President Biden and his aides have taken office with deep experience in transatlantic affairs. But over the course of four years, they have also focused on the Pacific region, where China seeks to be the dominant player. Their main effort: building alliances to counter China.
President-elect Donald J. Trump has already signaled a different approach to dealing with China. he Invited Chinese leader Xi Jinping at his inauguration ceremony on Monday. The two spoke by phone on Friday, and Mr. Xi sends Chinese Vice President Han Qing participated in the ceremony, which is a departure from the Chinese tradition of having its ambassador in Washington.
The Biden administration’s eventual activities targeting China contradict this. Mr. Biden He made a call last Sunday with the leaders of Japan and the Philippines to confirm a new trilateral security arrangement he helped build. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited South Korea and Japan this month on his last official trip.
In the telling of Mr. Biden and his aides, they give Mr. Trump a sharp competitive advantage over China, the United States’ largest rival.
Of all Biden’s foreign policies, historians can ultimately view his approach to China as existing on a continuum. His administration has built its own structure on the foundation of competition laid out by the Trump team, and is now turning it on its head.
It is unclear what Mr. Trump will do with that. He admires authoritarian President Xi Jinping, and sees China mainly through the lens of economic negotiations. Trump’s billionaire advisers, including Elon Musk, want to maintain and perhaps expand business dealings with China.
But his top picks for foreign policy aides are more in line with Biden: They emphasize that the United States must constrain China across many dimensions, and use the full range of security and economic tools.
One early test will be whether Mr. Trump imposes a ban on TikTok, the Chinese social media app popular with young Americans.
Biden signed bipartisan legislation last year to ban TikTok based on national security concerns unless its parent company, ByteDance, sells it to investors not connected to a “foreign adversary.” ByteDance still owns TikTok and the White House Announced on Friday It is up to Mr. Trump to enact the ban. Mr. Trump said on Saturday that You’ll likely give TikTok a try The ban has been postponed for 90 days, and the company’s CEO plans to attend his inauguration.
Trump’s signature policy toward China during his first term was to impose tariffs on certain Chinese goods. Biden and his aides have maintained these while expanding policy along three main axes: strengthening alliances and creating new security partnerships in the Asia-Pacific region; limiting technology exports to China; And the launch of industrial policy in the United States.
In short, Biden sought to transform China policy into global policy.
During Biden’s term, already tense relations eased when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, the de facto independent island that China claims as its own, and a Chinese spy balloon drifted over the United States. But his team was quick to resume high-level contacts, including between the two militaries.
Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, said the United States and China “compete, and obviously compete aggressively, and yet the relationship still has an element of stability, so we are not currently on the verge of a downward spiral.” In an interview in the West Wing conference room.
He added: “This is an important development over four years in terms of how the relationship is managed on both sides.” He said the Chinese Communist Party has now accepted the Biden team’s formulation of “guided competition” for the relationship.
The Biden administration has been energetic an idea That China He wants to replace the United States Rash Doshi, the China director who served on the National Security Council earlier in the Biden administration, said China is the world’s hegemon. Many Republican lawmakers and policymakers share this view.
Upon taking office, Mr. Biden and his aides saw huge gaps in critical areas, including the U.S. defense industrial base, Mr. Sullivan said.
The administration has established “two big pillars” of policy, as he put it: investments aimed at revamping American manufacturing, technological innovation, and supply chains; And investments in alliances and partnerships, “so that we can expand China’s strategy into a truly regional and global strategy.”
Mr. Sullivan pointed to alliances not only in Asia, but in Europe as well. Mr. Biden’s team has helped persuade European countries to back away from some trade agreements with China, and has also helped NATO issue stronger statements on China and signal support for Taiwan.
The partnership China forged with Russia during President Vladimir Putin’s sweeping invasion of Ukraine helped push the Europeans in this direction, as did China’s cyberespionage efforts.
But transatlantic allies have not gone as far as the United States in viewing China as a threat. Some European politicians still prioritize trade relations with China, the world’s second-largest economy. Trump’s antagonism toward European countries may jeopardize the work of the Biden administration.
Moreover, US allies could run into China’s arms if Trump carries out his threat to impose global tariffs even on them.
Mr. Trump also says that allies are draining the American military, and that they should pay the United States to protect or defend themselves. In Asia, this thinking applies to Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, as well as Taiwan.
The Biden administration had the opposite position. By creating a network of new security agreements among US allies in Asia, it has tried to make their militaries more closely intertwined with each other and with US militaries — which, according to Mr. Biden’s team, will help deter China.
Mr. Biden has also moved to bolster the military capabilities of several allies and the U.S. military presence in Asia: sending Tomahawk missiles to Japan; Working with Britain to begin equipping Australia with nuclear submarine technology, and the submarines themselves; and expanding the US military’s access to Philippine bases near Taiwan.
In private conversations in Washington, Chinese officials complained that it was a policy of containment.
The central question, which is difficult to answer and relevant to Mr. Trump’s team, is whether the Biden administration has struck the right balance between deterrence and provocation. Is China accelerating in strengthening its military capabilities, and is it becoming more aggressive in the region due to American moves in its backyard?
Beijing took notice when Biden said on four separate occasions that the US military would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion.
Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who worked briefly at the State Department under Mr. Blinken, noted that the administration’s policies did not incite the conflict, and that some of its diplomacy helped.
“She was able to avoid extremism,” she said. It remains to be seen whether this flop is ambitious enough to halt the underlying trends.
At the summits, Mr. Xi directly criticized a signature Biden policy that Chinese officials insist is part of the containment effort: export controls on advanced semiconductor chips, including the kind needed to develop artificial intelligence.
After offering the first tranche in 2022, Mr. Sullivan Describe it As a policy aimed at keeping “core technologies” out of the hands of competitors by creating a “small, high-fenced arena.”
Some experts dispute this policy It backfired China has already accelerated the innovation process. The less Chinese companies rely on American technology, they say, the less leverage the United States has over China.
Mr. Sullivan said the criticism “gets the chronology wrong.”
“Our semiconductor export controls were actually a reaction to China’s very systematically stated and stated policy that it would localize its semiconductor manufacturing capabilities,” he said.
Some former officials point to other political flaws. Ryan Haass, China director for President Barack Obama’s National Security Council, listed three: Biden and his team lacked a serious trade agenda for Asia, appeared timid in engaging with China, and appeared more comfortable interacting with advanced democracies on China policy than with advanced democracies. . With developing countries.
But overall, he said, the policy has worked: “America is in a stronger competitive position vis-à-vis China than it was when Biden took office.”
