Hardly had the prescient nonagenarian Dr. Kissinger left Beijing after promising top Chinese leaders of his intention to work on US-China relational stability when President-elect Trump’s phone conversation with Taiwanese leader Tsai Ing-wen and his subsequent, stridently provocative tweets plunged the most important bilateral relationship into considerable turmoil.
Of course, the turmoil is not comparable to the infamous 1993 Yinhe incident in which an imperious US forced a placatory China into allowing its ship to be inspected. Nor is it as risk-laden as the 2000 collision between a US Navy EP-3 spy plane flying bellicosely on the very edge of China’s frontier and a Chinese PLA Navy J-8 in which Chinese pilot Wang Wei was killed and on which China took a more spirited stand. Yet, Trump’s conversation with Tsai is non-trivial because no American president or president-elect has done this since 1979.
As if the phone-call was not enough, hot on the heels of the phone call Trump followed up with some grating tweets: “Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency making it hard for our companies to compete, heavily tax our products going into their country (the US doesn’t tax them) or build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don’t think so.” That the Chinese renminbi has actually appreciated and the US taxes Chinese imports do not seem to matter much to Trump.
While the Chinese government’s reaction was understandably mild (Foreign Minister Wang Yi called Tsai’s call “a petty trick”), senior editor of China Daily Wang Hui believed it was important to remind the US president-elect that compared to skirmishes on trade, cyber security and currency, the Taiwan question is Beijing’s “most sensitive diplomatic nerve”. Global Times, China’s second leading newspaper, put it more graphically in an editorial: Trump wanted to “treat China as a fat lamb and cut a piece of meat off it.”
Two questions arise: Why did Trump do it? And was Trump wise to do it? Analysts the world over have begun speculations over these. I have been privileged to follow China-US relations since 1993 when I was posted in Beijing by the Foreign Office, and will make an attempt to answer both. But first, let us reconstruct the world, and the US’ predicaments, from Trump’s viewpoint.
I think Trump has an intuitive idea about the link between a US’ foreign policy gone haywire and the abysmal economy that has led to the very victory that he now savors. To focus on the US economy, however, Trump must stabilise a world that is now in serious disorder. The US under Bush-Obama has forced Russian hand over Crimea, unraveled the Middle East, initiated a never-ending war in Afghanistan and caused deep uncertainty in Asia-Pacific. All this has led to the US incurring colossal losses to its treasury.
Not surprisingly, Trump has been hinting at revisiting two of the three major US foreign policy boo-boos. He wants to put the US’ relationship with Russia on a more even keel. In the inferno that is the Middle East, Syria and Iraq burn. On its edges, Libya and Afghanistan smolder. At the very least Trump wants to take the first step in the right direction by allying with the pro-Christian Assad against the Jihadis. It is with China, however, where he has launched his risky “deal-making” game, hoping that by browbeating its paramount trade partner, it will win a major discount in favour of the US. Alas, Trump has inherited the same mindset that many erstwhile US presidents possessed and seem to have passed on.
The US’ China policy springs from dated US perceptions of USSR containment in the 1950s. The same mindset, under the Bush-Obama leaderships, eventually crystallised into a four-legged China strategy. First, isolating China through TPP; second, using the Philippines to threaten Chinese sea routes; third, deploying THAAD in South Korea and Japan to demolish the 50-year-old MAD deterrence structure; and fourth, exporting sophisticated weapons to Taiwan. With Trump’s ascension, TPP is nearly gone. With President Duterte refusing to play second fiddle to the US’ desire of encircling China, the second leg has collapsed. It is now the deployment of anti-missile systems in South Korea and Japan and the phone call with Tsai that have kept the containment ball rolling.
I believe alienating China will not only de-stabilise the Asia-Pacific but also hurt the US domestically. Consider this. Trump has won largely due to his pledge of making the US great again. For his voters, this means that the US economy will be rekindled by the new leadership. This however leads to some interesting questions. Where will the trillions of dollars in investment in its infrastructure come from, given that the savings rate in the US, already much lower than its Asian rivals, has suffered a further dent in 2007-8? Also, if Trump imposes the so-called 45% tariff on imports from China, will this not give rise to a significant jump in inflation? Will other less efficient producers not replace China? How will the US cover its account and trade deficits, if not from Chinese investment? Finally, if China retaliates, what will happen to the US economy?
The US has provided leadership to our world over the past century, owing to its near-miraculous creativity in science and technology. It is only since the collapse of the Soviet Union that it has started committing serious governance mistakes. President Trump is doing well vis-à-vis Russia and Syria. It is time for him to show leadership by partnering with, instead of containing and alienating, China to restore order to a world that is in desperate need of it.
The writer has worked in China as a diplomat