Trump 2.0 foreign policy in Indo-Pacific region: A recalibrated strategic competition with China?

Former President Donald Trump's overwhelming and convincing victory in the 2024 US presidential election allows him to pursue his foreign policy agenda in Southeast Asia, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region.

Thus far, he has been silent about how he will pursue his agenda of making America great again in this part of the world. However, looking back to the first Trump administration, he clearly engaged China in a strategic competition.

Some countries in the area saw the competition as an opportunity, while some were wary and suspicious of its collateral damages. Indeed, launching a clear-cut strategic competition against China clarified the Trump administration’s agenda and actions in Southeast Asia relative to the second Obama administration.  

Engaging China in a strategic competition

Since the second decade of the 21st century, an emergent China has altered the regional balance of power and undermined the post-1945 regional order bolstered by the US role as the Indo-Pacific strategic offshore balancer. 

Beijing aspires to establish a new type of great power relations that requires revising the existing regional order, which it sees as unjust, improper and disadvantageous to developing countries, starting with China.

Leveraging its enormous economic and military power, China’s actions to reshape the existing international and regional order tremendously impact the regional security equilibrium.  

The Trump administration did away with the engagement policy toward China as it adopted a hard balancing policy toward China, focusing on competition and confrontation rather than cooperation.

The Trump administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy declared that the US is dissatisfied with China for betraying U.S. hopes and expectations that supporting Chinese economic growth and integrating the People’s Republic of China into the international order would lead to its liberalization and its acceptance of its role as a responsible stakeholder in the Asia-Pacific region.

Instead, China expanded its power at the expense of the sovereignty of other states in the area.  

During the Trump administration, the US Department of Defense released the 2018 National Defense Strategy that identified China as a strategic competitor as it raised issues with the way China and Russia are attempting to shape the world by complying with their authoritarian models of governance and economic systems.

It noted that China is taking advantage of military modernization, influencing operations, and using predatory economics to coerce neighboring countries to reconstruct the Indo-Pacific regional order and China’s way of seeking regional hegemony through military modernization. 

The 2018 US National Defense Strategy declared, "Long-term competition with China and Russia is the principal priority of the U.S. Department of Defense.” 

In early 2021, key members of President Biden’s foreign policy team signaled that the incoming administration largely agreed with its predecessor’s diagnosis of the new international environment and the strategic competition narrative about US foreign and defense policy toward China.

Based on this assumption, the Biden administration increased public investments in the country’s diplomatic, intelligence, and military capabilities. It also enhanced collaboration with its allies and security partners to gain a diplomatic and strategic advantage over China in technology, economy, politics, diplomacy, military and global governance. 

The Biden administration’s decision to continue the Trump administration’s policy of engaging Beijing in a strategic competition is based on the premised that while China has successfully eroded American military advantage in potential locations of conflict near its shores and inside the First Island Chain, the US retains an overall advantage in military technology, power projection, and with a regional political and military alliance structure unmatched by China. 

Implications of decision for strategic competition

In 2017, the Trump administration’s decision to engage China in a strategic competition was a bold move in forcing the U.S. defense and foreign policy community to review and rethink the flawed policy of the past US administration from President Richard Nixon to President Barack Obama. 

This policy was based on the assumption that peaceful and cooperative engagement with potential American rivals, such as China and Russia, and their integration into Western multilateral organizations and the liberal global economy would transform them into benign international actors and responsible stakeholders in the rules-based international order. 

Furthermore, by announcing that it was engaging China in a great power competition in December 2017, the Trump administration came out with its new label for the challenging and dynamic US-China relationship to counter Beijing’s preferred formulation of a “new type of great power relations.”

President Xi Jinping, at the start of his first term in 2012, formulated and announced the idea of a new type of great power relations to manage the increasing competition between the two major powers, which the Xi Jin Ping administration would intensify as China’s pursues it revisionist and expansionist efforts in the South and East China Seas. 

President Xi believed that China’s overall relations with the US should be maintained and managed even though two U.S. allies—Japan and the Philippines—deemed China’s efforts at the South and East China Sea challenging the territorial status quo.  

The adoption of the label “strategic competition” reflected the fact that although the Trump administration valued the importance of the US-China relation, it did not imply that the US valued its relationship with China above its security ties with its formal treaty allies in the region, i.e., Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Australia.  

Finally, by labeling China as a strategic competitor, the Trump administration rejected any notion that it would accept a form of US-China condominium or G-2 in the Indo-Pacific region. Such an arrangement would require the US to accept compromising arrangements in accommodating China’s core interests.

This would entail Washington’s acceptance of China’s claim that Taiwan is a Chinese province and that it is entitled to pursue its expansion in the South and East China Sea at the expense of the Philippines, Taiwan and Japan. 

This would also require accepting a Chinese sphere of influence or giving the appearance of aligning with Beijing against Washington’s key allies, such as Manila and Tokyo. Such action would damage American credibility among its allies globally and compromise its standing as the strategic off-shore balancer in the Indo-Pacific region. 

By engaging China in strategic competition, the Trump administration put the US in the best position to deal with an emergent and expansion power, such as China, as it devoted sufficient attention to its regional allies, partnerships and participation in several regional multilateral organizations in the Indo-Pacific region.

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Dr. Renato De Castro is a trustee,  convenor and non-resident fellow of think tank Stratbase ADR Institute. He is also a distinguished full professor at the Department of International Studies at De La Salle University-Manila.