Susan Walsh/AP Photo
Then-President Donald Trump shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, June 29, 2019.
The clown car of several Trump cabinet nominations has diverted attention from the appointees who will determine his China policy. They are actually serious people. With the notable exceptions of crazily high tariffs and the naïvely wishful idea of a deal with Putin to contain Xi, Trump’s China policy could be an island of bipartisanship, and in some respects even sensible.
Robert Lighthizer is expected to be named trade czar, located at the White House. He served as U.S. trade representative in Trump’s first term. Lighthizer was one of Trump’s few excellent appointments the first time around, and he managed to keep Trump’s confidence for his entire term. If the leading candidates for Treasury secretary—all from Wall Street—deadlock, Lighthizer could get that post and still serve as overall trade coordinator. Trump is ambivalent about Wall Street. The two Goldman Sachs people in his first term, Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin, did their best to rein him in.
A second key player on China policy will be the secretary of state, Sen. Marco Rubio. He’s not my favorite guy, but compared to several of Trump’s other cabinet picks, Rubio is Thomas Jefferson. The third major figure on China will be national security adviser Florida Congressman Michael Waltz, also a serious person (I know, the bar has been lowered).
China policy breaks down into two parts, geopolitical and economic. This month, Waltz published a kind of audition piece for the national-security job, in The Economist magazine. He called for a pivot away from Europe, and a settlement with Putin, the better to concentrate on the more serious national-security threat: China. “The next president should act urgently,” Waltz wrote, in the piece co-authored with former Pentagon strategist Matthew Kroenig, “to bring the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East to a swift conclusion, and finally focus strategic attention where it should be: countering the greater threat from the Chinese Communist Party.”
This was music to Trump’s ears. Waltz, and not defense secretary-designate Pete Hegseth (who may not get confirmed) will be the one to carry the policy out.
The idea of focusing on China as the prime threat is far from crazy, but there are some big glitches with the idea of abandoning Europe and giving Putin a pass. For starters, a more aggressive China containment policy will require the support of Europe. “The notion that the United States should turn away from Europe to concentrate on China is truly self-defeating,” says James Mann, a China specialist at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “In fact, it has been a goal of China’s Communist Party leadership for more than a decade to try to draw a wedge between Europe and the United States.”
The Europeans have been all over the place on China. Lately, the EU has raised barriers to some imports from China to protect its own production, but Germany has continued doing deals with Beijing, to promote exports and create partnerships. If the Trump administration disdains NATO, includes imports from Europe in the plan for higher across-the-board tariffs, and leaves Europe to the tender mercies of Putin, the Europeans will be very tempted to make their own separate peace with Beijing.
Donald Trump’s brand of economic nationalism is controversial but not crazy.
On the nexus of national security, economic containment, and industrial policy, Trump’s policies will basically be a harder-line extension of Biden’s. The Biden administration did a pretty good job of keeping sensitive U.S.-controlled technologies out of the hands of the Chinese, though there were slipups that enabled companies such as Huawei to get access to the most advanced semiconductors. This is one of those places where the proposed pivot away from Europe undermines the proposed China policy. If Trump cuts Europe loose and leaves Europe to make its own deals with China, those deals could include more access to sensitive technology.
While strengthening the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) to prevent China from getting its hands on strategic U.S.-based companies, Biden did not take on the issue of outward U.S. investment in China, where Wall Street investment companies make it easy for Americans to invest in funds that in turn invest in China. As a senator, Rubio has been one of the hardest-line and best informed of the Republican senators on the need to close these loopholes.
China policy in Trump’s first term was mostly based on tariffs. It did not include complementary domestic policies to rebuild domestic supply chains and U.S. industry generally. That complement fell to Biden. Trump has blustered about repealing Biden’s several industrial-policy measures, but that will not happen because so much of the new production is in red states.
Trump is also obsessed with tariffs, and not just as an instrument of trade policy. He hopes that massive tariff revenues can pay for the extension of his 2017 tax cut and new tax cuts on working-class constituents. But the idea of a 10 or 20 percent across-the-board tariff on all imports, which will raise consumer prices, is probably a nonstarter. “Why restrict trade with Europe or Japan or South Korea?” Mann asks.
Higher tariffs on China, a Lighthizer favorite, are another story. The president has the power to impose those, and they make sense as offset to China’s extensive subsidized exports as a way to keep its faltering economy afloat.
The fact that the views of Waltz, Lighthizer, and Rubio are closely aligned doesn’t mean they will face clear sailing with the rest of the Trump coalition. There will be serious pushback on the idea of abandoning Europe and on tariffs that are punitively high on Americans.
But the serious conversation about China policy underscores the two faces of Donald Trump. His brand of economic nationalism is controversial but not crazy. It’s a serious debate worth having. So much else about Trump is worse than crazy—from the personal vindictiveness to the disdain for competent public officials, not to mention the Constitution. After a week, spite and malice seem to be winning.
