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It\u2019s 20 January, Inauguration Day in the United States, and nobody now doubts that we\u2019re destined to live in what the Chinese would call \u2018interesting times\u2019. The new president\u2019s campaign rhetoric strongly intimated that under his self-proclaimed \u2018America First\u2019 posture, traditional American strategy and alliance politics would undergo a major change. And what\u2019s already clear is that his approach to dealing with allies and adversaries will be based less on their traditional roles in US foreign policy and more on how he and his foreign and security policy team view other countries\u2019 willingness to adjust their policies to conform with a markedly different set of US economic and strategic priorities.<\/p>\n
As part of Trump\u2019s revised posture, there appears to be a greater readiness to embed US power and policy within a more multipolar international power structure\u2014albeit with less emphasis on the importance of international institutions to US policy interests. He\u2019s already criticised the United Nations for \u2018not living up to its potential and\u2026causing problems rather than solving them.\u2019 Still, notwithstanding reports of Russian cyber-meddling in the American electoral process assisting Trump\u2019s campaign victory, the president-elect\u2019s desire to seek accommodation with Russia (over likely opposition from key congressional Republicans), suggests nothing less than a radical adjustment to America\u2019s position in the world.<\/p>\n
The incoming administration\u2019s geopolitical outlook on the Asia\u2013Pacific is no less seminal. Trump\u2019s musings over the utility of the US\u2019s longstanding \u2018one China\u2019 policy as the core principle for governing Sino\u2013American relations, and his equally controversial acceptance of a phone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, strongly signalled that no concrete \u2018grand bargain\u2019 would be immediately engineered between his government and the People\u2019s Republic of China. That point has also been underscored in the confirmation testimony of his Secretary-of-State designee, Rex Tillerson, who warned that China must stop its island-building in the South China Sea. He further asserted that the US would seek support from its regional security allies to ensure that China doesn\u2019t employ what reclaimed islands it has constructed to disrupt the flow of maritime trade through the region.<\/p>\n
Indeed, the president-elect\u2019s cabinet and national security choices point to the adoption of a US foreign policy management style more comparable with that of the business world than with one driven by classic geopolitics. In this context, Trump\u2019s campaign threat to slap substantial tariffs on Chinese exports to the US in retaliation for what he viewed to be Chinese currency manipulation, and his appointment of Peter Navarro, a strong critic of China\u2019s trade and security policies, as director of the White House\u2019s National Trade Council, underscored the contrast in the incoming president\u2019s perspectives of China and Russia. Trump has jettisoned President Barack Obama\u2019s promotion of the multilateral Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement as a basis for underwriting US trading and commercial interests in Asia. Perhaps most fundamentally, the president-elect\u2019s view of how US policy should be managed within the broader international relations and global security arena seems to be shaped by his self-anointed image of being a proven \u2018winner\u2019 in the international corporate environment and his confidence that this background would be readily adaptable to managing an emerging and highly complicated world order.<\/p>\n
Mira Rapp-Hooper, from the Center for a New American Security, has recently intimated that if Trump and his advisers are determined to stake out a US policy towards Asia in which its regional alliances and traditional approaches to order-building lose their traditional centrality, it may take months for the new administration to fashion an Asia\u2013Pacific strategy. Or, as likely, \u2018[g]iven Trump\u2019s devotion to unpredictability, he might not craft such a strategy at all\u2019. The incoming administration could \u2018instead pick and choose from a neo-Jacksonian, unilateralist buffet, deciding what “America first” means as circumstances change.\u2019<\/p>\n
Those are valuable insights. But I\u2019d argue that the new president will enjoy neither the luxury of time nor the unbridled freedom to choose from a menu of diverse and possibly disparate policy options, such as the above observation implies. Instead, he\u2019ll be compelled by events and trends in the Asia\u2013Pacific that are unfolding at breakneck speed, and by his own country\u2019s resource constraints, to think and act quickly and coherently if acute regional instability is to be avoided.<\/p>\n
Two key factors that will test the new administration\u2019s ability to combine the old with the new in whatever Asia\u2013Pacific policy positions it pursues are:<\/p>\n
Failure to deal in good time with either of those emerging challenges could substantially erode the Trump administration\u2019s foreign policy credibility and permanently undercut the US\u2019s national security interests in the Asia\u2013Pacific.<\/p>\n
Over the longer term, it may well be the case that, confronted with resurgent US power, China, Russia or both may be inclined to pursue a \u2018grand bargain\u2019 with a \u2018greater America\u2019, Japan, India and the ASEAN members for long-term regional order-building. But that scenario seems a distant prospect in 2017, as Trump will apparently be preoccupied with repairing US domestic infrastructure and further resuscitating the US\u2019s economic growth. Still, the outlook\u2019s not entirely bleak. While Trump postulates an \u2018America first\u2019 posture, that hardly represents an \u2018Asia last\u2019 prescription. Above all else, Trump\u2019s history is shaped by his reputation in the business world for hard but fluid bargaining to derive optimal results for interest-based objectives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s 20 January, Inauguration Day in the United States, and nobody now doubts that we\u2019re destined to live in what the Chinese would call \u2018interesting times\u2019. The new president\u2019s campaign rhetoric strongly intimated that under …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":252,"featured_media":30255,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[143,52,1428,549],"class_list":["post-30254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-asia-pacific","tag-china","tag-donald-trump","tag-strategic-policy"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n