far failed to count as an international force due largely to it remaining a nation of impoverished people even after seven decades of independence. While Mr. Modi won his 2014 election on the promise of Achchhe Din to the people but did not do anything about it, he paid heavily for this lapse in the Bihar election by facing a humiliating defeat. Now that he has once again won the UP election on the promise of New India. Due to the new power relations being built around the world and around India’s own neighbourhood, he would never be able to do nothing about the new slogan. In short, all countries in the world will be forced to find its own place in the emerging rules of international relations which would also have significant repercussion for their domestic policies as well. That will hold true for India as well as for United States of America
Japanese was the dominant official language in Taiwan from 1895 to 1945 because Taiwan was a Japanese colony. But it is absurd to suggest that Taiwanese people ever stopped speaking Chinese (Hokkien and Hakka). Even if your rather ambiguous sentence reference to "They" refers only to Taiwanese members of the Japanese armed forces, as distinct from the whole population, it is quite unrealistic to suggest that these people could no longer speak their native languages. The expectation that ordinary Taiwanese should speak Japanese only began with the policy of assimilation in the 1920s, and that was only one generation before the end Japanese rule. The British Raj in India lasted for nearly 200 years. How many Indians in that time ended up only able to speak English? I’d say, none!