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Why Trump should break with Biden's containment strategy toward China

How the incoming US president handles the rise of Beijing will have massive political and economic consequences around the globe
US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, not pictured, attend a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, in June 2019 (Brendan Smialowski/AFP)
US President Donald Trump attends a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, in June 2019 (Brendan Smialowski/AFP)

In three previous articles, I addressed the internal and foreign policy challenges that US President Donald Trump will soon face. This fourth and final one covers the most difficult and important challenge that he and his successors will encounter in the 21st century: the rising role of China in an emerging multipolar - or multi-nodal - world. 

There is no policy area where the US-China relationship is unimportant. How it is managed will have global political, economic, financial, technological, environmental and security consequences.

Suffice it to say that the US and China, the world’s two largest economies, are also the top two emitters of greenhouse gases; climate change thus cannot be resolved without their reciprocal cooperation. 

Over the last eight years, the Trump and Biden administrations have claimed that China could be either contained or “de-risked”, but a data-based analysis does not offer strong evidence to support this assertion.

In recent decades, especially since the 2008 financial crisis, China has become the main engine of global growth. Its capabilities exceed the combined manufacturing output of the US, all of Europe, Japan and South Korea. 

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In 1980, more than 80 percent of the Chinese population lived in poverty; four decades later, such conditions have all but disappeared. 

In 2023, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute reported that China had seized the lead in 37 of the 44 top technologies that will define the future, including solar panels, electric batteries, advanced robotics and nuclear energy, among others. And Beijing already controls the rare earth global supply chain. 

China was also on track to meet its 2030 renewable energy goals by the end of 2024, and in 2023, the clean energy sector accounted for around 40 percent of its annual economic growth.  

US efforts backfired

Despite Washington’s efforts to deny Beijing access to advanced chips, the two countries remain neck and neck when it comes to AI, supercomputers and the quantum revolution. In other words, the US war on Chinese tech has backfired.

Contrary to the years-long campaign by western media clamouring for its economic decline, China is growing. Containing or even rolling back this reality would incur massive costs for the global economy and its supply chains, including the American one. 

US business knows this (ask Elon Musk about Tesla’s China assembly line, or Tim Cook about the iPhone’s), but does Trump? Applying sanctions and tariffs on China, as he has hinted, could disrupt world trade and send inflation soaring. Never forget that one of the main factors that brought Trump back to the White House was rampant inflation under the Biden administration.

The US goal to delegitimise China's leadership and trigger regime change is neither realistic nor feasible. The sooner Trump understands that, the better

Fortunately, there is a thin ray of hope: Trump recently asserted that “China and the United States can together solve all of the problems of the world”. The hope is that his actions will match his words and, above all, that he will not listen to the numerous China hawks he has selected for his new administration.

Since the 2009 G20 summit in Pittsburgh, China’s potential has been quite clear in the US. The Obama administration let the so-called G2 concept - referring to the US and China - circulate in western mainstream media as a new joint global governance tool. It did not last long, ending with the first Trump administration.

China, however, always showed cautiousness towards a bilateral partnership in “ruling the world”. It viewed this as a form of hegemony, which Beijing has constantly rejected, preferring an independent and autonomous foreign policy without formal alliances. 

In the 19th and 20th centuries, after all, China suffered the humiliation of foreign interference, so it is not keen to impose its own on the rest of the world today. China’s international behaviour has five pillars: mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity; mutual non-aggression; non-interference in internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit; and peaceful coexistence. They are all quite distant from the behaviour of the US for many decades. 

Reassuring stance

Beijing’s ambition is to be recognised as an equal partner in pragmatic, cooperative understandings, and to see its few red lines respected: on Taiwan, non-interference in its own internal affairs, and not constraining its economic and technological growth.

To any normal international actor, this stance should sound reassuring. Even a country obsessed with its fading hegemony and terrified by imaginary threats, like the US, should welcome such a position with relief. 

Not a chance. Former President Barack Obama once recognised that the US, by perceiving itself as a hammer, was inclined to see the world as a series of nails to be pounded; the net result is a self-fulfilling paranoia. In fact, history has shown that in past wars, Washington has falsely attributed objectives to the other side, with catastrophic consequences, such as in Vietnam and Iraq

China aspires to be a leader in a multipolar world, not the sole hegemon; the latter is exclusively a US aspiration, engraved in its political DNA, inevitably causing it to perceive any rising nation as a potential threat. 

If Trump really wants to put this dangerously derailing bilateral relationship back on track, he should pay closer attention to Beijing’s real views and aspirations, and dismiss Washington’s bipartisan consensus, which mistakenly portrays China as the main existential threat to the US. This worldview sees the two countries locked in a zero-sum contest for global supremacy, for which only Beijing is to blame.  

Trump would be wise to metabolise the unequivocal warnings and clear red lines that Chinese President Xi Jinping gave to US President Joe Biden during their meeting last November - from the notion that containing China is an unwise strategy, to how unnecessary a new cold war would be, to the need for formal commitments to be respected and for both countries to be treated as equals.

The last three tragic years of conflict in Ukraine have shown that when red lines are ignored, the consequences can be devastating. The One China policy regarding Taiwan, and the three China-US joint communiques, must remain the cornerstone of the bilateral relationship. If these modest boundaries are respected, a renewed, fruitful cooperation between the two global powers is possible.

American grievances

But the US has its own views and grievances towards China, too - and unfortunately, most of them cross Beijing’s red lines: on Taiwan, Hong Kong, the crackdown on Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and the complex situation in the South China Sea. 

Other issues, such as China’s support for Russia, collide with Beijing’s ambition to be treated as equal: if the US says it has the right to support Israel amid the Gaza genocide, why can’t China support its partner, Russia, when the latter asserts that a clear red line related to its own security (regarding Ukraine and Nato) was ignored? 

Other American grievances, such as the trade imbalance and China’s technological successes, inevitably collide with another red line: for Beijing to not see its economic and technological development constrained.

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The stark reality is that both countries seem to have a gun pointed at each other’s head. 

Biden is leaving Trump a US national debt topping $36 trillion, which is the real existential threat the country is facing - and efforts by China and the Brics towards de-dollarisation could made this debt unsustainable; Beijing is already reducing its stock of US Treasury bonds. Trump has threatened to impose 100 percent tariffs on any country inclined towards de-dollarisation.

China, conversely, should take note that the balance of power in the Middle East, one of its most important energy suppliers, is apparently shifting back to Washington and its allies - and this could constitute a weak spot that the US may exploit in a coercive manner.

Ultimately, the main difference - and also the main problem - between China and the US is that the first would like to be a global leader in an ideally fairer, multipolar world, while the latter is still fixated on a unipolar world order based on American hegemony. Washington appears incapable of conceiving or accepting a different model.

But one conclusion seems reasonably certain: the US goal to delegitimise China’s leadership and trigger regime change is neither realistic nor feasible. The sooner Trump understands that, the better.  

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Marco Carnelos is a former Italian diplomat. He has been assigned to Somalia, Australia and the United Nations. He served in the foreign policy staff of three Italian prime ministers between 1995 and 2011. More recently he has been Middle East peace process coordinator special envoy for Syria for the Italian government and, until November 2017, Italy's ambassador to Iraq.
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