Internatıonal Crisis Group
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US Vice President Kamala Harris (R) and former President Donald Trump (L) at a presidential debate on September 10, 2024. (C) Chinese President Xi Jinping at the 70th anniversary of the National People's Congress in Beijing on September 14, 2024. SAUL LOEB / AFP and (Xinhua/Zhai Jianlan) Zhai Jianlan / XINHUA / Xinhua via AFP
Report 10 / United States 17 October 2024 20+ minutes
The Next U.S. Administration and China Policy
The world’s two most powerful countries – the U.S. and China – are increasingly at odds over several issues. The winner of November’s U.S. presidential election should strive to contain the tensions in this difficult relationship in service of stability in the wider world.
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What’s new? In November’s presidential election, U.S. voters will choose between the contrasting foreign policy visions of former President Donald Trump and his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. The result will shape an increasingly fraught relationship between the U.S. and China, the world’s two foremost powers.
Why does it matter? Strategic competition between Washington and Beijing will likely intensify whether Trump or Harris assumes the U.S. presidency in January 2025. But the candidates’ records, as well as their top advisers’ views, suggest significant differences in how they would craft China policy if elected. Trump would likely be transactional, Harris pragmatic.
What should be done? Whoever wins in November should take certain steps to keep manageable competition from becoming an existential struggle. These include maintaining “dual deterrence” with respect to China and Taiwan, using and expanding military and political channels to Beijing, and taking care to signal that Washington does not seek Beijing’s collapse.
Executive Summary
Strategic competition between the U.S. and China is poised to intensify whether former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris assumes the U.S. presidency in January 2025. Distrust between the two countries is strong, growing and multifaceted. Foreign policy observers across the political spectrum in Washington assess that China is striving to overtake the U.S. as the world’s leading power, while Chinese President Xi Jinping charges that the U.S. aims to constrain China’s development. While U.S. analysts agree that Beijing is Washington’s foremost challenger, a second Trump administration and a Harris administration would likely take very different approaches to China. Regardless of who wins November’s election, the next U.S. administration should pursue a tenable cohabitation that enables Washington and Beijing to compete responsibly, reduce the risk of armed conflict and protect space for bilateral cooperation. Ways to buttress that effort include preserving key elements of the political status quo around Taiwan, expanding communication channels to Beijing and making clear that the U.S. does not seek a Cold War-style victory over China.
The world’s two most powerful countries are increasingly at odds, with several issues straining their highly consequential relationship. Taiwan remains the most contentious: China is becoming more assertive in pressing its claim to the island, testing the decades-old U.S. policy of “dual deterrence” that seeks to deter China from attacking and Taiwan from making moves toward formal independence. The near-term risk of war over Taiwan may be low, but it is growing. Maritime disputes in the South China Sea, especially between China and the Philippines, a U.S. treaty ally, are also escalating. The dynamics that fuel these disputes will make armed conflict increasingly likely absent reciprocal, reinforcing steps by leaders in Washington and Beijing to dial down tensions in Asia. The two countries are competing in numerous other ways as well: to drive leading-edge technological innovation, to cultivate economic and diplomatic influence in the developing world and to promulgate a compelling conception of international order.
With the U.S. presidential election taking place in early November, stewardship of this important relationship will soon pass to either former President Trump or Vice President Harris – the two of whom have distinct policy inclinations that will be important for U.S. allies, partners and competitors – including, importantly, Beijing – to understand. Three points typify Trump’s likely approach. First, he mainly views U.S.-China relations through the lens of trade, and he seems committed to accelerating economic decoupling between Washington and Beijing. Secondly, his first administration and his campaign statements underscore a fundamentally transactional mindset, whereby he subordinates most other objectives – strengthening U.S. alliances and partnerships in Asia and improving human rights conditions inside China, for example – to that of creating what he sees as a more balanced economic relationship with Beijing.
Thirdly, there is a level of unpredictability at work, not only because the former president has staked out contradictory positions over time – whether on his relationship with Xi or his feelings about the social media platform TikTok – but also because the advisers who would likely help him develop and shape China policy have divergent views on how to characterise and manage the competitive challenge that Beijing poses. With such a team of rivals giving him counsel, Trump’s own, sometimes idiosyncratic, decision-making would play a key role in setting the administration’s course on China policy.
As for Harris’s likely approach, it would likely draw from her background as the child of civil rights advocates and as a practicing lawyer. This background suggests an interest in issues of human rights and international law, which provide ample fodder for bilateral frictions – though she also has a pragmatic streak, suggesting that she would look for ways to keep the relationship on an even keel. Another theme that emerges is continuity with the Biden administration. Having helped drive the administration’s effort to rebalance U.S. foreign policy despite turbulence in Europe and the Middle East, the Harris team would likely aim to build on that legacy, which includes a three-pronged approach to China: invest in U.S. capacity at home, align with allies and partners and compete with Beijing where warranted.
Still, a Harris administration would likely contemplate some “dial shifting” of the policy that it would inherit. On export controls, for example, it might seek to work with multilateral groupings of like-minded countries to shore up aspects of the current restrictions that are not having their intended effect. It might also aim to recalibrate the U.S. approach to countries in the so-called Global South. Some of these countries contend that the U.S. views them narrowly through the lens of strategic competition with China, focusing on leveraging bilateral relations to get a leg up on Beijing. Conscious that this impression can damage U.S. interests, Harris might invest more effort in developing relationships that revolve less around big-power competition.
Much as the candidates may differ in style and approach, whoever wins should start with a realistic assessment of Washington’s competitor.
Much as the candidates may differ in style and approach, whoever wins should start with a realistic assessment of Washington’s competitor. Beijing is neither gliding toward hegemony nor staring down decline, contrary to assessments that have gained widespread traction in the U.S.; instead, it is likely to prove an enduring competitor on several fronts, one with which the U.S. will remain highly interdependent. However reluctant the two countries may be to countenance cohabitation, that outcome for their relationship is the most probable.
The winning candidate can take several steps that would help U.S. policy reflect this likelihood, while still preserving space that both Trump and Harris would likely see as necessary to compete with China and advance U.S. interests. They include working to enhance “dual deterrence” of both Beijing and Taipei, an approach that has governed U.S. policy toward Taiwan for 45 years; deepening communications between the U.S. and Chinese militaries; making greater use of the back channel that high-level U.S. and Chinese officials have used for decades to hold essential discussions in confidence; and avoiding intimations that the U.S. seeks to achieve a Cold War-style defeat of China.
The complex and often difficult relationship between the U.S. and China will likely test leaders in both Washington and Beijing for decades to come. As the next steward of the U.S. side of that relationship comes to power in early 2025, he or she should take these and other steps in the interest of stability that would serve both countries – and the wider world.
Washington/Brussels, 17 October 2024
I.
Introduction
The U.S. and China are the world’s two foremost economic and military powers – together accounting for roughly 43 per cent of global output and 49 per cent of global defence expenditures in 2023 – and intensifying strategic competition between them is central to the evolving international order.1 The outcome of November’s U.S. presidential election will play a significant role in shaping the U.S.-China relationship’s trajectory. China policy has thus far not figured prominently in the contest between former President Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, and Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent, and it is unlikely to become a central issue. (Tariff policy is a notable exception: Trump favours expanding tariffs while Harris does not.2)
Nonetheless, and notwithstanding the pervasive assumption of a broad bipartisan consensus on China policy – or at least on the judgment that Beijing is Washington’s main strategic competitor – the candidates would likely take markedly different approaches to China policy.3 With the race too close to call, it is essential for policymakers around the world to be prepared for both. At the same time, each candidate should be prepared, if he or she wins, to take certain measures that can help manage tensions between the U.S. and China.
This report explores differences between the candidates’ approaches, offers insight into the potential priorities for each candidate should he or she prevail in November, and recommends certain policies to guide the next administration regardless of who takes the helm. It relies on the candidates’ public statements and writings and on interviews with individuals who are familiar with their respective teams – including former officials in the Trump and Biden administrations – roughly half of whom are women. The interviews were conducted in person in Washington or by telephone or video conference between June and September 2024. The report also draws from Crisis Group’s prior work on U.S.-China relations, including reports on tensions in the Taiwan Strait and maritime disputes in the South China Sea.4
II.
The Trump Approach – Past and Present
The Trump administration (2017-2021) left an enduring impact on U.S. discourse on and policy toward China.5 Examining its legacy is the logical starting point for weighing how a second Trump administration might treat Beijing. Based on this record and events since Trump left office, a second Trump administration’s approach would likely rest on two substantive pillars: trade and transactionalism. Competition among Trump’s foreign policy advisers would also be likely to mould that approach. The aforementioned considerations, in turn, would shape the Trump administration’s Taiwan policy.
A.
The First Trump Administration
From the Nixon administration in the early 1970s until Trump took office in 2017, successive U.S. administrations had approached relations with China in a broadly similar way. Their overarching strategy was to integrate it into the post-World War II order while strengthening U.S. ties with other key Asian countries, such as India and Japan, as a hedge against its domination of Asia as it became more powerful. Underlying this approach was the hope that as it became more integrated, China might pursue incremental steps in the direction of political liberalisation at home and work with the U.S. to bolster the norms, arrangements and institutions that undergirded the post-war order. Especially during the second term of the Obama administration, however, U.S. officials became increasingly concerned that China was going in a different direction under Xi, combining greater repressiveness at home with greater assertiveness abroad.6
Entering the White House in 2017 proclaiming its “America first” worldview, the Trump administration regarded China’s rise with unease and took the view that preceding administrations had been mistaken in their efforts to help it emerge from pariah status. The “America first” doctrine largely repudiated 70 years of bipartisan judgments, framing allies and partners not as among Washington’s greatest competitive advantages but as constraints on its freedom of manoeuvre; proponents also argued that globalisation had not enriched the U.S. middle class but accelerated at its expense. In pressing for a strategy that it believed would recoup what it felt that prior administrations had squandered, the Trump team articulated a far more transactional view of the U.S. role in world affairs.7
Underscoring this perspective, a series of early Trump administration documents, including its 2017 national security strategy and 2018 national defence strategy, concluded that Washington’s erstwhile China policy had failed.8 These documents framed China in explicitly adversarial terms, arguing that it sought to displace the U.S. as the leading power in Asia and, in time, around the world. They also cast economic interdependence between the two countries not as a contributor to steady relations but as a source of strategic instability, reflecting Trump’s view that the trade deficit between the two countries had long been intolerable.9
The Trump administration took several actions that reflected an antagonistic ap-proach to China.
The Trump administration took several actions that reflected an antagonistic approach to China. Perhaps most notably, it imposed a set of tariffs in 2018 that covered nearly 13 per cent of the total value of U.S. imports in 2017.10 The effect was to reset bilateral economic ties and cause a “Sputnik moment” in Beijing; officials there concluded that Washington would henceforth be committed to thwarting its continued development and that Beijing would need to steel itself for a period of unexpectedly acute economic difficulty.11 Xi responded by doubling down on rhetoric and policies that framed greater technological self-reliance not as a mere economic imperative, but as a whole-of-society pillar of China’s quest to become the world’s leading power by the middle of this century.12
The Trump administration also worked to contest Chinese influence in other realms. It imposed secondary sanctions on China’s leading telecommunications company, Huawei, and launched a Clean Network initiative to root out Chinese hardware and software from infrastructure in the U.S. and the countries in Washington’s diplomatic orbit. The administration also forged tighter links with Taiwan, significantly increasing the volume of U.S. weapons sales to Taipei and the number of U.S. naval vessels passing through the Taiwan Strait. It did not cross China’s red line of recognising Taiwanese sovereignty, but Beijing saw such measures as challenging the political status quo that has long governed cross-strait relations.
The onset of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020 heightened the Trump administration’s criticism of China.13 Trump and his advisers believed that because China had not been more transparent about the origins and diffusion of the virus, it had in effect loosed a human and economic catastrophe on the U.S. – one that they feared would cost him re-election. In Washington, the pandemic also deepened a bipartisan conviction that the U.S. had to further reassess the fundamental precepts of its China policy, as the supply chain disruptions that it created laid bare the extent to which the U.S. depended on its foremost strategic competitor for a host of vital commodities – a reliance that, U.S. policymakers warned, Beijing could weaponise in times of crisis.
As noted, U.S. apprehensions over China’s conduct had been growing for some time. Xi’s steady centralisation of political power, deepening Sino-Russian ties following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and China’s gradual militarisation of the South China Sea all contributed. While these developments placed growing strain on U.S.-China ties, the pandemic caused a rupture, setting in motion a deterioration of the relationship that, despite periods of seeming stability, continues to affect a widening spectrum of interactions between Washington and Beijing.
[In 2020] Pompeo warned that Xi ... would “tyrannise inside and outside of China forever”.
In a span of just over a month in June and July 2020, four top Trump administration officials – National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray, Attorney General William Barr and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – delivered speeches that aimed not only to codify the administration’s approach to China, but also to make it harder for any successor to switch course.14 In his address, the most sweeping of the quartet, Pompeo warned that Xi, harbouring a “decades-long desire for global hegemony of Chinese communism”, would “tyrannise inside and outside of China forever” unless “the freedom-loving nations of the world [were to] induce China to change”.15
Still, the Trump administration was not a monolith when it came to China policy. While Trump permitted his top advisers to steer China policy in a more confrontational direction, he did not echo their depiction of an existential struggle between the U.S. and China or their portrayal of Xi as a tyrant with imperial ambitions.16 In July 2017, hours after the death of the Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, Trump called Xi “a very talented man” and “a very good man”.17 In March 2018, after the Chinese National People’s Congress abolished presidential term limits, in effect allowing Xi to rule China for life, Trump called him “a great gentleman” and remarked in jest that the U.S. should consider following suit.18
In this vein, Trump sometimes took steps in China policy that undercut his administration’s punitive measures. In May 2018, at Xi’s request, and shortly before a delegation of Chinese trade negotiators was due to arrive in Washington, he instructed the U.S. Commerce Department to revisit a decision that would have barred Chinese telecommunications company ZTE from buying U.S. products on account of violating U.S. sanctions on Iran and North Korea.19 In December 2018, he said that he would consider overruling a U.S. Justice Department request to extradite the chief financial officer of Huawei – also on account of violating U.S. sanctions – if he determined that doing so would facilitate trade negotiations with China and/or advance U.S. national security.20
Another example underscores Trump’s willingness as president to subordinate his advisers’ pressure campaign against China – including criticism of Beijing’s human rights violations – to what he deemed more pressing considerations. Top officials, including Pompeo, had long decried China’s repression of ethnic and religious minorities in the westerly Xinjiang province.21 In June 2020, however, Trump said he had not followed through with a U.S. Treasury Department plan to sanction Chinese officials and entities involved in administering internment camps there because he did not want to jeopardise trade negotiations between Washington and Beijing.22 Those talks had yielded a “phase one” deal – whereby China agreed to purchase $200 billion of U.S. goods and services by the end of 2021 – the preceding January.
The Trump administration’s record on China left a mixed impression, partly because of contradictions that Trump himself introduced.
In the final analysis, the Trump administration’s record on China left a mixed impression, partly because of contradictions that Trump himself introduced. Much as he has lauded Xi, for example, he has also condemned him. In May 2020, for example, he said “I don’t want to speak to him”, blaming China for not stopping transmission of the pandemic beyond its borders, and claimed that the U.S. could “cut off the whole relationship”.23 Trump’s attitude toward the social media platform TikTok, which the Chinese firm ByteDance owns, has also fluctuated. In August 2020, he signed an executive order banning TikTok from operating in the U.S. unless ByteDance divested from it within 45 days. TikTok sued the administration that December – and won – thus negating the order and earning a temporary reprieve.
As a candidate to return to the Oval Office, however, Trump has shifted tack. In March 2024, he stated that he opposed banning TikTok because he believed that doing so would benefit Facebook, which he calls “an enemy of the people” (the latter platform earned his ire after it banned his account for two years following the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021).24 Nonetheless, on 20 April 2024, by a 360-58 vote, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would ban it from operating in the U.S. unless ByteDance divests from it within nine months, with a possible three-month extension if a sale is in progress. The U.S. Senate passed it by a 79-18 vote on 23 April, and President Joe Biden signed it into law the next day.25
B.
A Trade-centric Lens and a Transactional Mindset
Both Trump’s record and Crisis Group’s conversations with members of his former team suggest that trade is the principal aperture through which he views the U.S.-China relationship. One word that came up frequently in these interviews was “dealmaker” – a word that is seemingly intended both to highlight the former president’s business background and to underscore his transactional instincts. As one noted, “Trump is a businessman first and foremost”.26 Another said, “Trump views other diplomats as business leaders to be outcompeted”.27 Consistent with these characterisations, Trump has often claimed that he can resolve some of the world’s most challenging crises – from the Russia-Ukraine war to escalating tensions between Iran and Israel – through tough-minded negotiations.28 In the same vein, he has said he would succeed in narrowing the U.S. trade deficit with China by putting pressure on Xi.29
Several former officials predicted that, should he become president again, Trump would seek to extract economic concessions from his counterpart.30 He might, for example, revoke permanent normal trade relations (PNTR), which refers to the non-discriminatory treatment of trading partners.31 He might also accelerate efforts to reduce U.S. reliance on China for rare earths, which are vital for the manufacture of many electronic devices.32
One former official said a major impetus for a more aggressive economic agenda would be Trump’s desire to “make China pay” for the havoc that the coronavirus wreaked in the U.S., which he attributes in significant part to China and believes cost him re-election in 2020.33 While Trump expressed optimism about the future of U.S.-China economic relations when he announced the phase one trade deal on 15 January 2020, his mood had darkened considerably by the summer – by which time the virus was rampant worldwide. The former official summarised his thinking thusly: “I could do 100 trade deals with China, and they wouldn’t make up for the damage that the pandemic has done to our economy”.34 Another former official noted that it was in March 2020 – when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic – that the Trump administration shifted to “a full-bore anti-China policy”, with the National Security Council racing to institute as many of the sixteen pages’ worth of China-related measures that it had devised as it could before that November’s vote.35
[Trump’s] principal purpose in the case of China would be to protect U.S. businesses.
The China-focused pledge of Trump’s current campaign that has probably received the most attention involves tariffs. Trump, a self-professed “tariff man”, believes that these measures are necessary to reduce the U.S. trade deficit and prevent the further erosion of America’s manufacturing base.36 He also contends that “trade wars are good and easy to win”.37 Trump argues that exporting countries bear the cost of U.S. tariffs, venturing as well that he would be able to dissuade would-be belligerents from engaging in territorial aggression by threatening to impose 100 per cent tariffs on their exports.38 His principal purpose in the case of China would be to protect U.S. businesses, and he would likely try to persuade it to increase its purchases of U.S. exports.
Tariffs enjoy significant public support, and even have the backing of some Democratic lawmakers, but the contention that Trump’s penalties on Chinese exports benefited U.S. workers is widely contested.39 A January 2024 study, for example, found that “U.S. import tariffs had either insignificantly negative or insignificantly positive employment effects; retaliatory tariffs had a consistent and significant negative employment impact; and only a minor part of these adverse effects were offset by agricultural subsidies”.40
In a second administration, Trump has said, he would impose a tariff of at least 60 per cent on Chinese exports (for comparison, the average U.S. tariff rate on Chinese exports during his first administration peaked at 21 per cent) and a tariff of 10 to 20 per cent on exports from all other U.S. trading partners.41 Bloomberg Economics forecasted that carrying out these proposals would essentially eliminate U.S. imports from China, and a May 2024 study warned that doing so would “[inflict] significant collateral damage on the U.S. economy”.42 Many economists worry that a more aggressive tariff agenda would worsen inflation and depress growth.43
Trump appears to believe that it would be in the U.S. national interest to disentangle the U.S. and Chinese economies – an outcome that is widely known as “decoupling” – even as this push would appear to be in tension with his desire to secure concessions from Xi and otherwise engage in dealmaking with China. In June 2020, pushing back against a statement by Robert Lighthizer, then his top trade adviser, that decoupling was no longer a “reasonable policy option”, he said the U.S. “certainly does maintain a policy option, under various conditions, of a complete decoupling from China”.44 His 2024 campaign website promises a “trade policy [that would] completely eliminate U.S. dependence on China”.45 Trump did not use the word “decoupling” in the September 2024 speech where he detailed his economic proposals, but he endorsed “economic nationalism”, promising to make the U.S. “truly self-reliant” and “require all essential materials for our national security to be produced here in the United States”. He also said he would institute “a pro-American trade policy that uses tariffs to encourage production here and bring trillions and trillions of dollars back home”.46
O’Brien, Navarro and Lighthizer contend that economic connectivity with China enables it to modernise its military faster and exploit U.S. know-how.
Just how far Trump might go in this direction is an open question. Many national security figures with his ear appear to favour some form of decoupling. O’Brien, Trump’s former national security advisor, has called for it, as has Peter Navarro, who led the U.S. Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy during the first Trump administration.47 Lighthizer, while not going as far as either O’Brien or Navarro, has adopted a more aggressive stance since Trump left office.48 O’Brien, Navarro and Lighthizer contend that economic connectivity with China enables it to modernise its military faster and exploit U.S. know-how, overriding any potential benefits. Another former Trump administration official offered Crisis Group a different perspective, however, stating that because China is a major trading partner of most core U.S. allies and partners, total decoupling would be infeasible.49
More broadly, beyond decoupling, observers offer caveats as to how aggressive Trump could be with trade policy in a second administration. Some suspect, for instance, that he would encounter resistance from Wall Street-friendly advisers to the most “disruptive” options that he is reportedly considering, such as devaluing the U.S. dollar in an effort to support U.S. manufacturers.50 China would also have a voice in the matter. A former official ventured that if a re-elected Trump were to apply far more economic pressure on Beijing, Chinese interlocutors would be less willing to negotiate with him than they were before – unless he were prepared to make significant concessions that he was unwilling to offer during his first term.51
That consideration points to another term that recurred in Crisis Group’s discussions with Trump’s former team about China policy: “transactional”. While Trump the “dealmaker” might drive a hard bargain with Beijing in a second term, he might also consider acceding to the Chinese government’s wishes on issues where others would hold firm.52 To that end, Trump would likely take a highly personalistic approach to China policy, framing his relationship with Xi as the decisive dynamic in U.S.-China relations. He would also be likely to think bilaterally; rather than envisioning an Asia strategy that would inform and encompass an approach to China, he seems to conceptualise China strategy as self-contained.
While some of his former advisers sought to build various coalitions to contest China – the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the “Quad”) among the U.S., Australia, India and Japan, for example, was revived during his administration before being elevated to the leader level under the Biden administration – Trump adheres to a worldview that inverts establishment U.S. thinking: namely, he contends that while adversaries and competitors have exploited U.S. beneficence for too long, allies and partners have done so, too, and maybe at greater cost to the U.S. He reportedly privately asked in 2019 whether the U.S. should exit from its longstanding defence treaty with Japan, and he pressured South Korea to pay 400 per cent more in 2020 for the cost of stationing U.S. troops in the country.53 Despite North Korea’s growing arsenal of nuclear weapons, he continues to tout how well he got along with its leader, Kim Jong-un, during his presidential term and has suggested that he could leverage their putative friendship to stop Pyongyang from conducting more missile launches.54
Trump is arguably more contemptuous of European allies and partners, which he believes “were set up to take advantage of the United States”.55 He has called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) “obsolete” and claimed at a campaign rally in February that, while in office, he told the leader of a “big” NATO country that he would tell Russia to “do whatever the hell [it wants]” were that country to be delinquent on its “bills” from the organisation.56 He is also reportedly considering a two-tier restructuring of NATO whereby the U.S. would sharply curtail its security ties with member countries that do not spend at least 2 per cent of gross domestic product on defence.57
Prominent Chinese strategists worry about Trump’s economic agenda and a potential U.S.-Russia understanding about Ukraine that would blunt the momentum of deepening Sino-Russian alignment. They also believe, however, that his aversion to multilateralism would undercut Washington’s ability to compete with Beijing by weakening the network of alliances and partnerships that augment the former’s global reach.58
C.
Competition among Trump’s Likely Advisers
A second Trump administration’s approach to China would also hinge on the cadre of advisers whom he would hire and the extent to which he would heed their counsel. Some officials who served during his first term would not return in a second one; others likely would. Trump and most of his senior advisers would likely be unified around the imperative of disentangling the U.S. economy from China’s more aggressively, with some even advocating complete decoupling. On other issues, however, Trump’s thinking does not self-evidently align with that of any of the officials who would likely be trying to persuade him to adopt their ideas. Importantly, those officials are not themselves of one mind.59
The simplest taxonomy, comprising two groups, reveals different views about how the U.S. should characterise the China challenge and what objectives it should pursue. Some figures, including former Secretary Pompeo – whom many observers speculate would return in a high-level position in a second Trump administration – see strategic competition between Washington and Beijing as a global struggle.60 They also believe that it is intensely – and perhaps fundamentally – ideological in nature.61 They argue, in addition, that the U.S. must do more to defend Taiwan – with some supporting the adoption of “strategic clarity” (whereby the U.S. would make an explicit defensive commitment) – even as it continues helping Ukraine battle Russia’s all-out invasion; indeed, to their minds, China would be likelier to attack Taiwan were the U.S. to entrust Europe with principal responsibility for Ukrainian security.62 To those in this camp, the U.S. object must be to “win” the competition with China; mere management will not suffice.63
Other figures – including former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development Elbridge Colby and Trump’s running mate, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio – argue that relative U.S. influence is declining and that Washington must focus on forestalling Chinese hegemony in Asia, not on the more daunting task of containing Beijing globally.64 They see strategic competition principally as a function of shifting power dynamics, not of irreconcilable ideological differences.65 They argue that the U.S. must defend Taiwan first and foremost, contending that Washington’s continued military support for Kyiv is depleting the stockpile of materiel that Washington can provide to Taipei.66 To those in this camp, the U.S. must focus on achieving a modus vivendi with China in Asia and guard against overreaching in its competition with Beijing outside that theatre; with limited resources, the argument goes, the U.S. must be unapologetic about making difficult strategic choices.
Cleavages among advisers, and Trump’s own inconsistencies, would likely leave their mark on U.S. policy toward China in a second Trump administration.
Cleavages among advisers, and Trump’s own inconsistencies, would likely leave their mark on U.S. policy toward China in a second Trump administration – as they did in the first. A little over four years ago, as Trump was preparing to run for re-election against then-candidate Biden, journalists Edward Wong and Michael Crowley assessed that “administration players on China have been divided by factional feuding and irreconcilable policy goals, with security hawks and religious freedom crusaders butting heads with Wall Street advocates and free traders”. Those who sought to advance “get-tough-on-China policies … ran into opposition from an unexpected quarter. President Trump himself was undermining their work”.67 There is reason to believe that these dynamics would play out should Trump serve a second term, with at least the two main camps competing with one another and with Trump himself.68
The first camp’s views are further from Trump’s than the second’s; there is no evidence that the former president discerns an existential struggle between competing U.S. and Chinese ideologies, and his longstanding fixation on trade deficits suggests that he might well deem the U.S.-China relationship to be in a satisfactory place were the two countries to ink a trade deal along the lines of the one that they reached in January 2020. Even the second camp, with its narrower focus on preventing Chinese dominance in Asia, could have an uphill climb to gain his full support since Trump seems amenable to an international order that revolves around spheres of influence. The widely held view that his withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and his scepticism of U.S. alliances with Japan and South Korea eroded U.S. influence in Asia does not appear to have altered his thinking.
Both camps described here would almost surely have representatives in a second Trump administration, and Trump might well – as he did before – allow them to carry out policies that extend far beyond those that he would independently see fit to execute. Still, as O’Brien reminded his audience during a September presentation, those who claim to know the precise contours of Trump’s China policy should be viewed with suspicion: “Anyone who says they’re speaking for Donald Trump, whether it’s on personnel or policy, is not speaking for Donald Trump. Donald Trump is going to speak for Donald Trump”.69
D.
An Uncertain Taiwan Policy
The foregoing considerations – Trump’s focus on trade, his transactional approach to foreign policy and significant differences among his likely advisers – would play an important role in shaping Taiwan policy, the most enduring and potent source of frictions between the U.S. and China.
Support for bolstering the island’s defences is robust, bipartisan and growing in Congress. There are important splits, however, among past and present officials – including within the Republican Party – over how to conduct Taiwan policy. The debates concern fundamental questions: should the U.S. revise or even abandon its longstanding approach to cross-strait tensions? How essential is a free Taiwan to U.S. national interests, and how far should the U.S. be willing to go to maintain one?
The U.S. has had a policy of “dual deterrence” – in Washington parlance, “strategic ambiguity” – since it normalised relations with China in 1979. The upshot of this ambiguity is that if both China and Taiwan are unsure of how the U.S. might react if war were to break out over the island, they are both likely to assume the worst from their respective perches. Thus, should Beijing be contemplating an invasion of Taipei to reunify the island with the mainland, it would likely surmise that Washington would intervene as forcefully as possible – a judgment that would presumably dissuade it from attacking. Conversely, should Taipei be thinking about declaring formal independence, it would likely calculate that Washington’s response would be lacklustre – and thus refrain from taking such a step. Dual deterrence has played an important role in preventing a U.S.-China war over Taiwan, even as the peace is growing more tenuous.70
Some observers think that Trump’s reputation as mercurial could help maintain that framework. A former official said he “enjoys being seen as someone who’s unpredictable and who could choose to do anything at any time. He might say to Xi: ‘You better believe that I’d do something’”.71 Trump has often recounted that he warned Xi not to move on Taiwan while he was president, and he reportedly told those gathered at a May fundraiser that he would bomb China were it do so.72 He has also expressed the opinion, however, that if Beijing were to proceed, Washington would be unable to stop it, citing how close Taiwan is to China and how far away the island is from U.S. shores.73 On most occasions, however, he demurs when journalists ask him how he would respond to a Chinese invasion.74 Perhaps this variation in tacks reflects Trump’s considered design to keep China off balance. A simpler interpretation is that he himself may not know how he would respond and is hesitant to commit to Taiwan’s defence, in which case ambiguity might fairly represent his actual policy preference.75
Trump sees Taiwan in transactional terms, mirroring how he views other U.S. security alliances and partnerships.
Clearer, however, is that Trump sees Taiwan in transactional terms, mirroring how he views other U.S. security alliances and partnerships. In July 2023, for example, he said “Taiwan took … our business away. We should have stopped them. We should have taxed them. We should have tariffed them”.76 In a July 2024 interview, he went further, claiming that Taiwan has taken “about 100 per cent of our chip business. I think, Taiwan should pay us for defence. … Taiwan doesn’t give us anything”.77 While no prominent figure in his orbit makes that argument, some are becoming increasingly vocal in urging Taiwan to spend more on defence; Colby, for example, concludes that “at a certain point … defending Taiwan will become more costly and risky than it is worth for us. At some point, we will lose more people, spend more money and forces and hurt our military so much that it is simply not worth a free Taiwan”.78 Colby and those who share his views are not just making a spending argument; they are concerned that Taipei is not moving quickly enough to fortify its asymmetric defences against a potential assault by Beijing.79
Others who counsel Trump disagree; indeed, in their efforts to back Taiwan vis-à-vis China, high-level officials in a second Trump administration might recommend the adoption of strategic clarity about the U.S. defence commitment to Taiwan, which would mark a fundamental change to Washington’s Taiwan policy. Pompeo, for example, contends that dual deterrence “now serves more to embolden Beijing’s aggressive posture toward Taiwan and mislead the international community”. He concludes that recognising Taiwanese independence is accordingly “a moral imperative, a strategic necessity and a rightful acknowledgment of the democratic processes that define a true, sovereign state”.80
The extent to which such views would sway Trump, however, is unclear. A former official warned that “if I were the Taiwanese, I would be very concerned. The most comforting explanation for Trump’s statements is that he wants to prevent Taiwan from assuming too much about the extent of U.S. commitment” – and wants it, therefore, to exhibit greater urgency in upgrading its own defences.81 Some observers think that he might consider scaling back U.S. support for Taiwan to stabilise the U.S.-China relationship, aiming to broker a détente with Xi and claim credit for what he would deem a historic breakthrough. In this case, they think, China would not necessarily see a green light to invade Taiwan, but it could feel emboldened to intensify the patient, multifaceted pressure campaign that it is presently pursuing – with the objective of reunification – and test U.S. resolve more openly and provocatively.82
As farfetched as this scenario may seem, another former official suggested that Trump’s experience as a negotiator may give him the confidence to pursue goals that most observers would regard as exceedingly ambitious, if not impossible.83 Granted, the official explained, “he is suspicious of China now” due to China’s failure to uphold the January 2020 trade deal and its opacity in reporting on the pandemic. As such, he would not pursue “endless dialogue” with Xi.84 Yet, whether due to affinity, a desire to enhance his bargaining power or a mix of the two factors, Trump has taken to praising Xi on the campaign trail. In a July 2023 interview, for example, he said Xi “runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. Smart, brilliant, everything perfect”.85 Though Trump might seek to punish China for the pandemic, his seeming admiration for Xi suggests that were Beijing to make certain economic concessions to Washington, he might consider reducing support for Taiwan – and possibly also easing export controls on China and downsizing U.S. security initiatives in Asia.
That transactionalism would likely pit him against the more aggressive advisers in his administration, who would be inclined to characterise the bilateral relationship in Cold War terms. As fraught as the relationship is now, suggestions by high-ranking U.S. officials that they wish to see China go the way of the Soviet Union could be perceived as an existential threat in Beijing, placing ties on a far more dangerous trajectory.
III.
Potential Elements of Harris’s Approach
Vice President Harris would likely pursue a China policy that hews to the path that the Biden administration has forged – diverging from the “engage, but hedge” approach that the U.S. largely adopted from the Nixon administration through the Obama administration, but embracing alliances and partnerships more enthusiastically than the Trump administration did, and probing for ways to make progress on issues of human rights and international law that would likely resonate given her personal background and legal career. Reviewing the perspectives of her key national security advisers suggests, in addition, that her approach would reflect an appreciation for the limits to unilateral U.S. influence. Finally, Harris’s running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, who lived in China for a year and has subsequently visited numerous times, could shape her China policy as well, combining concern about the country’s human rights record – an issue of longstanding interest for him – with recognition that bilateral cooperation is imperative.
A.
Harris’s Record to Date
Should Harris be elected in November, her China policy would likely draw from her upbringing, legal background and experience dealing with foreign policy issues as a U.S. senator and vice president.86 A senior Biden administration official told Crisis Group that her upbringing as the daughter of civil rights activists informs her focus on human rights, while her career as a prosecutor – culminating with her time as California’s attorney general from 2011 t0 2017 – gives her a strong interest in international law.87 These emerged during her time as a U.S. senator, when she co-sponsored the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act (2019) and the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act (2020), both of which Trump signed into law.88
Yet she does not view China exclusively through those two lenses, maintaining that even as the U.S. calls out China for what it perceives as violations of the norms and laws that Washington says should anchor the international order, the world’s two foremost powers should pursue opportunities to cooperate.89 (Chinese officials rejoin that the U.S., its allies and its partners are also widely criticised for breaches of said order.90) Harris distilled her thinking about China perhaps most succinctly in her remarks at the 2024 Munich Security Conference, explaining that Washington is “standing up to Beijing when necessary and also working together when it serves our interest”.91
Harris staked out similar positions during her bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination to oppose Trump in the 2020 presidential election. (She left the field of candidates early, ultimately becoming Biden’s running mate.) In a 2019 memoir, which she released prior to her first presidential run, she expressed concern about China’s theft of U.S. intellectual property and called for empowering law enforcement agencies to curb the export of fentanyl precursors from China.92 In August 2019, during the campaign, she stated that a Harris administration would “cooperate with China on global issues like climate change, but [not] allow human rights abuses to go unchecked. The United States must reclaim our own moral authority and work with like-minded nations to stand up forcefully for human rights in China and around the world”.93
As vice president, Harris has helped implement the Biden administration’s three-part strategy toward China, which U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken outlined in 2022: “We will invest in the foundations of our strength here at home – our competitiveness, our innovation, our democracy. We will align our efforts with our network of allies and partners, acting with common purpose and in common cause. And harnessing these two key assets, we’ll compete with China to defend our interests and build our vision for the future”.94 This strategy reflects the Trump administration’s assessment that Beijing is Washington’s foremost strategic competitor, but rejects the “America first” worldview that underpinned it, particularly with its emphasis on enlisting U.S. allies and partners in shared purposes.
The Biden administration has pursued this strategy through a series of measures. It has “invested” through pieces of legislation – including the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act – that aim to strengthen long-term U.S. economic competitiveness. It has “aligned” with other countries by seeking to reinvigorate longstanding alliances and groupings such as NATO, the G7 and the Quad. It has also developed new, “minilateral” arrangements such as a September 2021 defence cooperation pact among the U.S., the UK and Australia (known as AUKUS); a January 2023 agreement between the U.S. and India to partner on developing critical and emerging technologies; and an August 2023 summit that convened the leaders of the U.S., Japan and South Korea. The Biden administration contends, therefore, that it has “competed” with China effectively to shape the international order.95
In support of the “invest, align and compete” strategy, Harris has rejected Beijing’s maritime claims in the South China Sea, stated that China engages in military and economic coercion of its neighbours, and charged it with impeding maritime freedom and international trade.96 She has travelled to the Indo-Pacific four times and met with the leaders of all five U.S. treaty allies in the region (Australia, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and the Philippines). Additionally, at the September 2023 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in Jakarta, she announced the establishment of a U.S.-ASEAN centre in Washington.97 Harris has also worked to strengthen the U.S.-Philippines alliance, having met with President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. six times since he took office and, in November 2022, becoming the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to visit the Philippine island of Palawan (the visit was significant because the island abuts the South China Sea, where Sino-Philippine tensions are mounting).98
Harris is within the mainstream of Biden administration opinion that supporting Taiwan does not preclude backing Ukraine.
Unlike those in Trump’s orbit who believe that the U.S. must prioritise Asia above all other theatres, Harris is within the mainstream of Biden administration opinion that supporting Taiwan does not preclude backing Ukraine – and that failing to support Ukraine would undercut confidence in the U.S. as a security partner in Asia. In her remarks at the 2023 Munich Security Conference, Harris warned that if Russia were to conquer Ukraine, “other nations could feel emboldened to follow [its] violent example. Other authoritarian powers could seek to bend the world to their will through coercion, disinformation and even brute force”.99
At least one more area of likely continuity between the Biden administration and a Harris administration merits mention: the reinforcement of various dialogue mechanisms that have helped prevent strategic competition from devolving into unchecked escalation. Chief among these are communications between the U.S. and Chinese militaries – limited but growing – and a high-level back channel that Washington and Beijing have used over the decades to conduct sensitive conversations outside of public view. With the transfer of power in Taiwan from President Tsai Ing-wen to a successor, Lai Ching-te, who is more vocal in criticising Beijing and touting Taiwan’s separation from the mainland, Harris and her national security advisers would need to make immediate use of these mechanisms to keep cross-strait frictions in check.
A former senior Biden administration official who worked for Harris said a Harris administration would be unlikely to have significant room to reshape U.S. policy toward China: Washington assesses that Beijing aims to supplant it as Asia’s pre-eminent power, and the U.S. foreign policy establishment has come to regard bilateral relations as irreducibly competitive.100 Another former senior official who worked for Harris said the U.S. needs a “balanced, cohesive, comprehensive China policy that considers how to manage strategic competition”, reassuring Taiwan while lowering the rhetorical temperature in the strait, slowing Sino-Russian alignment and finding room for cooperation between the U.S. and China.101 Yet amid escalating wars in Europe and the Middle East and shrinking domestic political space for creative diplomacy toward China, the official acknowledged that saying “we need a new blueprint” would be difficult.102
B.
Potential Areas of “Dial Shifting”
Given that Harris has been “very invested” in the Biden administration’s approach, one former official expected that hers would build upon it.103 Another former official agreed, noting that “she is a co-leader of the current administration; its foreign policy is hers as well”.104 Thus, one former official explained, the question is “how much dial shifting” Harris might contemplate in China policy – not only in response to moves by Beijing, but also to leave her own imprimatur on U.S. foreign policy. This former official noted that she “doesn’t have a rigid ideology that would fit into an international relations textbook. She’s a pragmatist”.105
This official ventured that the U.S. export control apparatus is one topic that could come up for review in a Harris administration.106 In the two years since the Biden administration imposed its first set of constraints on China’s ability to obtain both high-end semiconductors and the equipment that is required to produce them, U.S. officials have expressed concern about the speed with which China has circumvented the restrictions to enhance its self-reliance.107 Another former official said one of Harris’s major tasks would therefore be to refine U.S. economic policy toward China: adjusting export controls to enlist greater multilateral support for achieving their objectives and limit the harm to U.S. companies that operate in China, while ensuring that Washington and Beijing can maintain a productive trading relationship.108
As president, [Harris] would likely place greater emphasis on engaging countries of the so-called Global South.
There are at least two other topics that a Harris administration might consider in a stocktaking exercise. First, according to a former official, Harris believes that “there are vast swathes of the world that we don’t spend enough time on. She doesn’t think that our relationships with developing countries should be about the U.S. versus China. She thinks that we should be engaging with them on their own terms”.109 As vice president, Harris has spent much of her time abroad in Africa, the Caribbean and northern Central America, all places that she believes the U.S. has historically underweighted in its foreign policy.110 On the sidelines of the 2023 ASEAN Summit, she observed that the U.S. “cannot have any credibility if we don’t have some level of profound and sincere interest and therefore knowledge about what is happening in other countries”.111 As president, she would likely place greater emphasis on engaging countries of the so-called Global South, as many assess that the U.S. does not push hard to strengthen ties with these countries unless and until China has undertaken headline-grabbing initiatives there.
Secondly, Harris’s identity as the child of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father could help sensitise her to the risk that strategic competition may produce social spillover. In May 2020, she introduced a Senate resolution that condemned phrases such as “Chinese virus” and “kung flu” – which Trump had used to characterise the coronavirus – and urged the U.S. to dedicate itself anew to “combating misinformation and discrimination that put Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders at risk”.112 In a May 2024 address celebrating Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month, she cited the role of Chinese Americans in constructing the U.S. transcontinental railroad.113 Her ties to the AANHPI community offer grounds for believing that it would be well represented in a Harris administration and keen to distinguish more strongly between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people.114 There is much work to be done, with nearly two thirds of Chinese Americans stating that the poor state of U.S.-China relations “negatively affect[s] how other Americans treat them”.115
C.
Key Advisers
Another way to get a sense of how a Harris administration might approach China policy is to consider the perspectives of her national security advisor, Philip Gordon, who many observers believe would continue in that role were she to be elected, and her deputy national security advisor, Rebecca Lissner, who played a central role in drafting the Biden administration’s 2022 national security strategy. Both acknowledge the scale and complexity of strategic competition with China, contending that it is essential for the U.S. to strengthen its economic resilience and modernise its diplomatic network to meet that challenge. Both, however, eschew notions of a zero-sum, existential contest between Washington and Beijing and appreciate the limits to unilateral U.S. influence.
Gordon is best known for his scholarship on and policy efforts to shape developments in Europe and the Middle East – he served as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs from 2009 to 2013 and as White House coordinator for the Middle East from 2013 to 2015 – but his current portfolio as the vice president’s national security advisor also covers Asia. In that capacity, he stated in May that China is “a country that has the means and the interest in challenging the international order”. He also expressed concern about Sino-Russian relations, but he argued that the U.S. is well positioned to manage deepening autocratic alignment due to the fabric of partnerships that it is stitching across Asia and Europe.116
Between stints in government, Gordon expressed scepticism of the Trump admin-istration’s China policy.
Between stints in government, Gordon expressed scepticism of the Trump administration’s China policy. He signed a July 2019 open letter arguing against “U.S. efforts to treat China as an enemy and decouple it from the global economy”.117 In an April 2020 webinar, he stated that “there’s no way to avoid being honest about China and what it’s doing in the world. At the same time, we have to be careful … not to let it become counterproductive”. He criticised the Trump administration for suggesting that it might permit U.S. citizens to sue the Chinese government for mismanaging the pandemic or renege on U.S. sovereign debt obligations to China. He also called out a congressional proposal that would have prevented Chinese nationals from completing graduate or postgraduate work in the U.S. in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields.118 The throughline in his critiques is a concern about overreaching when contesting Chinese influence.
Gordon presented his most detailed rebuttal of the Trump administration’s approach to China – and the most thorough exposition of his proposed alternative – in a July 2020 essay, arguing that the U.S. should focus on “rebuilding U.S. economic strength and domestic unity”; “coordinat[ing] positions of the world’s leading democracies”; “restor[ing] deterrence and reduc[ing] the risks of Chinese miscalculation”; and “continu[ing] to deal directly with China and explor[ing] practical cooperation to advance its own goals”.119 He and former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg argued in an essay that same month that “[r]ebuilding the United States’ domestic strength and unity – and leveraging rather than alienating democratic allies – would be a more effective approach than wishful thinking that rhetorical assaults from top U.S. officials will magically transform the Chinese regime”.120
This cautious assessment of the limits to unilateral U.S. influence underpins Gordon’s appraisal of an evolving international order. In June 2015, shortly after stepping down from the Obama administration, he wrote an essay that criticised U.S. efforts to reshape the Middle East, noting “the fallacy that there is an external, American solution to every problem”.121 Gordon expounded upon this proposition in a 2020 book: stating that “[t]he Hippocratic oath to ‘do no harm’ is not always an option in international diplomacy”, he cautioned that “turning to aggressive, invasive treatment under the wrong circumstances can be worse than containing and managing problems, however real”.122 Applied to Asia today, this passage suggests a foreign policy in which Washington would be clear-eyed about the extent to which it can and cannot affect Chinese domestic politics, stymie Chinese technological development, and prevent middle powers and developing countries from deepening their ties with China.123
Former colleagues suggest another element of Gordon’s worldview that could shape a Harris administration’s China policy: strategic empathy. Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for strategic communications and speechwriting during the Obama administration, observed in July that Gordon “has a capacity to see America and its foreign policy from the outside in, not just the inside out”.124 Strategic empathy does not imply strategic sympathy; Gordon has expressed strong concern about China’s internal and external conduct, and there is every reason to expect that he would continue to do so in a Harris administration. Still, a willingness to consider why China’s assessment of U.S. strategic intentions has darkened over the past decade could facilitate productive conversations between U.S. and Chinese diplomats – provided, of course, that Chinese interlocutors reciprocate by considering why Washington’s view of Beijing’s strategic intentions has similarly dimmed.125
Like Gordon, Lissner argues that the U.S. must reconcile itself to an international order in which its margin of pre-eminence is declining. Unlike those in Trump’s orbit who reach a similar conclusion, however, that assessment inclines her to advocate for reinvigorating U.S. alliances and partnerships, not embracing an “America first” mindset. Her work suggests a core conviction: if Washington were to proceed from the belief that it could restore its post-Cold War standing by dint of sheer exertion, it would only hasten that trend. In a December 2017 essay, she lamented that the congressionally mandated national security strategy had “devolved into a rhetorical exercise, characterised by grandiose ambitions and laundry lists of priorities”.126 In a November 2018 piece, she warned that “the tenets that have guided American grand strategy since the end of the Cold War … are under great strain and may no longer be tenable”.127
Lissner believes that the Soviet Union’s dissolution imbued the U.S. with an exaggerated sense of its own agency.
Lissner believes that the Soviet Union’s dissolution imbued the U.S. with an exaggerated sense of its own agency. She observed in an April 2019 essay that “if there is one resounding lesson of the post-Cold War period, it is: just because the United States can do something, does not mean that the United States should do something” (emphasis in the original).128 In a 2020 book, she and co-author Mira Rapp-Hooper, the current senior director for East Asia and Oceania on the National Security Council, urged U.S. policymakers to dispense with “any illusions of the United States’ ability to craft order unilaterally and universally according to its own liberal preferences”. They concluded that U.S. power’s “relative decline will be most acute in Asia, where China’s economic growth is fuelling its bid for regional hegemony”.129 Lissner and co-author Micah Zenko argued in an August 2020 essay that senior U.S. officials could not reasonably enjoin allies and partners to enlist in “a Manichean struggle with China”, not least because Trump had often disparaged them.130
Lissner’s next book was published while she was serving in the Biden administration. Although it was primarily historical in nature – examining how the Korean, Vietnam and 1990-1991 Gulf Wars had shaped U.S. grand strategy – it closed with an application of those case studies’ lessons to the present: “The United States can no longer claim the freedom of action – and margin of error – afforded by uncontested primacy, nor is it feasible to pursue a grand strategy that seeks to recapture it”. She warned that “any U.S.-China contingency would introduce catastrophic escalation risks” and “likely engage the United States’ most vital national interests”.131
Most recently, as noted above, Lissner helped draft the Biden administration’s national security strategy, which contends that China “has ambitions to create an enhanced sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific and to become the world’s leading power”. The document also notes, however, that China is “central to the global economy and has a significant impact on shared challenges, particularly climate change and global public health”. It emphasises that, in competing with China, the U.S. should “meet the economic and development needs of partner countries, not for the sake of competition, but for their own sake”.132 A former senior official contends that part of Washington’s “long game” will be “figuring out how to outcompete China without framing developing countries as pawns in great-power competition”.133
D.
The Walz Factor
A final factor to consider is the potential influence of Harris’s running mate, Governor Walz, who has a longstanding interest in U.S. policy toward China. His experiences there date back to 1989, when he spent a year teaching English and U.S. history to roughly 300 students in a middle school in Foshan. All told, he has been to China some fifteen times.134 In the 1990s and 2000s, as a high school teacher in Minnesota, Walz organised summer trips to the country for his students.135 Were Harris to be elected, he would become the highest-ranking U.S. official since President George H. W. Bush to have lived in China.136 He reflected on his visits there during his 1 October debate with Vance, stating that “this is about trying to understand the world”.137 There are presently fewer than 1,000 U.S. students in China, down from a high of roughly 15,000 in the 2011-2012 academic year.138 One might expect Walz to advocate for more U.S.-China student exchanges as a way of cultivating a new generation of China hands and mitigating strategic distrust between the two countries.
Political scientist Paul Musgrave explains that Walz’s time in China shaped the basic duality that informs his thinking about the country: “his professed affection for the Chinese people and culture has been matched by a longstanding criticism of the country’s rulers”.139 When he returned from his year of teaching there, he posited that if Chinese citizens “had the proper leadership, there are no limits on what they could accomplish. They are such kind, generous, capable people”.140 The Chinese government cracked down on dissidents at Tiananmen Square during that year, an event that would leave an enduring imprint on him.
As a member of Congress, Walz served on the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which spotlights human rights abuses in the country. At a November 2011 hearing on the then-detained blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng, he declared that China cannot credibly claim to be “serious about human rights while it flagrantly violates its own laws and international human rights commitments”.141 At a separate hearing that month on China’s digital censorship, he stated that “human rights are … supreme to the other issues at hand”.142 At a May 2014 hearing marking the 25th anniversary of Tiananmen, he warned about the “risk of forgetting the lessons that were there”.143 Jeffrey Ngo, a U.S.-based activist from Hong Kong, said Walz helped sustain congressional backing for the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act.144 Separately, Walz travelled to Tibet in 2015 (he first visited in 1990), and in 2016, he met the Dalai Lama and arranged a meeting between Lobgsang Sangay, then the leader of Tibet’s government in exile, and a group of Minnesota high school students.
Walz’s perspective on China ... is neither exclusively critical nor solely focused on human rights.
Walz’s perspective on China, however, is neither exclusively critical nor solely focused on human rights. While in Congress, he also co-sponsored resolutions that highlighted the contributions of Chinese Americans as well as one that would have facilitated immigration of highly skilled workers from China.145 He has also stressed that the U.S. and China have no choice but to cooperate. In November 2015, upon returning from a congressional delegation to Tibet, he observed that the U.S.-China relationship is “too critically important on trade; it’s too critically important on climate change; it’s too critically important on national security, issues of containment of terrorism and everything else that’s involved”.146
Walz has continued to articulate this balanced view in the intervening years, stating in a September 2016 interview that China is “a complex country” and that “I don’t fall into the category that China necessarily needs to be an adversarial relationship. I totally disagree. … There’s many areas of cooperation that we can work on”.147 He echoed this sentiment in a January 2020 reception that convened friends and supporters of the University of Minnesota’s China Center: “The world demands solutions, and the two countries best positioned to be able to do that are the People’s Republic of China and the United States”.148
IV.
Policy Recommendations
While no one can predict exactly how Donald Trump or Kamala Harris would deal with Beijing, the two candidates would likely adopt very different approaches, albeit ones that would share a view of China as chief strategic competitor for the U.S. Trump mostly views U.S.-China relations through the lens of trade. He may be willing to downplay or shelve many longstanding U.S. objectives vis-à-vis China if he believes that Washington can gain economic leverage as a result. Efforts at forecasting his approach must also take into account, however, that his own views oscillate frequently and that he does not feel beholden to his advisers’ opinions.
Harris, by contrast, would likely exhibit considerable continuity with Biden, aiming to further invest in U.S. economic competitiveness and strengthen the U.S. network of alliances and partnerships, especially in Asia. She would likely approach China policy with a sense of realism concerning both relative U.S. decline and the growing complexity of the international order. Walz’s influence, finally, would likely reinforce her pragmatic bent, one that would incline her to a balance of values-inflected, competitive and cooperative policies – calling out China’s human rights abuses and violations of international law but also finding opportunities for Washington and Beijing to collaborate on the management of transnational challenges.
The two candidates have a common interest in maintaining a stable relationship that will allow the U.S. to compete where it sees fit.
Despite these differences, several challenges of China policy will confront whichever candidate prevails in November. Moreover, the two candidates have a common interest in maintaining a stable relationship that will allow the U.S. to compete where it sees fit but will not tip into potentially catastrophic conflict. As such, either a Trump administration or a Harris administration should take at least four steps to minimise the escalation risks of strategic competition:
First, work to enhance dual deterrence. While some individuals in Trump’s orbit contend that this policy is obsolescent, it remains the only viable basis for preserving peace across the Taiwan Strait. Thus, the U.S. should continue working to persuade China that it would incur devastating military and economic consequences were it to attempt to invade Taiwan. Part of that effort should involve further bolstering Taiwan’s “porcupine defences”, asymmetric capabilities that would make it painful for China to invade and annex the island.149
Also in the realm of dual deterrence – in this case vis-à-vis Taipei – the U.S. should convey to President Lai that taking a harder line on cross-strait tensions than his predecessor, President Tsai, could complicate Washington’s efforts to be supportive of Taipei and play into Beijing’s coercion. In his inaugural address, Lai was more explicit about his Democratic Progressive Party’s longstanding position that Taiwan is a “sovereign, independent nation” than previous presidents from his party have been upon assuming office. He also declined to say he would conduct cross-strait relations in accordance with the Taiwanese constitution and the 1992 Act Governing Relations Between the People of Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area.150 Even as she raised Taiwan’s international profile and vowed not to acquiesce to China’s intimidation, Tsai nodded to Beijing’s sensitivities by invoking those two documents, which contain textual elements that suggest that Taiwan and mainland China are part of a single territorial entity.
The U.S. should also exercise greater discipline, both by demonstrating that it remains committed to dual deterrence in deed – not just in word – and avoiding seeming displays of support for Taiwan that actually undercut the island’s security.151 Thus, for example, senior officials should not encourage Taipei to make moves toward independence. It is also essential for the president, the president’s China advisers across the government and members of Congress to appreciate that seeming departures from stated U.S. policy can, over time, nurture the impression in China that de facto U.S. policy is moving in a destabilising direction.152
The successful wielding of deterrence requires concomitant emphases on threats and assurances.
Finally, the successful wielding of deterrence requires concomitant emphases on threats and assurances.153 Washington should accordingly invest more effort in assuring Beijing that a peaceful political settlement of cross-strait tensions remains possible. There is little evidence that China is imminently preparing to attack Taiwan, even as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is building up its capabilities for such a contingency. A U.S. decision, however, to recognise Taiwanese independence or restore the U.S.-Republic of China mutual defence treaty – which entered into force on 3 March 1955 and lasted through 1 January 1979 – could prompt Beijing to undertake such an assault.154
Secondly, deepen communications between the U.S. military and the PLA. These ties, which are far less robust than those that the U.S. and the Soviet Union developed after the Cuban missile crisis, will become increasingly essential as the combined number of U.S. and Chinese military assets in Asia increases.155 Recent months have seen encouraging steps. On 29 August, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met in Beijing with General Zhang Youxia, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. The following month witnessed a flurry of engagements. Admiral Samuel Paparo, head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, held a telephone call with General Wu Yanan, commander of the PLA’s Southern Theater Command, which oversees the PLA’s activities in the South China Sea. Michael Chase, deputy U.S. assistant secretary of defense for China, Taiwan and Mongolia, led a U.S. delegation that met in Beijing with Chinese counterparts at the Xiangshan Forum, China’s premier global security gathering, and during the eighteenth round of Defense Policy Coordination Talks between the two countries. Most recently, General Wu attended the Indo-Pacific defence chiefs conference in Hawaii.
Beyond continuing these interactions, the next U.S. administration should push hard to establish a communications channel between U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command, which oversees the PLA’s activities in the Taiwan Strait and East China Sea. Continued discussions with the Southern Theater Command and prospective ones with the Eastern Theater Command should seek to narrow the two countries’ differences over the utility of crisis-management channels and procedures. Bilateral military ties are fragile, and China could suspend or downgrade them to signal dissatisfaction with particular U.S. actions – as it did after NATO’s accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May 1999 – but that precedent does not diminish the importance of U.S. efforts to foster them.
Thirdly, use more frequently – and expand the remit of – the bilateral “strategic channel”. High-level U.S. and Chinese officials have used this conduit for decades to conduct sensitive, substantive discussions in confidence.156 During the Biden administration, a series of exchanges between Sullivan and his counterpart Wang Yi, China’s top foreign policy official, has helped steady the bilateral relationship. The two held their first meeting in Vienna in May 2023, following two incidents that threatened to send U.S.-China ties into an escalatory spiral: then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August 2022 visit to Taiwan and the February 2023 sighting of a Chinese surveillance balloon over U.S. territory. That meeting and their next one, in Malta in September 2023, paved the way for a crucial tête-à-tête between Biden and Xi in San Francisco in November 2023.
The Biden-Xi meeting has not ... has helped the intensification of strategic competition occur in a more predictable manner.
The Biden-Xi meeting has not – and could not reasonably have been expected to – reset a fundamentally competitive relationship, but it has helped the intensification of strategic competition occur in a more predictable manner. It has also facilitated more frequent meetings – on a wider range of issues – between high-level working groups of U.S. and Chinese officials. Those meetings have produced modest but notable dividends, most importantly steps by China to crack down on the export of fentanyl precursors.157 The U.S.-China strategic channel could now serve to advance discussions on mitigating the security risks of artificial intelligence and even on establishing a new framework for arms control. As with military ties, the U.S. cannot compel China to make greater use of this strategic channel, but developments over the past year and a half offer cautious grounds for hoping that the two countries will continue to avail themselves of it.
Fourthly, avoid intimating that it aims to achieve a Cold War-style defeat of China. Such a suggestion would risk turning a manageable competition into an existential struggle – against a challenger, importantly, that is far more economically capable and deeply integrated into the international order than the Soviet Union ever was during the Cold War.158 While U.S. allies and partners share many of Washington’s apprehensions about Beijing’s conduct and ambitions, few, if any, of them would participate in a campaign to depose the Chinese Communist Party or relegate China to the periphery of the international order.
To place its China policy on a more stable footing, the U.S. should adopt a more nuanced assessment of its trajectory. The discourse in Washington has unfortunately come to alternate between analytical extremes, suggesting that Beijing is either on a march toward global hegemony or on the precipice of systemic decline. The first assessment discounts China’s competitive liabilities – including economic headwinds and mounting pushback from advanced industrial democracies – while the second discounts its competitive strengths – including technological advances and deepening influence in the developing world.159 The more prosaic likelihood is that China will endure as a pillar of the international order, most obviously in Asia: the U.S. can no more expect to contain it within the continent than China can expect to displace the U.S. from there. Competitive coexistence between the two countries is far likelier than a power transition.
V.
Conclusion
While Trump and Harris agree that Beijing is Washington’s most capable strategic competitor, the contrast between the respective approaches that they would likely take belies the oft-cited U.S. “consensus” on China policy – and highlights both the opportunity and the imperative to consider what a durable policy would entail. That tensions between Washington and Beijing will likely keep mounting does not preordain a new twilight struggle or a catastrophic confrontation. It does, however, place an increasing premium on thoughtful diplomacy to ensure that the world’s two foremost powers can compete responsibly and cooperate to address the transnational challenges that will indefinitely bind their societies and economies.
Washington/Brussels, 17 October 2024
