Why Trump Or Harris Might Sell Out To China

During his first term, Trump put tariffs on Chinese goods and put export controls on Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE. But he then partially backtracked on both of those efforts after empty promises and relatively minor pressure from China.

In 2020, Trump agreed to stop raising tariffs on China in exchange for China purchasing US agricultural goods - the so-called“phase one agreement.” Trump kept his part of the bargain and claimed it as a huge victory for“Making America Great Again.” But China simply
lied and bought almost nothing
from the US:

Ultimately...China ended up buying none of that extra $200 billion of US exports it had promised to purchase. Art of the deal, indeed.

Trump also
relented on export controls
on ZTE. Congress
tried to intervene
to save the export controls, but failed. Here's what former GOP Congressman Adam Kinzinger had to say about that:

So much of Trump's first-term record isn't actually that tough on China – it's one of initially tough policies followed by capitulation. Between that and the TikTok flip-flop, it's not clear why we should expect a second term to be different.

The biggest flashpoint for US-China relations is Taiwan. A Chinese invasion of the island would severely compromise the security of US allies (most importantly Japan ), cut off much of US chip supplies, and probably signal the beginning of a more general Chinese domination of Asia.

Biden inched the US away from its traditional posture of“strategic ambiguity” with
repeated promises to aid Taiwan
in the event of a Chinese attack. Whether that was the right move, or whether strategic ambiguity should be preserved in its traditional form, is a hotly debated matter in the national security community.

But one thing I haven't seen
any
foreign policy experts suggest is that the US should publicly suggest abandoning Taiwan. Yet this is exactly what Trump seems to have done in a series of
recent statements . Most recently, he did
an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek
in which he bashed Taiwan for its success in chip manufacturing, and appeared to argue that the island is indefensible:

He also
bashed Nancy Pelosi for visiting Taiwan .

Trump's words on Taiwan have
alarmed
some of his fellow Republicans, and rightly so. But if Trump does abandon Taiwan, the party leadership will likely go right along with him. Already, the GOP platform has
scrubbed any mention of Taiwan , for the first time in over 40 years:

It doesn't exactly take a foreign policy genius here to see that Trump and at least some of his people are strongly considering giving Taiwan the Ukraine treatment. That
signals weakness
to China's leadership and could even invite a war that otherwise would have been deterred.

As a possible bright spot, Trump's vice presidential nominee JD Vance has expressed strong support for defending Taiwan , and Trump's former national security adviser Robert C. O'Brien is a staunch advocate of“peace through strength .” But it's not clear how much influence these folks would have over Trump on the Taiwan question.

Personally, I don't put much stock in Trump's tendency to
say nice things about Xi Jinping . He did that
all throughout his first term , even while moving US policy in a more anti-China direction, so I think this rhetoric is a red herring.

Much more worrying is the evidence that Trump's political base - or at least the online part of it - is shifting toward a pro-China stance. Twitter user and former Noahpinion
guest blogger
Pourteaux has
a long-running thread
keeping track of anti-anti-China statements from MAGA figures and online rightists. A couple of examples:

Part of this is just isolationism. But part of it comes from the idea that MAGA's true enemy is American liberals, and that in order to fight this enemy, foreign dictators like Putin and Xi Jinping should be viewed as allies - a sort of global alliance of autocracy. Tucker certainly seems to subscribe to this idea, but
Trump himself
and some of his allies - even ones like
Mike Pompeo
who were tough on China during Trump's first term - have said similar things:

If Trump decides that appeasement of China, even at the cost of Taiwan and Chinese economic supremacy, is necessary in order to focus on fighting Trump's internal enemies, we're all in a whole lot of trouble. A
whole lot
of
commentators
are now starting to
get worried , but with Trump a clear favorite in the prediction markets and election forecasts, it might be too little too late.

I'm much less worried about Kamala Harris than I am about Donald Trump when it comes to China policy. Unlike Trump, Harris generally seems like someone who tends to continue her predecessors' policies. Jordan Schneider of ChinaTalk has
a good thread
in which he argues that Kamala's China policy would be similar to Biden's. Some excerpts:

And for what it's worth, Chinese nationalists
seem to prefer Trump over Harris .

But although this is good, it doesn't fully reassure me yet. For one thing, although Biden enacted tariffs on China that were even higher than Trump's, Harris consistently
slammed tariffs and protectionism
back when she was running for President in 2019 and 2020.

She seems amenable to the idea of restricting free trade in the name of labor rights and environmental concerns, but unlike doesn't seem to see tariffs as
a tool of national security
- a way of preserving defense-related manufacturing capacity against the possibility of a conflict with China.

Also, Harris' national security adviser, Philip H Gordon,
argued during Trump's first term
that engagement with China was a wise policy and that many elements of it should be brought back:

I don't know if Gordon still thinks this, or if what he thinks is representative of what Harris would think as president. But it's very worrying rhetoric, considering that it goes directly against the Biden administration's whole approach to China.

Nowhere does Gordon acknowledge the military importance of preserving US manufacturing capacity – something that Biden's own national security adviser, Jake Sullivan,
understands very well . Nor does Gordon acknowledge that China itself has been
striving to decouple from the US all on its own , and has been making great strides in this regard, threatening to turn a two-way economic dependency into a one-way dependency.

Nor does Gordon seem to realize that despite America's best efforts to court China as a partner, overthrowing US hegemony and degrading US power is at the centerpiece of
Xi Jinping's foreign policy approach .

In other words, there is at least the possibility that Harris might think we're still living in the pre-Xi world of 2012, and might view Biden's attempts to stand up to China as an unnecessary continuation of Trumpist aggression rather than as a crucial but inadequate step toward shoring up global security. I don't know how strong this possibility is, but until we hear more from Harris on the topic, I will continue to worry.

That all having been said, my worries about Trump on this front are still much greater.

US national interests are best served by a peaceful world where authoritarian powers don't try to conquer their smaller, weaker neighbors, and where global trade is conducted for mutual benefit instead of as a form of mercantilist beggar-thy-neighbor competition.

That goal requires that the US recognize China's movement away from peaceful economic development and toward assertive nationalism and totalitarianism under Xi Jinping.

And it requires strong steps on the economic, diplomatic, and military fronts to dissuade China from launching a reckless war that plunges Asia into violence and chaos.

I hope that whoever gets elected President this year is up to that task. Right now I'd definitely pick Harris over Trump for this reason alone, but that doesn't mean she has my full confidence either.

This
article
was first published on Noah Smith's Noahpinion
Substack and is republished with kind permission. Read the original
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subscriber
here.

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