Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on telegram
Share on whatsapp
Share on linkedin
Share on print
Share on email

One China, Two Trump China Policies: ‘Peaceful Coexistence’ vs. Existential Threat

◎ If Trump continues to approve his team’s substantive approach in implementing his policy objectives, the free world’s prospects will continue to improve.


President Trump has confirmed former national security adviser John Bolton’s most serious allegation: that, at least temporarily, he virtually endorsed Xi Jinping’s Uyghur concentration camps in China.

Asked whether he declined to impose sanctions against China, Trump said: “Well, we were in the middle of a major trade deal. … [W]hen you’re in the middle of a negotiation and then all of a sudden you start throwing additional sanctions on — we’ve done a lot.”

It was not a proud moment for Trump or for America. Yet, just three days later, Bolton’s replacement as director of the National Security Council, Robert O’Brien, delivered a powerful indictment of the Chinese Communist government and criticized prior administrations’ “passivity” in the face of Beijing’s violations of international law and norms.

Months earlier, O’Brien gave a scathing critique of the international community’s failure to respond to the Uyghurs’ plight: “Where is the world? We have over a million people in concentration camps. I’ve been to the genocide museum in Rwanda. You hear ‘Never again, never again is this going to happen,’ and yet there are re-education camps with over a million people in them.”

Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger and other administration officials all have pushed to help the Uyghurs by punishing responsible Chinese officials.

No administration member was muzzled or reprimanded, despite ongoing trade talks and Xi’s deep resentment at America’s “interference in China’s domestic affairs.” As Congress moved legislation to do just that, Trump offered no objection and did not press Republicans to oppose it.  The bill sailed through and he signed it into law with a strong supporting statement.

How to square this circle?

Trump campaigned as a transactional operator who could significantly change the status quo in ways his predecessors could not or would not. He was a master of high-stakes negotiations: demanding much and settling for less, playing mind games, all to keep his opponents off balance.  He argued in 2016 that those same business methods would work in foreign policy.

For the first two years, Trump’s disruptive approach succeeded moderately well with China and even better with North Korea. But, in Xi and Kim Jong Un he faced dedicated communist opponents whose coin of the realm was deception and deceit, operating at a sophisticated level of psychological intimidation, and for life-and-death/war-and-peace stakes that more than matched Trump’s real estate acumen and prowess.

The Xi-Kim partners, confident they had taken Trump’s measure, executed a tag-team routine.  Xi abruptly intervened when the Trump-Kim rapprochement threatened a denuclearization breakthrough, summoning Kim to Beijing. He directed a return to the decades-long hard line that had proved so useful with other U.S. administrations. (Pyongyang reciprocated earlier this year, defending Beijing against U.S. criticism over Hong Kong.)

But the two dictators did not immediately give up on Trump and directed their venom at his national security professionals. The bifurcation was modestly successful. The president seemed quite willing to play the role of accommodator-in-chief, if it meant gaining his objectives on trade.

After Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross banned Chinese communications giants ZTE and Huawei from the U.S. market, Xi asked Trump to reverse the decisions. The president acquiesced in both cases, citing “my personal relationship” with Xi and saying “too many jobs [would be] lost in China.”

Trump followed a similar path of generous rapprochement with Kim. In 2017, he excoriated the North Korean regime for causing the death of American student Otto Warmbier. But, to assuage Kim’s feelings after walking away from the Hanoi summit, Trump declared,  “I don’t believe he knew about it. He tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.”

The statement drew strong bipartisan criticism in Congress and cannot have pleased administration officials. Strongly supportive of the president’s overall national security goals in the Indo-Pacific — a denuclearized, prospering North Korea and a peaceful, reforming, fair-playing China — they often are caught unprepared by his short-term tactical maneuvers.

More importantly, on the connective tissue between tactics and end goals — the strategy that knits them together — their thinking has substantially diverged. Trump’s more transactional approach assumes that positive personal relations between leaders and mutually beneficial economic arrangements can bridge nationalist and ideological differences. Despite his dramatically different operating style, his basic policy orientation is not fundamentally different from that of prior administrations. It is the Cold War concept of “peaceful coexistence.”

By contrast, from the start of the administration — and with the president’s approval — Trump’s key national security and foreign policy people have enunciated a coherent set of principles and positions on human rights and security issues that address essentially unbridgeable conflicts with the communist regimes in China and North Korea.

Trump himself stated, in announcing America’s new National Security Strategy in 2017, that it was a return to “principled realism.” That meant being “clear-eyed about global competition [and] the central role of power in world affairs [but] grounded in the knowledge that promoting American values is key to spreading peace and prosperity around the globe.”

Both Trump’s personal-centric methods and his administration’s concept-driven approach pursue the same goal: disrupting the disruptors of the post-World War II, U.S.-led international order and their existential threat to the values and interests it protects.

The protracted and disastrous public health, economic and security consequences of the China-originated coronavirus pandemic seem to have caused some presidential rethinking about the value of cultivating personal “friendships” with the likes of Xi and Kim, given the nature of the political systems they head.

With the policy base Trump and his administration have built, they are uniquely positioned to advance the evolving geopolitical dynamic in ways that favor the United States and the West.  Despite the widespread criticism of Trump’s unilateralism and brusque treatment of allies, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg credits the U.S. president for the allies’ increased contribution to the alliance’s common defense against the immediate threats from Russia and Iran.

First published in The Hill.

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the Secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and the Institute for Taiwan-American Studies, and has held nonresident appointments in the Asia-Pacific program at the Atlantic Council and the Southeast Asia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Views expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of SinoInsider.

Search past entries by date
“The breadth of SinoInsider’s insights—from economics through the military to governance, all underpinned by unparalleled reporting on the people in charge—is stunning. In my over fifty years of in-depth reading on the PRC, unclassified and classified, SinoInsider is in a class all by itself.”
James Newman, Former U.S. Navy cryptologist
“Unique insights are available frequently from the reports of Sinoinsider.”
Michael Pillsbury, Senior Fellow for China Strategy, The Heritage Foundation
“Thank you for your information and analysis. Very useful.”
Prof. Ravni Thakur, University of Delhi, India
“SinoInsider’s research has helped me with investing in or getting out of Chinese companies.”
Charles Nelson, Managing Director, Murdock Capital Partners
“I value SinoInsider because of its always brilliant articles touching on, to name just a few, CCP history, current trends, and factional politics. Its concise and incisive analysis — absent the cliches that dominate China policy discussions in DC and U.S. corporate boardrooms — also represents a major contribution to the history of our era by clearly defining the threat the CCP poses to American peace and prosperity and global stability. I am grateful to SinoInsider — long may it thrive!”
Lee Smith, Author and journalist
“Your publication insights tremendously help us complete our regular analysis on in-depth issues of major importance. ”
Ms. Nicoleta Buracinschi, Embassy of Romania to the People’s Republic of China
"I’m a very happy, satisfied subscriber to your service and all the deep information it provides to increase our understanding. SinoInsider is profoundly helping to alter the public landscape when it comes to the PRC."
James Newman, Former U.S. Navy cryptologist
“Prof. Ming’s information about the Sino-U.S. trade war is invaluable for us in Taiwan’s technology industry. Our company basically acted on Prof. Ming’s predictions and enlarged our scale and enriched our product lines. That allowed us to deal capably with larger orders from China in 2019. ”
Mr. Chiu, Realtek R&D Center
“I am following China’s growing involvement in the Middle East, seeking to gain a better understanding of China itself and the impact of domestic constraints on its foreign policy. I have found SinoInsider quite helpful in expanding my knowledge and enriching my understanding of the issues at stake.”
Ehud Yaari, Lafer International Fellow, The Washington Institute
“SinoInsider’s research on the CCP examines every detail in great depth and is a very valuable reference. Foreign researchers will find SinoInsider’s research helpful in understanding what is really going on with the CCP and China. ”
Baterdene, Researcher, The National Institute for Security Studies (Mongolian)
“The forecasts of Prof. Chu-cheng Ming and the SinoInsider team are an invaluable resource in guiding our news reporting direction and anticipating the next moves of the Chinese and Hong Kong governments.”
Chan Miu-ling, Radio Television Hong Kong China Team Deputy Leader
“SinoInsider always publishes interesting and provocative work on Chinese elite politics. It is very worthwhile to follow the work of SinoInsider to get their take on factional struggles in particular.”
Lee Jones, Reader in International Politics, Queen Mary University of London
“[SinoInsider has] been very useful in my class on American foreign policy because it contradicts the widely accepted argument that the U.S. should work cooperatively with China. And the whole point of the course is to expose students to conflicting approaches to contemporary major problems.”
Roy Licklider, Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Columbia University
“As a China-based journalist, SinoInsider is to me a very reliable source of information to understand deeply how the CCP works and learn more about the factional struggle and challenges that Xi Jinping may face. ”
Sebastien Ricci, AFP correspondent for China & Mongolia
“SinoInsider offers an interesting perspective on the Sino-U.S. trade war and North Korea. Their predictions are often accurate, which is definitely very helpful.”
Sebastien Ricci, AFP correspondent for China & Mongolia
“I have found SinoInsider to provide much greater depth and breadth of coverage with regard to developments in China. The subtlety of the descriptions of China's policy/political processes is absent from traditional media channels.”
John Lipsky, Peter G. Peterson Distinguished Scholar, Kissinger Center for Global Affairs
“My teaching at Cambridge and policy analysis for the UK audience have been informed by insights from your analyzes. ”
Dr Kun-Chin Lin, University Lecturer in Politics,
Deputy Director of the Centre for Geopolitics, Cambridge University
" SinoInsider's in-depth and nuanced analysis of Party dynamics is an excellent template to train future Sinologists with a clear understanding that what happens in the Party matters."
Stephen Nagy, Senior Associate Professor, International Christian University
“ I find Sinoinsider particularly helpful in instructing students about the complexities of Chinese politics and what elite competition means for the future of the US-China relationship.”
Howard Sanborn, Professor, Virginia Military Institute
“SinoInsider has been one of my most useful (and enjoyable) resources”
James Newman, Former U.S. Navy cryptologist
“Professor Ming and his team’s analyses of current affairs are very far-sighted and directionally accurate. In the present media environment where it is harder to distinguish between real and fake information, SinoInsider’s professional perspectives are much needed to make sense of a perilous and unpredictable world. ”
Liu Cheng-chuan, Professor Emeritus, National Chiayi University
Previous
Next