Trump on China

Trump on China Lowell Dittmer (bio) Ever since Nixon’s ice-breaking 1972 visit to China, the China issue has been a salient part of American presidential elections. Typically, this takes the form of the challenger’s bashing the incumbent for being taken in—for “coddling” the “butchers of Beijing,” as Bill Clinton put it in 1992. Donald Trump’s rhetoric rang true to form. But the November 2016 Trump election was a shock to the political system for other reasons as well. First, the outcome was a huge upset, in which an outspoken billionaire developer and former showman without military or political experience came out of nowhere to defeat an experienced former secretary of state and senator strongly supported by a still popular incumbent. Second, Trump is an outlandish personality— mercurial, bombastic, pugnacious, hyperactive, narcissistic, and bluntly outspoken on whatever happens to cross his mind, without the usual politician’s obsession with avoiding self-contradiction. He paradoxically combines a visceral xenophobia with great empathy for unpopular foreign strongmen (e.g., Putin, Duterte). This has fascinated the news media to no end, who award him generously with free publicity, if mostly critical. Third, Trump has boldly defied “political correctness” in foreign policy as in domestic political discourse, not bothering to consult with his party’s think tanks or established foreign policy elites (except Henry Kissinger), to make proposals orthogonal to conventional wisdom or GOP orthodoxy. He has, for example, at various times espoused or offhandedly concurred with the nuclear weaponization of Japan and South Korea, the disavowal of all free-trade agreements including the World Trade Organization, the notion that global warming is a Chinese plot, or the screening of immigration based on religion. End Page 673 Thus the nation and indeed the world awaited his inauguration with fear and trembling. While an electoral turnover periodically occurs in all mature democracies and need excite no such alarm, Trump’s election seemed to many to represent a radical break with the established bipartisan democratic paradigm, leaving those who had embraced and worked to extend it, in both the political and intellectual communities, in the lurch, and they have had difficulty coming to terms with the possibility that their old reference points and frameworks may no longer apply (at least for the next four years). Thus, there has been no “honeymoon” but only a blistering counterattack. To Trump’s surprise, the election, it seems, is not over. What can we now expect? Trump is what Mel Gurtov (2017) calls a “shape-shifter”: it is hard to pin him down. Since his election he has swung in at least three different directions. First, he has moved from realist to interventionist: “It is the right of all nations to put their own interests first,” as Trump put it in his inaugural address (Blake 2017a). “In a Trump Administration, our actions . . . will be tempered by realism,” the new president declaimed, and his prioritization of the national interest (“America first”) and professed interest in disengaging from unnecessary wars or nation-building in the developing world paralleled the strategy of “offshore balancing” advocated by many realists. Trump does not seem interested in mobilizing US power to support the international liberal order nor has he expressed interest in maintaining America’s web of alliances. Yet Trump has adhered to this position inconsistently since his inauguration. He initiated America’s first intervention in the Syrian civil war (a “humanitarian intervention” applauded by some former critics), for example, and revived the American counterinsurgency engagement in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Based on Barack Obama’s transitional briefing pointing to the looming peril of the North Korean nuclear threat, Trump seized upon Kim Jong-un’s New Year’s Day announcement of a forthcoming intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) to rekindle the North Korean crisis, raising the open-ended possibility of military intervention. His confederates have expressed strong support of NATO and the Asia Pacific alliances, presumably with his approval. Second, as a businessman he End Page 674 exhibits marked mercantilist proclivities, as for example in his campaign promise to build a wall on the Mexican border to halt illegal immigration and “make Mexico pay for it,” or to...