美中緩和未必能延續至特朗普時代之後

Andy’s view

The prospect of steep losses for Republicans in today’s midterms and the lame-duck presidency that ensues regardless raise a fundamental question about the outlook for a budding US-China détente.

Can warming superpower ties outlive the Trump era?

I wouldn’t count on it.

It’s not that an election humiliation would crimp US President Donald Trump’s diplomatic style. On the contrary, there’s every expectation it would give him even greater incentive to build his legacy on the world stage. But the current thaw is so much an artifice of his own unabashed admiration for his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. And a backlash is brewing.

Trump boasts of a “great friendship” with the Chinese strongman — they’ve held two summits so far this year, with plans of another meeting in Shenzhen this month, and a fourth in Miami in December — speaks of a G2 to manage global affairs, and waves away strategic concerns that might strain the bromance. (Asked about reports that Chinese satellite imagery was used by Iran to kill US troops, Trump told reporters on Air Force One: “They basically do what we do.“)

Yet US policy on China remains very much in play, and debates will surely heat up after the midterms as the race to succeed Trump gets under way across both parties.

Although Republican hawks have largely fallen silent in Trump’s second term, within the Beltway a bipartisan tough-on-China consensus is intact. Foreign policy elites complain that Trump is ceding the Western Pacific to Beijing (Evan Feigenbaum of the Carnegie Endowment mocks the administration″⁣s “reverse pivot from Asia” as the Pentagon diverts warships and marines to the Gulf.) Tech hawks accuse Trump of throwing away the US lead in AI by greenlighting exports of advanced Nvidia chips to China, or turning a blind eye to illicit transfers. The Taiwan lobby is outraged at his transactional approach to the island.

Moreover, such criticisms are likely to intensify if an angry Trump, smarting from midterm defeats, focuses even more of his attention on deal-making with Xi.

Ali Wyne, a US-China specialist at the International Crisis Group, sees bipartisan frustration at Trump’s China policy winding up like a coil, ever more tightly as he gives ground to Xi, and eventually unspooling “violently and unpredictably.”

The next president, Wyne told me, will inherit a weaker hand vis-à-vis China and is likely to be “far more permissive of competitive and even confrontational actions.”

Certainly, Trump’s successor — from either party — won’t have nearly the same latitude to manage China ties; one former American diplomat calls the president “his own China desk officer.” (Of course, there’s always a chance that Trump himself will flip before he steps down, as he did at the end of his first term when he blamed Xi for unleashing the pandemic on the world and wrecking his reelection chances.)

The late Henry Kissinger, the architect of Nixon’s 1972 opening to China, observed that “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.” In Trump’s ardent pursuit of Xi, critics suggest the US president forgot that lesson. Once Trump goes, a return to a colder, harder, more calculating is in the cards.

Notable

• In a recent op-ed for The New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman argues that as the world’s leading AI superpowers, with shared interests in safeguarding against AI’s risks, the US and China may be pushed toward “mutually assured collaboration.”