M. K. BHADRAKUMAR --- Trump comes to Asia as peacemaker.
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President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, joined by President Xi Jinping and First Lady Peng Liyuan (L) on a tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing, November 8, 2017 (File photo).
The United States used to be an ardent supporter of the rechristening of the Asia-Pacific region as the Indo-Pacific, and in all fairness, President Donald Trump should have included India in his itinerary of Asia tour, the first in his second term. Delhi would have been more than happy to schedule a Quad summit to peg such a visit but evidently, Trump was uninterested.
Trump has no need for India as a ‘counterweight’ to China in the dramatically changing Asian (and international) environment. Trump has other ideas toward engaging with China in a constructive spirit. Quad has become an albatross Trump can do without. Never once after setting foot in Asia on the current tour, Trump made even a cursory reference to Quad. Life is getting even more complicated for India.
In the cold war era, ASEAN would have been the US’s ‘natural ally’ but by the mid-2010s, the southeast Asian grouping had already begun tapping into China’s phenomenal growth. The blossoming of the adorable China-ASEAN bromance, an exceptionally tight, affectional, homosocial bonding relationship by itself, began almost unnoticed in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 when China
toppled the US’ traditional role as the locomotive of the world economy by accommodating the US’ distress calls to Beijing to keep US interest rates low by buying billions of dollars of new Treasury debt, and by launching a US$ 586 billion fiscal stimulus in 2008 (an amount more than 12 percent of China’s GDP at that time) by way of an aggressive, dare-devil monetary policy.
By a curious coincidence, 2008 also happened to be the Year of the Rat by the Chinese Zodiac calendar which is associated with the smart, quick-witted, flexible, adaptable, and outgoing human traits. At any rate, as the US, UK and Japan all fell into recession (and probably are yet to see a real recovery), amidst an increasing disdain and lack of trust among many in the southeast Asian region of the West’s financial practices, China turned out to be the single biggest factor in why Asia managed to escape the global financial crisis relatively unscathed. Suffice to say, China’s massive stimulus package not only helped to stabilise and revive China’s economy, its market, but became the lifeline for the rest of Asia. China never looked back, and has remained the largest trading partner of the ASEAN for 16 consecutive years.
Such stark realities influence Trump’s strategy toward China. His mothballing of the Indo-Pacific strategy is not whimsical but an acknowledgment of emergent geopolitical realities. Indians are still on a learning curve here.
In the run-up to Trump’s Asia tour, RAND, Pentagon’s think tank, brought out a research report entitled Stabilising the US-China Rivalry. The report’s key findings are that: some degree of modus vivendi must necessarily be part of the US-China relationship; both countries should accept “the essential political legitimacy of the other”; they should develop “sets of shared rules, norms, institutions, and other tools that create lasting conditions of a stable modus vivendi;each side should “practice restraint in the development of capabilities explicitly designed to undermine the deterrent and defensive capabilities of the other”; the two countries should accept “some essential list of characteristics of a shared vision of organising principles for world politics that can provide at least a baseline for an agreed status quo”.
The most important recommendation that the RAND report makes is that specific US strategies are needed to “guide efforts to stabilise the issues of Taiwan, the South China Sea, and competition in science and technology” and Washington should “focus on creating the maximum incentive for Beijing to pursue gradual approaches toward unification.”
The leitmotif of Trump’s Asia tour is his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping later today in South Korea, which promises to be a significant moment in the US-China relationship — a much-needed upgrade of ties with an assertive China whose demand can no longer be denied for an equal, respectful relationship commensurate with its towering stature in the world arena, who cannot be browbeaten and whose meteoric rise as a superpower is an irreversible geopolitical reality which will dominate the 21st century world politics.
It comes as no surprise that a trivial outfit like Quad serves no useful purpose for Trump. As he prepares to meet Xi, Trump is at something of a turning point himself with hardly anything to show in his foreign policy platter. The Ukraine war is irretrievably lost to Russia and the endgame is about cutting losses and retreating without much humiliation and scorn and damage to America’s international standing and credibility; the transatlantic alliance system is rocky, to say the least; the Gaza Plan already unravelling; a brazen neocon project is afoot to replace the regime in Venezuela with uncertain consequences — most likely, a ‘forever war’ in the Western Hemisphere, and so on.
The US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told ABC’s “This Week” that he anticipated a “fantastic meeting” between Trump and Xi on Thursday. Chinese and American trade negotiators said that they had agreed to a framework of a deal on tariffs and other issues. China’s top trade negotiator, Li Chenggang, however, modestly commented that the “candid and in-depth discussions” resulted in a “preliminary consensus.”
Bessent hyped up the talks in Kuala Lumpur as a roaring success and confirmed that the threatened 100 percent tariffs against China will be put on the back burner. He claimed that China will ‘reexamine’ its rare earth global export controls through the one-year period ahead. The bottom line is that the two leaders at their meeting will hit the ‘reset’ button for the relationship and set the stage for a final negotiating push toward a trade deal in early 2026.
That said, Chinese Communist Party pledged in a new economic blueprint released Oct. 23 to deepen its self-reliance on technology over the coming five years, underscoring Beijing’s drive to reduce its reliance on the US while advancing its own technological ambitions. Both sides retain significant leverage while the advantage lies with China, especially in its expanded restrictions on export of rare earth minerals and related technologies that are essential to a wide range of advanced manufacturing such as the production of cars, semiconductors, drones, factory robots, offshore wind turbines, missiles, fighter jets, tanks and other military equipment. China produces 90 percent of the world’s refined rare earths and rare earth magnets, and up to 100 percent of some kinds of rare earths that are particularly needed for the most cutting-edge technologies and military applications.
The good part is that the Trump-Xi meeting can be expected to restore a measure of calm to the US-China bilateral relations and set the stage for a final negotiating push toward a trade deal in early 2026 which may be the occasion for a state visit by Trump to China.
But on the other hand, some of that shine will wear off as President Vladimir Putin is now aiming at ‘total victory’ in Ukraine, having been convinced by his comrades, finally, that a negotiated settlement with Trump is too much to hope for, given the intransigence of the US’ European allies who will be satisfied with nothing short of weakening Russia by inflicting a humiliating defeat that would trigger a regime change in the Kremlin. |
