Trump on China

• Published in: Asian perspective Vol. 41; no. 4; pp. 673 - 700
• Main Author: Dittmer, Lowell
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Seoul Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc 2017; Johns Hopkins University Press; 극동문제연구소
• Subjects: Alliances; Anti-communism; Armed forces; Awards & honors; Biological & chemical weapons; Campaigns; Candidates; COMMENTARY; Cooperation; Counterinsurgency; Elections; Foreign policy; Human rights; Immigration; Immigration policy; International relations; International trade; Internationalism; Intervention; Islam; Legislatures; Nation building; Petroleum; Political alliances; Political campaigns; Political systems; Politics; Power; Presidential elections; Presidents; Rhetoric; Ross, Wilbur L Jr; Staffing; Trump, Donald J; Undocumented immigrants; 정치외교학; United States > US; South Korea; China
• ISSN: 0258-9184; 2288-2871; 2288-2871
• DOI: 10.1353/apr.2017.0029

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. 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). Second, as a businessman he 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 "take the oil" as a way of cutting off a source of revenue for the Islamic Caliphate. Third, particularly since his inauguration, as Trump has slowly begun staffing his administration and working with the Republican Congress, there has been a return to traditional Republican foreign policy doctrine: a muscular internationalism with emphasis on a strong military and a willingness to unleash it against targets incapable of retaliating, reaffirmation of the five US mutual defense alliances in the Asia Pacific (Japan, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, and Australia), and of course anticommunism. Although clearly a unique phenomenon, Donald Trump is also a product of his time. We hence begin by outlining the foreign policies of the Barack Obama administration that provided his campaign's rhetorical foil, as he all but ignored Hillary Clinton's substantive platform. We then turn to Trump's China policy platform as set forth in his presidential campaign, followed by an early and hence tentative look at his Asian policies as they have evolved since inauguration.