Zhou Bo

Opinion | Why China can rest easy if Trump is re-elected US president

Trump’s threats don’t work on China, but they could alienate Nato allies and worsen the conflict in the Middle East even as the polarising leader presides over a more divided America

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Zhou Bo

Published: 5:30am, 21 Mar 2024

With Donald Trump pulling slightly ahead of Joe Biden in some national polls as the US prepares to vote for its next president, what might America’s China policy look like if Trump is reelected? My answer is simple: a Trump 2.0 administration will look a lot like Biden’s.

America’s China policy took a U-turn when Trump became president in 2017. But his major legacy is not decoupling – which Biden has continued in the name of “de-risking”. It is something ideological: a bipartisan consensus against China that has taken root.

To be fair, Trump is not an ideologist. But once bilateral relations are hijacked by ideology, the room for flexibility drastically shrinks. Can Trump break camp? A good example is Richard Nixon. Once a diehard anti-communist rightist, the former US president is best remembered for his icebreaking trip to China.

Nixon, however, is well-recognised as a strategist while Trump is a self-satisfied “deal-maker”. In his first book, Trump: The Art of the Deal, he wrote: “My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.”

Such a strategy, ironically, seems to work best on American allies. They are appalled by his remarks that he would encourage the Russians to “do whatever the hell they want” to any Nato country that doesn’t fulfil its financial obligations to the military alliance.

Should Trump win a second term, it is almost certain that more Nato members would hurry to meet the target defence spending of 2 per cent of gross domestic product so as to avoid the worst-case scenario – America’s withdrawal from Nato. If this is a stick, it is expected to work much better than Biden’s carrot.