Trump’s ascent has Asia on edge
President Donald Trump has so deeply infected the global discussion that a recent headline on the front page of a Philippine daily that shouted WORLD ON EDGE AS TRUMP ERA NEARS could have been published almost anywhere.
Those words have a special resonance in the Far East. Asians are obsessed by the possibility that a showdown is looming between the U. S. and China over Taiwan, the South China Sea, rampant Chinese industrial espionage, Beijing’s trade surplus with the U.S. — $366 billion in 2015 — or how it has devalued the yuan to try to keep exports booming amid signs that its economy is finally slowing down.
The other Asian preoccupation, which is not really talked about much outside of the Far East, is concern about North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and the much harder line that Trump is likely to take on this.
Complicating calculations about Asia’s future is a theory, gaining currency among some foreign policy experts, that Trump may be cultivating Russia in the hopes it will join him in isolating China. This may seem far-fetched today, given that Russia and China recently conducted joint naval exercises, that China has become a key market for Russian natural resources and because Russians and Americans still distrust each other deeply.
But any visitor to Vladivostok or Khabarovsk in Russia’s thinly populated eastern reaches comes away stunned by how Chinese businessmen and settlers are everywhere. Russians there feel under siege and are profoundly unhappy about what they regard as creeping Chinese imperialism and colonialism.
Whatever Trump is or is not up to with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Chinese government must be wondering about the possibility that the White House and the Kremlin may have friendlier relations. Trump has praised Putin and been far more critical of China than any other country. While China’s Xi Jinping was doing a victory lap as the international champion of free trade at the Davos economic summit, Trump and his team were firing fresh verbal broadsides at Beijing. And now ultra- hawk John Bolton, who has Trump’s ear on foreign policy, has advocated basing U. S. troops in Taiwan — closer to China than Ottawa is to Montreal.
How might the notoriously thin- skinned Chinese react if Trump conducts a bit of old- style gunboat dip- lomacy by ordering a carrier battle group or two into the Taiwan Strait? Or if a couple of flat-tops were to circle the new military installations China has built atop the rocky outcrops that are the centrepiece of Beijing’s highly dubious claim to almost all of the South China Sea?
Such hypotheticals would have been considered absurd on Barack Obama’s watch. It was months after an armada of Chinese dredges went to work that Obama finally sent a few small U. S. Navy ships from the Seventh Fleet to conduct brief transits of the South China Sea and had a few spy planes fly near several of the artificial islands that the People’s Liberation Army has turned into military airfields.
Despite Trump’s antiChina rhetoric, the i dea that he might base troops in Taiwan, send aircraft carriers into disputed waters or launch a trade war by imposing stiff tariffs on imports from China still seems like a stretch. The new defence secretary James Mattis and secretary of state Rex Tillerson are much more worldly and thoughtful than their boss. If they have any influence, the Trump administration’s behaviour toward China should be much more nuanced and far less belligerent than that.
There is good reason to be cautious. China is already apoplectic because Trump has suggested the U. S. may no longer respect Beijing’s One China policy, which holds that Taiwan is and always will be part of China.
The Chinese foreign ministry says this position on Taiwan is “non- negotiable.” If Trump does not agree, “Beijing will have no choice but to take the gloves off,” the China Daily News said in an editorial.
The battle lines in Asia are already being drawn. Malaysia, Cambodia and now the Philippines have been aligning themselves with China, while trying to keep channels open to Washington. Before Trump’s election, Vietnam, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan began shoring up military ties with the U. S., while trading with Beijing.
China has tried to gain regional influence by establishing the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as a rival to the western- backed Asian Development Bank. To make itself less dependent on trade with the U. S. and exports originating mostly from Pacific ports, China has invested billions of dollars to build the so- called Silk Road that now links Asia to Europe by train. Massive infrastructure projects are underway in Myanmar, Pakistan and Africa to open up the Indian Ocean to Beijing.
China’s military is on a building spree, too. It is developing not one, but two stealth fighter jets, a stealthy long- range drone capable of carrying two tonnes of bombs, new missiles and a blue water navy capable of operating far from home shores. In its own show of force late last year, it sent its first aircraft carrier through the Strait of Taiwan. At least two more aircraft carriers are under construction.
Given Chinese sensitivities and Trump’s unique, often incendiary approach to diplomacy, the struggle between the old superpower and the emerging superpower is creating deep anxiety about what the Year of the Rooster will bring.
THE BATTLE LINES IN ASIA ARE ALREADY BEING DRAWN.