Amid the dramatic differences between Donald Trump and Joe Biden on foreign policy, there is common ground.
The biggest area of agreement concerns China. Trump has steered the U.S. toward a more confrontational approach with Beijing, a reversal of decades that featured both Republican and Democratic presidents who believed that over time, expanded ties — trade, scientific, education and more — would liberalize the communist giant.
Trump ended this naive charade, and deserves credit for treating China not as we wish it would be, but as it really is. Much of the American foreign policy establishment, including Biden, now holds harder-line views toward Beijing than in the past.
In 2000, Biden argued in the Senate for normalizing trade with China, opening the door for the world’s most populous nation’s entry into the World Trade Organization. A year later he traveled to China as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to highlight a commercial link that would allow the country to become a member of the WTO. As Barack Obama’s vice president, he recalled that trip in 2011, saying he “believed then what I believe now: that a rising China is a positive, positive development, not only for China but for America and the world writ large.”
Starting around 2012, the U.S.’s tone with China changed. Biden met with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, several times, and sensed a Cold War brewing. He supported flying warplanes in the South China Sea to remind China of the U.S.’s dominance of shipping ports. His campaign criticized China’s treatment of Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region as “genocide.”
During the presidential campaign, Biden ramped things up. Earlier this year, he called Xi a “thug” during a debate. In another, he said China was an “authoritarian dictatorship.”
As the Wall Street Journal noted recently: “Advisers to Mr. Biden say they share the Trump administration’s assessment of China as an authoritarian rival intent on disrupting the American-led global order.”
Trump takes lead on China
U.S. establishment foreign policy has come around to the notion that Trump was right on the principal diagnosis that Beijing is a malignant influence on the world stage. As far back as 2011, Trump was talking tough on China. In a tweet that year, he said that “China is neither an ally or a friend — they want to beat us and own our country.” A year later he said in another tweet that China’s “M.O.” is to “lie, cheat & steal in all international dealings.”
Both Trump and Biden recognize Xi’s “Made in China 2025” policy as an all-out effort to transform China into the world’s leader in key areas such as 5G, artificial intelligence, robotics, aerospace, biomedicine and more. Such economic and technological prowess translates into raw military power.
Trump has attempted to limit China’s power. On Oct. 9, in a move that didn’t get much media attention, his administration placed 28 Chinese organizations on a blacklist for their alleged role in human-rights violations, effectively blocking them from doing business with American firms. The list includes manufacturers of video surveillance, artificial intelligence, voice recognition technology and more. This is on top of higher-profile administration efforts to keep Huawei, the Chinese technology giant, from spreading into Western countries, and the spat over the viral video app TikTok.
Biden has criticized Beijing’s “abusive” trade practices, agreeing with Trump that the Asian nation is breaking trade rules, unfairly subsidizing Chinese companies and stealing U.S. intellectual property. He acknowledges one million manufacturing jobs have been lost to China.
Biden and tariffs
But as president, how would Biden handle China?
Despite agreeing with Trump on the diagnosis — that China is a bully on the world stage — Biden’s proposed remedies may differ. Trump thinks his tariffs are hurting China. The U.S. currently levies 7.5% tariffs on $120 billion in certain Chinese goods, and 25% duties on about $250 billion of other Chinese products. The president has said China bears those costs, not U.S. consumers. Still, J.P. Morgan Chase has estimated that the tariffs are costing the average U.S. household about $1,000 a year. U.S. companies lost at least $1.7 trillion in market value from the tariff war, according to research by economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Columbia University.
For those reasons and others, Biden has slammed Trump’s tariffs as harmful to American interests, though his campaign has so far hedged on when, or whether, they would be lifted. I suspect the levies could begin to ease at some point in 2021 if he wins.
Biden, according to his platform, says he would “stand up to” China by “working with our allies to negotiate from the strongest possible position.” He would apply carbon tariffs to countries that are “failing to meet their climate and environmental obligations.”
Both Trump and Biden are also correct in saying that some sensitive supply chains that run through China are potential national-security threats. Like Trump, Biden says he wants to ease American dependence on Beijing by luring American manufacturers home with tax credits.
Restoring R&D in technology
One way Biden could outdo Trump is by ramping up research and development in the key technologies mentioned earlier in this column. Both men have talked about the need for closer partnerships between federal agencies and the private sector. But with the exceptions of things such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, Trump’s budget proposals have consistently sought to cut R&D spending in areas with potential long-term security benefits. That isn’t how the U.S. is going to best the Chinese over the long run.
Trump might not be president much longer if the polls are correct, but he has helped to reorient the American view toward China. We’re in a race now, a new Cold War, with a rival that has so far proven to be more nimble and innovative than our prior Cold War opponent, the Soviet Union, ever was. Regardless of who wins the election, it’s a safe bet that the new, harder line to Beijing will continue.
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