The Empire Strikes Back

Trump’s decision to repeatedly tweak Beijing’s nose was part of a calculated strategy.
By Benny Avni

You think you’re confused about President Trump? 

Imagine how they feel in Beijing.
They might’ve rejoiced this week when the new president fulfilled a campaign promise to undo the Trans Pacific Partnership. 

Obama designed the 12-country trade deal, in part, to reduce China’s economic clout.
So is Trump a China pushover? 

Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice thinks so. 

On Tuesday she tweeted, “Trashing Trans Pacific Partnership is a big fat gift to China, a blow to key allies, and a huge loss for American global leadership. So Sad!”
But wait. As Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Monday, the new administration will “make sure” China can no longer do as it pleases in international waters. 

Secretary of State-designate Rex Tillerson went further in his confirmation hearing, saying America will prevent China from accessing artificial islands it’s built in the South China Sea.
Add in Trump’s post-election phone call with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wei, and his announcement later that he intends to fully reexamine the Nixon-era “One China” policy, and you get a new tone that suggests the days of coddling and being cowed by China are numbered.
“Trump has already put the Chinese off their game,” says the Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano. 

“It really seems they don’t know what to make of him and how to best respond. They face a president who is willing to challenge them both on the military and economic [fronts], and they seem unprepared for that.”
Carafano, who has advised Trump’s transition team on foreign relations and national security, told me that once Cabinet secretaries and key members are confirmed and sworn in, China will be high on the agenda of the State and Defense departments.
It should. 

With growing economic clout and an increasingly aggressive military, China has emerged as a superpower-in-waiting.
Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis and White House strategist Steve Bannon (a former US Navy officer in the Pacific who reportedly has keen interest in China policy) will be busy. 

All are China hawks.
Mattis will be in Japan and South Korea next week to start coordinating military strategy with our Pacific allies.

Good. 

The time has come to add some hard power to Obama’s “pivot to Asia” — a great slogan that never really turned into anything tangible.
While Obama endlessly negotiated TPP with too many countries, America’s naval dominance of the Pacific faded. 

Yes, there was the occasional joint naval exercise with allies. 

But they weren’t enough to convince our partners we mean business when we insist on freedom of navigation on the high seas.
China has become more brazen, building artificial islands, fortifying them into military bases, setting up no-go naval passages and demanding planes identify themselves in skies China doesn’t own.
Without much resistance.
So, yes, the new administration will be wise to fill in the trade gap the TPP demise left behind. 

And fast, before China picks up the leftovers. (The Philippines, Malaysia and others are already looking to cut trade and other deals with Beijing.)
Trump must quickly start negotiating a bilateral trade deal with Shinzo Abe, Japan’s nationalist prime minister who isn’t afraid to challenge China.
A deal with Tokyo will help Trump set up agreements with other Pacific partners. 

Such deals can be tailored to each country’s needs (with “America first,” of course), which can be more beneficial to all than the overly complex, multilateral TPP.
At any rate, trade in the Pacific will only be possible if Beijing’s muscle-flexing is kept in check. 

Unless America resumes its role as the guarantor of free navigation, China will make the rules in the region. 

And China’s rules will make the protectionist Trump look like Thomas Paine.
If Team Trump’s initial tough talk gels into a detailed, coherent strategy, and if Trump keeps his campaign promise to increase military budgets, Pacific partners will once again trust America. 

Good trade agreements will follow.
All that, of course, depends. 

Will Trump concentrate on resisting China, or on his campaign-trail demand that allies pay us more for “their” defense? 

Will the Pacific disappear from our agenda before the next presidential campaign begins in earnest? Will coherent strategy replace tough talk?
That’s likely what they’re trying to figure out in Beijing as well.

The Necessary War

China and the U.S. poised to clash as never before
By Michael Den Tandt

Chinese warships take part in a drill on the South China Sea in 2016.
Canada is in a solid position, because of its robust imports of U.S. manufactured goods, to fend off the waves of protectionism now beginning to ripple outward from President Donald Trump’s White House.
The same can’t be said for the follow-on effects of looming U.S. trade actions against Mexico and China, which round out the list of America’s top three goods trading partners, alongside Canada.
Mexico, judging from recent signals emanating from the Trump administration, promises to be a pre-dinner snack on protectionist America’s plate. 

China is the main course. 

The president’s executive order withdrawing the United States from the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement, far from pulling America back from the Pacific region, sets the stage for an old-fashioned superpower standoff there.
Long before the TPP (which had comprised Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Chile, Mexico and Peru, Canada and the United States) ran afoul of right-wing nativists and left-wing populists in the United States, it was an Obama administration strategy for containing the increasing expansionism of Communist China.
The strategy’s most fervent advocates were the Japanese, led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. 

Taiwan was not invited to join TPP, doubtless because of the furious backlash this would have provoked from Beijing. 

Nevertheless the Taiwanese, led by President Tsai Ing-wen, had welcomed the pact because of the renewal of U.S. regional security guarantees it represented.
This is why, when Trump and Democratic party insurgent Bernie Sanders began looming large a year ago, both attacking the TPP, opinion leaders in Japan and Taiwan began feverishly speculating about the future of U.S. engagement in Asia.
The U.S. Navy is the guarantor of last resort for international law and international shipping through the South China Sea, worth an estimated US$5-trillion annually. 

China is attempting to assert a claim over much of that open ocean, contained by its so-called nine-dash line, as well as a group of small islets in the East China Sea in Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture.
Chinese incursions into its neighbours' territory have become commonplace in recent years, causing Japan to re-garrison its farthest-flung islands. 

Regional nerves have been further frayed by the People’s Liberation Army’s rapid building of various regional shoals and reefs into what appear to be air strips and fuel depots.
During his campaign for the Republican nomination, adding to his barrage against the TPP, Trump asserted key Pacific allies such as Japan and South Korea weren’t pulling their weight and should be made to pay for protection, or do it themselves. 

The ensuing received wisdom has been that, under Trump, the U.S. would beat a gradual retreat from the Pacific, leaving a clear field for China to continue to grow its influence.
The missing piece in this assumption was trade — a fact made increasingly obvious as Trump cabinet nominees led by Defence Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have appeared before Congress. 

The president’s inaugural speech confirmed it.
The administration’s self-stated sine qua non is the resurrection of American manufacturing, which it hopes to bring about by reversing a significant goods trade deficit with Mexico, nearly $60-billion in 2015, and a massive goods trade deficit with China, $366-billion in 2015.
China’s export-driven economy has long relied heavily on access to the U.S. market for steady, rapid growth. 

But that expansion, formerly in double digits, has slowed in recent years as the Chinese economy matures. 

This irreversible slowdown has been posited by some analysts as the underlying reason for Xi Jinping’s heavy-handed assertion of control over all aspects of the Chinese state — and Beijing’s new restlessness with regional limitations on its influence. 

Any dramatic curb in Chinese exports to the United States is likely to exacerbate such pressures.
Ergo, all the signals coming from senior Trump administration officials — from the president himself, with his Taiwan-friendly Tweets, on down — are not of waning interest in the Pacific region, but waxing. 

Only rather than the softish power of multilateral trade ties, the primary instrument of American power projection will be military — aircraft carriers and nuclear deterrence.
Answering questions from journalists in Washington, D.C., Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said “we’re going to make sure we defend international territories,” echoing earlier remarks by Tillerson. 

Beijing responded Tuesday by saying its claims in the South China Sea are “irrefutable,” just as it has insisted that its claim to Taiwan, which it considers a wayward province, is non-negotiable.
The Trump administration’s first foreign policy statement, meantime, reads as follows: “Our Navy has shrunk from more than 500 ships in 1991 to 275 in 2016. Our Air Force is roughly one-third smaller than in 1991. President Trump is committed to reversing this trend, because he knows that our military dominance must be unquestioned.”
It boils down to this: Two superpowers possessed of the world’s largest economies, both nuclear-armed are about to clash — economically and strategically — as never before. 

Batten the hatches.