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In April 2017, US President Donald Trump entertained his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, at Mar-a-Lago, his luxurious golf resort in Florida.
On the way to the White House, China had been one of Trump’s favorite targets.
Now it was all smiles.
“We’re going to have a very, very good relationship,” said the businessman-turned-politician after the meeting.
A few months later, Xi treated Trump to a state dinner in Beijing’s Forbidden City, the first foreign leader to receive such an honor.
The two events marked the peak of a relationship that has unraveled amid escalating disputes over trade, technology, maritime claims, human rights and the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus that was first identified in China late last year has spread across the world and the United States is now the worst-affected country in the world.
Once again, a tough approach to China is central to Trump’s bid for office with the United States set to go to the polls on November 3.
“It’s probably the worst relationship they have had since the two established diplomatic ties,” said Adam Ni, director of the China Policy Center, an Australian think tank based in Canberra. “The situation is quite bleak.”
The growing rivalry between the world’s two largest powers has been felt throughout the Asia-Pacific region, among traditional allies of the United States, and among smaller powers that for years have tried to balance support from the American superpower. along with deepening ties with China.
US President Donald Trump hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping and First Lady Peng Liyuan for a lavish dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort in April 2017. [File: Carlos Barria/Reuters]
“It’s not competition anymore,” said Thomas Daniel, a senior analyst at Malaysia’s Institute for Strategic and International Studies, referring to the dynamic between the United States and China. “He is becoming more and more adversary. It’s making things difficult for us in Southeast Asia, especially for those states that want the US to engage constructively in the region. “
Felt absence
Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, was honored on regular trips to Asia Pacific and a regular guest at key regional group meetings.
Its signature Asian strategy, the pivot, was designed to foster ties across the region, but also to seek engagement with China and cooperation on key issues.
Trump, by contrast, has been noted for his absence and disdain for the multilateralism that leaders of Asian capitals consider vital to the region’s long-term peace and stability. After attending the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in 2017, he has not been to the event since.
He has flirted with authoritarian leaders like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un while, promoting “America first,” he plays tough with allies like South Korea by demanding that they “pay” the cost of stationing thousands of US troops in the country.
US President Donald Trump appears to have a soft spot for authoritarian leaders like Kim Jong Un and took a highly transactional approach to policy making, confusing allies and partners in the Asia-Pacific region. [File: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters]
And despite his hardened approach to China, Trump appears to have retained some admiration for Xi. According to his former national security adviser John Bolton, during a meeting in Tokyo last year, Trump asked Xi for help in the US elections. Trump has denied the accusation.
Such fickle and transactional decision-making has only increased confusion about America’s commitment to a region that it insists is strategically important.
But there is also growing concern for China, which has sought to expand its influence through initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative and intensified activities in disputed areas like the South China Sea, which it claims to be entirely its own.
Beijing now occupies remote reefs and outcrops where it has built military installations and deployed the Coast Guard and maritime militias in support of its fishing fleets, disrupting littoral states that also claim the parts of the sea closest to their shores.
Hardened response
The Trump administration has shown a greater willingness to respond to such actions.
The US Navy conducted 24 voyages of freedom of navigation through the South China Sea between May 2017 and July 2020. That same month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that China’s claims at sea they were “illegal,” further hardening the US approach.
“You won’t see them clapping too loud from the sidelines, but there are some who have doubts about what China is doing, especially when it comes to issues like the South China Sea or on the border with India,” Joseph said. Liow, a research advisor at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
Some have welcomed the stronger US response to China’s claims in the South China Sea, where it had conducted right of navigation operations most frequently. [Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Jason Tarleton/U.S. Navy via AP Photo]
“But at the same time, these states do not want to jeopardize relations with China because the economic relations they have are broader and deeper and they do not want to compromise this relationship.”
The Trump administration has also responded more boldly to events in Xinjiang, where the UN estimates that around one million Uighurs are being held in camps that China describes as vocational training centers needed to fight ‘extremism’, and Hong Kong, where Beijing imposed a National Security Law in June after nearly a year of anti-government protests.
In both cases, the United States has imposed targeted sanctions and in Hong Kong it withdrew the special financial status the territory once enjoyed.
An anonymous Japanese government official wrote in The American Interest magazine in April that Trump’s more assertive response was preferable to Obama’s strategy of trying to get China involved.
“For countries receiving Chinese coercion, a tougher line from the United States on China is more important than any other aspect of American policy,” the diplomat wrote. “Asian elites, in Taipei, Manila, Hanoi, New Delhi, increasingly reckon that Trump’s unpredictable and transactional approach is a lesser evil compared to the danger that the United States will again cajole China into being a ‘ responsible actor. ‘”
Taiwan, claimed by China as its own, has been the target of increasingly assertive behavior by Beijing since Tsai Ing-wen was first elected president in 2016 (Trump was also the first US president to accept a congratulatory call from a Taiwanese leader).
The United States, which is required by law to support Taiwan even if it maintains formal ties with Beijing, has been selling advanced weaponry to the island and encouraging Taipei to modernize its military, as China intensifies air and maritime activity across the strait. .
“It is true that during President Trump’s first term, relations between the United States and Taiwan improved rapidly,” Chieh-Ting Yeh, vice president of the Global Taiwan Institute, told Al Jazeera, noting that the improvement also reflects the “approach of Tsai’s principled but measured diplomacy. and “most importantly, the increasing aggressiveness of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Rare consensus
Yeh emphasized that the US approach to Taiwan also has broad support in Washington.
“Relations between the United States and Taiwan are not determined simply by the whim of President Trump,” he said.
Analysts point out that the rapprochement with China is one of the few areas of agreement in domestic politics.
“Getting tough on China has become a rare bipartisan source of consensus in a polarized political climate,” wrote Hui Feng, a senior fellow at Australia’s Griffith University, noted on an academic website, The Conversation. “In fact, even if Trump loses the election to Democratic challenger Joe Biden, a fundamental U-turn in US-China relations is unlikely.”
Biden, a former Obama vice president who met with Xi several times when he was in office, has said that under his administration, the United States would lead by “power by example” rather than by “example of power.”
Vice President Joe Biden has met with Xi Jinping several times. Analysts say that while Biden’s tactics could change, America’s tougher strategy toward China would stick if he took over the White House given his broad bipartisan support. [File:Mike Theiler/Reuters]
But while he has recruited many former Obama officials to his team, he has also promised a more robust approach to China. He has even referred to Xi as a “bully”.
“Nobody thinks it will be Obama 2.0,” Liow said. “There is a steady and growing pace in the rejection of China, but they will want to work with China on a number of issues such as health and climate change, where there is a convergence of interests.”
A Biden administration is expected to return international organizations abandoned by Trump to the United States and rejoin the Paris climate accord.
Analysts also expect the United States under Biden to invest more in its relationship with like-minded democracies, such as Australia, Japan and South Korea. In the latter, Biden’s campaign has accused Trump of treating the alliances as “protection scams” in his attempt to get more money out of Seoul.
“If Biden wins, expect the Blue House to breathe a sigh of relief,” wrote Linde Desmaele, a researcher at the KF-VUB Korea Chair affiliated with the International Security Group at the Institute for European Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, in a recent abstract. of policies.
In November 2017, US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump joined the Chinese President and his wife for a state dinner in the Forbidden City. Ties have deteriorated dramatically since [File: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters]
Whoever wins in Tuesday’s poll, it is unlikely that the relationship between the two global giants can ever go back to what it was.
America has changed. And also China. In Asia-Pacific, diplomats are preparing for four more challenging years.
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