Why February is a big, big month for Trump

With a March 2 deadline approaching, the US and China this week begin a new round of negotiations in an attempt to agree upon a breakthrough trade deal. This is not the only big foreign win US President Donald Trump is seeking this month, as he is also preparing for his second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The hopes and expectations surrounding both appear high but each process remains fragile, which could mean the president does not end the month on the international high he hopes.

This week’s negotiations in Beijing — which will be led by senior officials on both sides, including US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He — comes amid growing signs that a deal is possible to avert a trade war. Trump has asserted that a “very big deal” is imminent and there is an outside chance he himself may travel to Beijing to seal an agreement with President Xi Jinping, before or after meeting Kim in Vietnam.

Yet even if a deal with China emerges, key questions remain about whether this will be any more than a temporary truce, or the beginning of the bigger Washington-Beijing grand bargain that Trump says he wants, including in relation to Pyongyang. This uncertainty underlines the fact that bilateral ties, overall, remain mixed, with tensions not only in the economic realm but also regarding broader security concerns and political relations.

Outside of North Korea, where Trump and Xi cooperated to positive effect during much of 2018 to bring Pyongyang to the negotiating table, a string of security issues still cloud the bilateral agenda. These include tensions in the South China Sea.

Yet it is economic disputes that are currently at the forefront of the bilateral relationship, and it is by no means certain that a US-China deal will be done by the March deadline that was set late last year when Trump agreed to delay for 90 days a planned increase, from 10 percent to 25 percent, in US tariffs on about $200 billion in Chinese goods. If the talks break down, the mood could be very different. It has already been reported that Trump is planning to sign an executive order banning Chinese telecommunications equipment from US wireless networks, which will needle Beijing.

Trump previously said that “China ... has been very tough on our country … we probably lost last year $500 billion in trade to China. Think of it: 500 billion.” It is this narrative that Trump may yet return to this year if he judges it to be in his political interests.

On the face of it, therefore, it appears to be too soon to dismiss the possibility that bilateral tensions will remain high in 2019, even if there is a trade deal. As Trump moves into the second half of his term of office, he needs to show his US political base a wide a range of concessions from China to fulfill his “America First” agenda.

What he would ideally favor — building on the recent diplomacy with Xi over North Korea — is a wider grand bargain with Beijing that extends beyond the economic arena, where one of his key asks is to see the Chinese currency floated, to other security issues. A big bargain of this kind could also have a broader positive effect on international relations, helping to underpin a renewed basis for bilateral relations under the Trump presidency into the 2020s.

While this potential grand bargain is an agenda item for later in Trump’s presidency, North Korea is a clear and present issue, given this month’s summit in Vietnam. Given the outcome of the Singapore summit last year, it remains an open question, however, whether sustained moves toward “denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula will ultimately prove anything more than a mirage.

Despite all the challenges, Trump is nonetheless likely to continue his Korea gambit, with a 2020 re-election campaign on the horizon.

This, along with his desire to cement his place in history, means the potential prize of de-escalating tensions in the world’s last Cold War frontier on a sustained basis is likely to remain appealing

At the heart of the apparent log-jam between Washington and Pyongyang lies not only the vagueness of the commitments that emerged from Singapore, but fundamental differences between Pyongyang and Washington over what next steps are needed to build confidence.

It was always highly likely that Kim would be wary of making major, concrete commitments, at least initially, and would want to win economic and political concessions from Trump before agreeing to any reduction in nuclear capabilities, let alone committing to “full denuclearization.”

In this context, Kim is reportedly looking for Trump to give his support to formally ending the 1950-53 Korean War. On the face of it this seems a simple, albeit deeply symbolic, step. Yet some US officials and conservatives in South Korea are concerned that such a declaration would weaken the Washington-Seoul alliance and remove the rationale for the 28,000 US forces that are stationed on the peninsula.

Taken together, this underlines why February is such a big month for Trump. He could yet enter March on the crest of a foreign policy wave, or unexpectedly suffer plunging fortunes if the talks with Pyongyang or Beijing crash.