On Reflection | Why Hillary Clinton is a bigger concern for China than Donald Trump

So you think Donald Trump is the biggest threat to world peace? And Barack Obama engineered America’s “pivot to Asia”?

It was actually Hillary Clinton, emphasising the necessity of a “strategic turn” for the United States, who launched the pivot to Asia in an October 2011 article titled “America’s Pacific Century”. The tone was martial: “Our military is by far the strongest and our economy is by far the largest.” The South China Sea duly featured: “Half the world’s merchant tonnage flows through this water”. Informed observers didn’t need a manual to spot Clinton’s subtle cue alerting them to the danger of China’s “nine-dashed line”.

Clinton’s essay preceded Obama’s November 2011 speech to the Australian Parliament in which he officially announced the pivot. The key theme was the US as a “Pacific nation”. The tone was mostly combative. Only after 10 long confrontational paragraphs did a meek “effort to build a cooperative relationship with China” appear.

Who would Beijing prefer as US president: Clinton or Trump?

As a presidential candidate in 2008, Clinton’s tone was way more composed. She admitted that the US budget deficit was largely funded by Chinese purchases of US Treasury bills. She then seemed to be subscribing to the widely held notion in the Beltway that the root of US global hegemony is economic.