The Diplomat author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Dr. Van Jackson – a senior lecturer at the School of History, Philosophy, Political Science, and International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington and author of dozens of journal articles, book chapters, and policy reports, as well as five books – is the 462nd in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.”
Analyze the impact of the Trump administration’s foreign policy on great power politics.
Trump and MAGA are an accelerant of great-power confrontation. It’s important to understand that the zero-sum, antagonistic “competition” between China and the United States is an inter-imperial rivalry driven by structural factors.
Both are mobilizing the state to capture a greater share of economic growth for sectional interests within their respective countries. In China, this process is fueled by domestic inequalities as part of a system that vastly overproduces relative to domestic demand. The surpluses that the owners of capital in China capture have to go somewhere and much of it ends up abroad in state-driven foreign policy initiatives.
The U.S. economy, meanwhile, is captured by defense-industrial interests. The trillion-dollar defense budget is a form of military Keynesianism that at once chokes off America’s economic potential and depends on the China threat to justify itself – you don’t need “next-generation air dominance,” for example, to beat drug cartels.
So, the forces driving and sustaining Sino-U.S. rivalry are far bigger than one presidency or one man. MAGA and Trump represent forces that heighten rivalry because they exacerbate the structural drivers of rivalry. Even if Trump wants to make nice with Xi Jinping – and it appears that he does, sometimes – it won’t matter for the larger trajectory. At the end of Trump’s reign, whenever that is, Sino-U.S. rivalry will be deeper and more intensified than at the start of his presidency.
Examine the impact of U.S. trade policy on great power competition.
Trade policy is downstream of the forces propelling geopolitical rivalry in the first place. So if your relationship is defined by “competition,” then that will inevitably find expression in economic statecraft. Biden and Trump have both pursued an exclusionary economic nationalism in trade policy, but they’ve done so in different ways, to the benefit of different sectional interests.
Biden’s various tariffs and restrictions on trade and investment were mostly focused on green tech, advanced weapons systems, and semiconductors – a decoupling limited to the high-value economic sectors of the future (“small yard, high fence”). Trump’s tariffs and restrictions on trade are taking that Biden posture to its logical conclusion, expanding the scope of decoupling and tariff walls. Whether Trump’s trade policy will yield total decoupling of the great powers is immaterial (though I believe it will); the important thing is what a firewall-trade policy does to Sino-U.S. relations, and it is quite obviously an accelerant of rivalry and a site of confrontation.
Identify strategies of BRICS+ countries in navigating China-U.S. competition.
BRICS+ – the majority of the world’s population – is an identification that explicitly includes China, so all of these countries have an open door toward China in various ways. The complication is if they also have friendly relations with the U.S. or rely on the U.S. market as a destination for exports – and many do. The approach that smaller countries try to take to this dilemma is to be a “friend to all, enemy to none.” The closest analogy is the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War, but more inclusive. I suppose you could call this a form of hedging, but you’re really making yourself an open platform that says, “you are welcome here, but so is the other guy.”
The dilemma for these de facto nonaligned countries – that is, those who need friendly ties to both great powers – is that Sino-U.S. rivalry forces them to make choices that favor one side at the expense of the other and that kind of invidious choice is against the nonaligned country’s self-interest. In the extreme, this is how a country becomes a literal battleground or a sacrifice zone in Sino-U.S. conflict. In some situations, a country simply won’t have any agency. But in the more mundane scenario, countries that fall within the U.S. sphere of influence (like Palau, the Marshall Islands, or the Federated States of Micronesia) will be totally dependent on U.S. aid and investment and unable to access the benefits of trade relations with China. The reverse is also true – countries who fall within a Chinese sphere of influence, like the Solomon Islands, increasingly find themselves cutoff from a United States that is literally telling countries they have to choose between the U.S. or China.
The only countries who even have the capacity to resist these invidious choices on their own are those who control needed natural resources (e.g., Indonesia) or physical sites of production in global supply chains (Vietnam).
But this is why the analogy to the Cold War Non-Aligned Movement is so useful. Small countries caught in the great-power dilemma can exercise collective leverage if they act as a bloc – they can be each other’s insurance policy and strategic alternative. Of course, collective action is hard, and while the Non-Aligned Movement produced many successes at the time, as a historical trend it did not end well.
Compare and contrast the Trump approach to brokering a ceasefire in the Ukraine war with how Washington might manage the future of Taiwan vis-à-vis China-Russia-U.S. power dynamics.
Trump basically redirected U.S. power toward Ukraine, the client state, to compel them to sue for peace. Russia was not asked to concede much of anything. This is power politics at its worst, but it also reflects the balance of forces. Ukraine was never positioned to withstand a Russian onslaught so long as Russia was willing to pay the high (military and economic) price of an invasion. Applying that template to Taiwan is unpromising for Taiwan.
In Ukraine and foreign policy generally, Trump is wary of allowing any place on the world map to become a sinkhole for U.S. resources. He wants to minimize costs to the U.S. and maximize the extraction of benefits for business interests in the U.S. who support him. If there’s a silver lining in that, it’s that he’s unlikely to get U.S. troops bogged down in a protracted counter-insurgency or a high-tech great-power war. But that silver lining obscures the reality that Trump continues to support U.S. combat operations around the world – including in losing situations like the Red Sea battle against the Houthis – and is likely to expand them to Mexico and Latin America.
Taiwan, in Trump’s perspective, exists to be traded away. The U.S. will extract what it can from Taiwan, which, at the moment, involves relocating semiconductor production and siphoning Taiwan’s public resources in the form of growing bilateral arms sales. The government in Taipei clearly doesn’t get this yet, because relocating semiconductor production is not in their interest. But the arms buildup, unfortunately, is necessary as long as 1) great-power rivalry remains a defining feature of the landscape, and 2) there is no assurance that the U.S. will actually go to war to fight for Taiwan.
Assess how Global South countries help to shape a new global world order amid intensifying great power competition.
I think the existence of the BRICS+ is an example of the Global South trying to make a world beyond great-power competition. The U.S. dollar is rapidly losing its status as the world’s reserve currency because the Global South is denominating more and more of its financial transactions in currencies other than the U.S. dollar. China became the biggest bilateral lender not because it was China’s grand plan but because the Global South sought alternatives to IMF loans, which transgressed against their economic sovereignty. In a way, this is all worldmaking from below, and it really puts the limits of the great powers in perspective.
But it’s a mistake to glorify the Global South’s choices. They are a collection of very diverse countries that do not share sufficient collective consciousness to identify their individual interests with the whole. There’s a lot of exploitation and hierarchy that goes on within South-South relations. And the world that Global South countries are helping bring into existence, while more multipolar, is more autocratic and ethnonationalist.
The working classes in these countries have a lot in common with the working classes in the U.S. and China. But poor and economically insecure folks are press-ganged into subordinating their interests to the interests of their rulers, often in the form of “great-power competition.” A better world is one that raises the standard of living for the global working classes, not just elites who rule in their name. And there is no sign of that world on the horizon.