Tag Archive for: Donald Trump

One dinner won’t fix the US–China relationship

Too much expectation is being loaded on the prospect that one dinner in Buenos Aires between US President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping will solve the many differences in trade and global outlook between the two nations.

There is at least the promise of good progress, which is the most sober way to interpret Trump’s hyperbolic statement that the dinner ‘was an amazing and productive meeting with unlimited possibilities for both the United States and China’.

The leaders agreed there would be a temporary halt in plans to increase tariffs on Chinese exports to the US on 1 January. That is significant—the prospect was for a further US$250 billion worth of tariffs placed on Chinese exports.

But the halt of tariff increases depends on further talks and will surely require real progress to reduce China’s massive trade imbalance with the US, stop forced technology transfers and end Beijing’s cyber-enabled theft of US intellectual property. These are much harder tests to satisfy.

The onus will be on China to demonstrate that it’s willing, for example, to cease its industrial-scale cyber hacking of US businesses, universities and government systems. And it will need to put flesh on the bones of promises to buy a ‘very substantial … amount of agricultural, energy, industrial, and other product from the United States’.

In September 2015, then president Barack Obama extracted from Xi a commitment that China would not ‘conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property’ and a promise that ‘China does not intend to pursue militarisation’ of the South China Sea. Of course, neither undertaking lasted.

Obama’s China policy failed because the US never applied believable red lines to stop Beijing’s bad behaviour or apply costs to punish cyber spying and illegal ­island building.

By contrast, Trump’s China policy has been more successful. Even before Trump was sworn in, he was rattling Beijing by musing about US support for the ‘one-China policy’ and taking an unprecedented phone call from Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen.

Trump’s imposition of tariffs on Chinese exports offends trade purists, but the fact is the US economy is in a stronger position to withstand a trade war with China. The risks for Beijing are greater: China’s economy is more vulnerable, and that plays on the deep-seated fears of the Communist Party that its iron control over its people will be challenged if it can’t meet expectations for growth and relative prosperity.

Broader than trade, a bipartisan US consensus has emerged that China is now its biggest strategic competitor and that Beijing’s challenges to the international rules-based order in the South China Sea, and in the Pacific and globally via the Belt and Road strategy, need to be resisted.

For once, Trump’s gut instincts are helping. He holds out to Xi the possibility of better relations—‘We’re going to end up doing something which is great for China and great for the United States’—at the same time as the US makes clear it is unafraid of open competition with China on the economic, strategic, military and cyber fronts.

Trump at best is an awkward champion of the rules-based order. But the most striking feature of the G20 summit is just how broad the challenge is to the stability of the international system that the US, Australia and Europe all promote. Look at the roll call of G20 leaders: Vladimir Putin attends at the same time as Russia fires on and illegally holds Ukrainian sailors and ships; Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman rubs shoulders with global leaders, just weeks after Riyadh’s flagrant assassination in Turkey of regime critic Jamal Khashoggi; Xi signs the G20 declaration supporting ‘the free flow of information, ideas and knowledge, while respecting … intellectual property rights protection’ at the same time as China controls all information domestically and is the biggest international cyber spy.

The delivery of a G20 communiqué where leaders could find common ground in the face of such basic differences on the international rules of the road is a minor miracle. Trump should take some credit for putting more pressure on the bad behaviour of Russia and China.

The best outcome from the dinner was Xi’s promise to place harsher legal penalties on Chinese illegal shipments of the opioid ­fentanyl to the US. The test will be if Xi’s commitment is any more believable than the broken undertakings he gave Obama in 2015 on cyber spying and militarising the South China Sea.

From pivot to stumble in Asia

US President Donald Trump blew off two multilateral summits in Asia this month. Given his soggy and sulking performance that week in Paris, during the international commemoration of the centenary of the end of World War I, it was probably for the best that Vice President Mike Pence attended instead. Pence was able to spread the gospel of American unilateralism at the ASEAN meeting in Singapore, and again at the APEC summit in Papua New Guinea.

But regardless of who’s delivering the message, it’s clear that America is losing its way. The Trump administration’s ‘America First’ foreign policy has yielded little fruit and left the United States isolated and increasingly discredited on the world stage. The international initiatives of past administrations have been replaced by empty slogans, hollow gestures, and, of course, ‘alternative facts’. With Trump scheduled to meet Chinese president Xi Jinping at the G20 summit in Argentina this week, the US may have one last chance to turn things around.

When future generations of historians sift through the wreckage left behind by the Trump administration, they will probably pay special attention to the breakdown of longstanding US policy towards China. For decades, successive US presidents have understood that the careful management of the bilateral relationship with China is vital to America’s national interests.

To be sure, given the daily fare of buffoonery on display at the White House, it would be easy to place all of the blame for the downward spiral in Sino-American relations on Trump. But China, too, is responsible for the current state of affairs. For starters, while economists are correct to point out that bilateral trade deficits can’t be considered in isolation, the fact remains that China’s surplus with the US—which hit a new record in September—is politically unsustainable.

For many American workers, China has become a symbol of job loss and economic insecurity. Although automation accounts for more of the decline in US manufacturing employment than does trade, China has developed a reputation as an economic predator. And after years of forcing US companies operating in China to transfer key technologies and intellectual property to Chinese firms, that reputation will be hard to shed.

Moreover, China’s expanding military has become a source of bipartisan concern in US national security circles, even though its defence spending is still but a fraction of America’s (a point often lost amid all the hand-wringing). Since having its territorial claims in the South China Sea struck down by a Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2016, China has continued to threaten smaller regional players’ maritime access there. As a result, the US Navy has had to launch new missions to demonstrate its right to navigate the waters demarcated by China’s ‘nine-dash line’.

China’s domestic policies also seem to be taking the country down a darker road. The treatment of Uyghur Muslims, for example, has invited international obloquy. It is up to the Chinese government to decide how to address the country’s political challenges. But if the Chinese find that their every move is being met with suspicion, they can hardly blame an international conspiracy. China’s own actions are emboldening its foes and exhausting its friends.

That said, none of China’s recent actions justify Trump’s sudden upending of Sino-American relations. The administration’s China policy is as reckless as it is feckless. China is home to over 1.3 billion people and a major contributor to the global economy. Regardless of what the US government says or does, Chinese power is not going away.

Earlier this month, Trump announced that China ‘wants to make a deal’ to bring the ongoing trade dispute to a close. No doubt it does. But Trump always trots out this line before holding talks with foreign leaders. Far from auguring a successful resolution, it signals merely that he will bring his usual impetuousness and carelessness to the negotiation with Xi.

Yes, China absolutely does need to change the path that it is on, particularly with respect to its trade and market-access policies. But as the Trump administration’s renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the US–Korea Free Trade Agreement showed, it is likely to emphasise cosmetic issues that yield catchy sound-bites, at the expense of the substantive action that the problems in the Sino-American relationship demand.

For example, the Trump administration has not brought an effective case against China to the World Trade Organization, nor has it marshalled the support of European allies who share its concerns about China’s behaviour. More broadly, the administration has proved utterly incapable of formulating a coherent policy, let alone an effective one. Whereas good policymaking is about setting priorities, Trump’s policymaking is about wanting it all, wanting it now, and gaining very little.

If fixing the bilateral trade relationship is too hard at this juncture, perhaps Trump should pursue cooperation with China in some other area. After all, we haven’t heard much from the North Koreans in a while.

The US and China are the closest of enemies

There has long been talk that the strategic rivalry emerging between the United States and China in recent years could one day give way to confrontation. That moment has arrived. Welcome to the Cold War 2.0.

The standard narrative about the Sino-American conflict is that it pits two distinct systems against each other. To the US, China is a big-data dictatorship that has detained a million Uyghurs in concentration camps, cracked down on Christians, curtailed civil rights and destroyed the environment—all while building up its military and threatening America’s regional allies. In the view of many Chinese, the US is an exponent of interventionism and imperialism and the Trump administration’s trade war is merely the opening shot in a larger economic, military and ideological contest for supremacy.

Yet this framing gets things backwards. The new Sino-American confrontation is rooted not in the two countries’ differences, but in their growing similarity. China and America used to be the yin and yang of the global economy, with America playing the role of consumer and China that of manufacturer. For years, China funnelled its surpluses back into the purchase of US Treasury bills, thus underwriting American profligacy and forging a symbiotic arrangement that the historian Niall Ferguson has called ‘Chimerica’.

But Chimerica is now a thing of the past. With his ‘Made in China 2025’ policy, Chinese president Xi Jinping is moving his country up the global value chain, in the hope of becoming a world leader in artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies. To that end, China has curtailed Western companies’ access to its markets, making it conditional on their transfer of technology and intellectual property to domestic ‘partners’.

At the same time that China has been reorienting its economic-development model, the US has replaced its traditional laissez-faire approach with an industrial strategy of its own. Behind Donald Trump’s trade war is a desire to rebalance the economic playing field and ‘decouple’ the US from China. And with both countries now locked in a zero-sum competition, Team GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) and Team BATX (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi) are waging a war of technical know-how and data access on a global scale.

Yet by trying to outcompete each other in the same areas, the US and Chinese strategies are becoming more alike. In response to former US president Barack Obama’s efforts to create a Pacific-rim trade bloc to contain China, Xi launched his Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which is now being met by an American-led Indo-Pacific initiative under Trump.

The two countries are also on similar paths militarily. Though China still has a lot of catching up to do, its total defence spending is already second only to the US. It has built and launched its first aircraft carrier and has plans to launch more. It is developing and deploying anti-access/area-denial defence systems. And by establishing its first overseas military base in Djibouti, it has signalled that it has global—not merely regional—ambitions.

China and the US also increasingly share a predilection for interventionism. For China, this represents a stark break from decades of treating non-intervention as a quasi-religious doctrine. But China’s changing attitude makes sense. As Yan Xuetong of Tsinghua University explained to me shortly after the US invasion of Iraq, a country’s support for intervention reflects a recognition of its own power. He predicted that as China built up its military forces, it would become more open to exerting its influence abroad.

Chinese citizens and many others around the world now expect precisely that. After evacuating hundreds of its citizens from Libya in 2014, China increased its participation in United Nations peacekeeping missions. And, following a series of attacks in Pakistan, it created a special security force (mostly of private contractors) to protect Chinese interests along the ‘new silk road’ of BRI projects.

Another area of Sino-American convergence concerns the multilateral system. In his 2005 ‘responsible stakeholder’ speech, then-US deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick told the West that global governance institutions must include China or risk being overturned. But to the Chinese, international engagement was never a binary choice. So, rather than becoming a responsible stakeholder in the US-led order, China is now developing what might be described as internationalism with Chinese characteristics.

Accordingly, China has taken advantage of membership in Western-dominated institutions while simultaneously defanging them and building a parallel system of its own. But, as the structure of the BRI shows, the world order China envisions is based not on multilateralism, but on bilateral relations. By dealing with other governments one on one, China can negotiate from a position of strength and impose its own terms.

Trump’s ‘America First’ doctrine embodies the same vision for the US. Both he and Xi have embraced a message of national rejuvenation. This has led Xi to replace China’s longstanding foreign policy of moderation and tactical cooperation with one based on the pursuit of national greatness. And both leaders have increasingly taken decisions into their own hands, while undercutting their respective countries’ systems of checks and balances.

Although ‘Cold War 2.0’ does not feature the same clash of utopian ideologies as the original, the metaphor is fitting nonetheless. Like its predecessor, this one will feature two superpowers that disagree on how the world should be organised, but agree that there can be only one winner.

Midterm results won’t change America’s Middle East policy

President Donald Trump’s party lost control of the US House of Representatives in midterm elections held last week. However, that probably won’t have any effect on the general trajectory of Washington’s policy on the Middle East. The US Senate—the legislative arm that’s more likely to influence foreign policy—remains firmly under Republican control. More important, Trump and his closest foreign policy advisers on the Middle East, son-in-law Jared Kushner and National Security Advisor John Bolton, will continue to determine Washington’s posture on the most important issues affecting the volatile region.

Trump has played to the Israeli gallery by shifting the US embassy to Jerusalem, thus endorsing Israel’s position that the holy city is the indivisible and inalienable capital of the Jewish state. And by withdrawing US funding for the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, he has validated Israel’s view that the descendants of Palestinian refugees have no ‘right of return’ to homes their forefathers were expelled from in 1948. This was not merely a financial move; it was above all a political declaration that the US no longer recognises the refugee issue as integral to the resolution of the Israel–Palestine conflict.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has returned the favour by absolving Trump of all responsibility in the horrendous shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue that left 11 worshippers dead. He did so despite the fact that mainstream US Jewish opinion points to Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and his coddling of extreme-right white supremacists as having created the atmosphere that led to the Pittsburgh massacre. Trump and Netanyahu are ideological soul mates. The administration’s approach to the Israel–Palestine problem isn’t likely to be altered by the midterm elections, especially since pro-Israel sentiments in Congress cut across party lines.

Trump’s hardline attitude towards Iran and the re-imposition of sanctions—especially the ones aimed at curtailing Iran’s capacity to export oil and engage in international financial dealings—are in part related to his desire to appease Israel. The other major reason for the US decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal is related to Trump’s passion for undoing President Barack Obama’s legacy regardless of the negative consequences it generates, especially among European allies who are signatories to the deal.

In addition to demanding that Iran totally give up its desire to enrich uranium, Trump insists that the re-imposed sanctions will remain in place until Tehran renounces its missile development program and stops what he calls its ‘aggressive’ meddling in other countries of the Middle East. Both the Republicans and Democrats are largely united in their determination to punish Iran for its regional actions and to force it to give up its missile development program and its uranium enrichment capacity.

The third aspect of Trump’s antagonism towards Iran is America’s, and especially his, close relationship with Saudi Arabia, which is engaged in a Middle Eastern cold war with Iran that has the potential to turn into armed conflict in the near future. Riyadh’s importance in the Trump administration’s calculations has been most clearly on display in the administration’s refusal to impose any significant measures on the Saudi regime as punishment for the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. That’s despite clear indications that the order to murder Khashoggi came from the highest echelons of the Saudi power structure—and despite bipartisan pressure from leading members of Congress to take punitive action.

There are several factors that explain America’s pro-Saudi posture. Washington considers Saudi Arabia its key surrogate in curbing Iranian influence in the Middle East, especially in the energy-rich Persian Gulf. Its support for Riyadh’s misadventure in Yemen that has killed, maimed and starved innumerable Yemeni civilians is an indication of this fact. The Saudi regime is engaged in fighting the Houthis in Yemen who are supported by Iran.

Moreover, Saudi Arabia is a leading purchaser of American arms and has recently offered to buy US$110 billion worth of sophisticated weaponry. It is also a major investor in the US economy. Above all, it is the world’s top oil exporter and has the largest reserves in the world. It is, therefore, the swing producer of crude and has the ability to affect oil prices in the world market both positively and negatively. Retaining influence in Riyadh is very important for Washington to protect itself from the sort of oil shock that took place in 1973.

The significance of the Democrats’ victory in the House of Representatives will, therefore, be limited primarily to the domestic arena. America’s foreign policy, especially its policy in the Middle East, will remain largely immune to the congressional power shift.

Trump’s pick a good fit for US–Australia alliance

Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr has been nominated by Donald Trump to be the new US ambassador to Australia.

He will need to be ‘confirmed’ by Congress before he takes up the appointment, a process that could take up to several months.

If Australia got to choose a US ambassador and ran the selection process, we’d probably have three key things we’d like to see in a candidate.

Our top priority would be that Washington’s envoy in Canberra be directly connected to the US president—so that when she or he calls, the president not only picks up the phone, but listens.

Second, to be effective it’s essential that America’s top diplomat in Australia understands and can work the Washington policy machine and can connect to the US business, technology and education sectors to achieve outcomes.

Third, a US ambassador must understand the depth and value of the Australia–US alliance, and the Australia–US economic and social connection—and be driven to deepen them, not just maintain or let them coast. We don’t want paeans of praise for 100 years of mateship. We want an ambassador who is restless and full of energy to show what we can do together next, across the breadth of the strategic and economic relationship.

The good news is that Donald Trump’s nominee, A.B. Culvahouse, has all these attributes.

He’s been closely connected to the highest levels of US presidential administrations since 1976, serving in Ronald Reagan’s White House, as well as on various defence, intelligence, and foreign and public policy advisory boards. He’s also on the board of trustees of the Brookings Institution—one of the best US think tanks.

His long career in the law, peaking with leading law firm O’Melveny & Myers LLP, gives him a huge professional network across the US technology sector, the broader US corporate community, and into the US higher education sector—all areas that are key to building on the US alliance at this particular time in global affairs. He’ll have a fat rolodex and a well-connected smart phone.

Even more than Trump’s original nominee, Admiral Harry Harris, Culvahouse is well equipped to understand that Australian and American prosperity, freedom and security are built on much more than military-to-military, diplomatic and intelligence relationships. While these are crucial, we now need an agenda across a much broader strategic, economic and research landscape and we need to forge closer connections across these sectors between our two countries.

An amusing sidelight, maybe showing a bit of his character, was his line to then senator and presidential candidate John McCain during the 2008 election campaign. Running the vetting process that offered up Sarah Palin as a VP candidate for McCain to consider, he said she was ‘high risk, high reward’. McCain took the risk. Culvahouse’s judgement was right—with the risk side dominating.

From his experience in the defence and intelligence world, he will have an appreciation of bilateral security matters. He has visited Australia and spent time meeting people involved in national security policymaking—who I understand found him intelligent, informed and engaged, if low key in approach.

What’s new for him in the role? He’ll need to develop a public voice that works in the Australian political and domestic context, but that’s normal for newly appointed ambassadors. Others—like John Berry, the immediate past occupant of the post from 2013 to 2016—faced this challenge and did it well.

Any US ambassador also needs to be able to work with Australian ministers, other parliamentarians (notably the opposition) and officials as partners, and speak with frankness and clarity about where our national interests differ and where they overlap deeply.

Of course, he’ll be very well briefed by James Carouso, long-serving chargé d’affaires at the embassy, who has worked to create momentum in the alliance, and who knows Australia so well. Carouso hands over a going concern rather than a renovator’s dream, so Culvahouse will be able to get off to a running start.

I don’t see any real risks for his confirmation: he’s likely to have support from both sides of Congress. And he certainly understands what’s involved in a vetting and confirmation process, so he’ll be well prepared.

This is good news for the Australian–American relationship—not just in national security terms but across the broad strategic and economic landscape.

Policy, Guns and Money: US midterms

In this special podcast we look at next week’s crucial US midterms. Our guests are Stephen Loosley and Dr Gorana Grgic. Both are US specialists and both offer fascinating insights into this keenly observed election.

US foreign policy and the start of a new cold war

America’s greatest error was not the Iraq war, calamitous self-inflicted wound though it was. Rather, it was adopting Francis Fukuyama’s now discredited idea that the end of the Cold War marked ‘the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’.

That proposition rested on the notion that individual liberty, supported by mature democratic institutions, is a prerequisite for long-term social stability and national economic prosperity. It is a falsehood sustained for decades by an admirable truism of the American soul: the belief that everyone, deep down, is secretly an American—that if you’re just given the right opportunities, institutions and freedoms, you too will hold the same values, dreams and ideals.

This attitude sustained American foreign policy towards Beijing for 40 years. Washington actively fostered China’s rise, thinking that as people grew more educated and prosperous they would invariably demand and achieve greater political freedom—and that in the end, prosperity would socialise a newly democratic China as a ‘responsible stakeholder’ in the US-led global order.

When this process began, China’s economy was roughly the same size as Australia’s. Since 1979, China’s economy has grown 50-fold. Instead of democratic reform, Chinese President Xi Jinping has centralised authority, changed the constitution and extended his term indefinitely. Meanwhile, China’s government is rolling out a so-called social credit system profiling every citizen’s financial records, social media, purchasing behaviour and political affiliation—extending absolute control under an AI dystopia, in real time.

America’s policy of fostering Chinese growth has led the United States to near disaster. In Vice President Mike Pence’s speech on China, however, there was at last a formal declaration of failure:

After the fall of the Soviet Union, we assumed that a free China was inevitable. Heady with optimism at the turn of the 21st century, America agreed to give Beijing open access to our economy, and we brought China into the World Trade Organization.

Previous administrations made this choice in the hope that freedom in China would expand in all of its forms—not just economically, but politically, with a newfound respect for classical liberal principles, private property, personal liberty, religious freedom—the entire family of human rights. But that hope has gone unfulfilled.

Minus the theatrical flair, this was the Iron Curtain speech of the 21st century. The post–Cold War era is over. The China–US struggle has now begun.

During my lifetime, no political and strategic analysis has been so reliably abysmal as commentary on President Donald Trump and his administration. One source of constant headaches is the misinterpretation of his ‘America First’ foreign policy. Put simply, Trump’s approach can be summarised in six guiding principles:

  • Sovereignty is the highest priority.
  • Self-interest trumps ideology.
  • The United States is a country like any other.
  • Trade must be reciprocal.
  • Alliances are policy and strategy, not identity.
  • Commerce is not zero-sum, but power is.

Some have interpreted this to mean that Trump’s America is withdrawing from Asia in some kind of neo-isolationism. In fact, the exact opposite is true.

At its core, ‘America First’ is the consequence of a strategic rivalry between two great powers decoupled from any global ideological struggle. Americans rightly believe that democracy and individual liberty are superior to Confucian dictatorship for human wellbeing. What ‘America First’ discounts, however, is the belief that Western liberalism is necessarily more successful with regard to governance, economic growth or social harmony. After all, despite the questions surrounding the CCP’s legitimacy, the American political system is currently consumed by ideological division and deepening partisan hatred.

The China–US cold war contrasts with the struggle against the Soviet Union, where American defeat meant the collapse of global capitalism and classical liberalism. It resulted in an alliance framework organised by geography yet fused by ideology. This time around, however, American defeat means, well, American defeat. This fact, more than any other, guarantees that ‘America First’ will continue to attract adherents domestically and dominate American foreign policy thinking long after Trump himself leaves office.

All this has major implications for Australia. As a Western US ally marooned on the Asian periphery, surviving the new US–China cold war will easily be the most challenging foreign policy trial our nation has ever faced. And while the motivating cause has been misdiagnosed—something that risks further miscalculations down the line—it is heartening to see commentators from across Australia’s strategic traditions calling for a revised doctrine to respond to our rapidly deteriorating environment. Goodness knows we need it.

The US shift on China: Australia’s options narrow

At the beginning of October, US Vice President Mike Pence delivered arguably the most significant policy statement produced by the Trump administration. His speech to the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank, on ‘the administration’s policy toward China’ sets out the most dramatic shift in relations with Beijing since Nixon and Kissinger’s ‘opening’ of relations in the early 1970s. Australians should read Pence’s remarks because they will surely lead to changing American expectations of alliances in Asia. Here are six conclusions about the speech and the trajectory of US–China relations.

1. This is a genuine policy change

Pence’s speech amasses a strong case for ‘a new approach to China’ and builds on a slew of American policy documents such as the national security strategy of December 2017, the unclassified summary of the 2018 national defense strategy, and White House and Pentagon statements on Chinese theft of American intellectual property. The speech points to intelligence assessments ‘about China’s actions’ that conclude ‘Beijing is employing a whole-of-government approach, using political, economic, and military tools, as well as propaganda, to advance its influence and benefit its interests in the United States’. That’s a view reinforced by senior intelligence officials publicly saying in recent weeks that China rather than Russia is the biggest threat to American strategic interests.

The speech is the product of something we have recently overlooked in Washington: away from the soap opera of the Oval Office, coherent policy work still goes on. What we have here is a widely shared administration, national security and intelligence community view that China has launched on an all-out competition to supplant America as the dominant strategic and technological power in the Asia–Pacific. The White House’s National Security Council has been working on a new China policy for months, is deeply critical of the Obama administration’s drift and indecision about pushing back against Beijing’s military annexation of the South China Sea, and is determined to stop the wholesale predation of American intellectual property.

2. Pence’s moment

It’s significant that Mike Pence has emerged as the champion of this new China policy agenda. Vice presidents don’t usually get to steer such consequential issues. Why so this time? Well, unlike Trump, Pence can deliver a tightly scripted 40-minute speech that goes much deeper than Trump’s inchoate distaste for ‘unfair’ trading relationships. Pence’s speech is unfailingly polite about Trump, noting that the president has ‘forged a strong personal relationship’ with Chinese President Xi Jinping, working on ‘most importantly the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula’. Is it too cynical to imagine that Pence well understands that Trump’s infatuation with the ‘little rocket man’ is a busted flush? Stand aside Nikki Haley, Mike Pence is interested in the presidential nomination too.

3. ‘Wholesale theft of American technology’

A substantial part of Pence’s speech details the range of methods used by China to steal American IP. In June, the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy said that ‘estimates of the cost of trade secret theft alone range between $180 billion and $540 billion annually’—that is between 1% and 3% of US gross domestic product. A week after the speech, the US Justice Department advised that an intelligence officer, Yanjun Xu of China’s Ministry of State Security, had been extradited from Belgium to face charges of ‘attempting to commit economic espionage and steal trade secrets from multiple US aviation and aerospace companies’.

The criminal complaint lodged with the US District Court in southern Ohio makes fascinating reading, showing that between ‘at least March 2017’ and Xu’s arrest on 1 May 2018, US intelligence officers had tracked Xu’s cultivation of an employee in GE Aviation using the cover of working with academics at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics to steal data relating to the ‘manufacture of jet engine fan blades and fan containment structures’.

The Xu case is one spectacularly public example of what FBI Director Christopher Wray told the US Senate Intelligence Committee in February was being tracked ‘in almost every field office that the FBI has around the country’—industrial-scale Chinese IP theft. Pence rather biblically claimed that ‘the Chinese Communist Party is turning plowshares into swords on a massive scale’. This, rather than the balance of trade, is what has Washington most riled.

4. Curious reference to allies

Pence quotes China scholar Michael Pillsbury, saying: ‘China has opposed the actions and goals of the US government. Indeed, China is building its own relationships with America’s allies and enemies that contradict any peaceful or productive intentions of Beijing.’ The speech points to the ‘debt diplomacy’ of the Belt and Road Initiative. The takeaway for Australia is that Washington is watching how its allies deal with Beijing. Australia is regularly cited in DC these days as being ahead of the game in pushing back against Chinese influence. The US will expect us to continue the push. This surely will be raised when Pence meets Prime Minister Scott Morrison in the margins of the East Asia Summit and APEC in November.

5. ‘Beijing’s malign influence and interference’ in the US

About half of Pence’s speech focuses on Beijing’s shaping and influencing agenda within the United States: ‘The Chinese Communist Party is rewarding or coercing American businesses, movie studios, universities, think tanks, scholars, journalists, and local, state, and federal officials.’ What is most striking about his comments is that they precisely graft onto China’s own efforts in Australia. From encouraging American business leaders to ‘condemn our trade actions, leveraging their desire to maintain their operations in China’, through to media supplements, radio and TV broadcasts, and the role of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, Pence makes clear that there is an established CCP playbook —called a ‘propaganda and censorship notice’—guiding their activities. It’s in play in Australia too.

6. ‘China wants a different American president’

In a speech with many surprises, perhaps the most startling claim is that ‘China has initiated an unprecedented effort to influence American public opinion, the 2018 elections, and the environment leading into the 2020 presidential elections’. Pence claims ‘what the Russians are doing pales in comparison to what China is doing across this country’ with the aim of removing Trump as president. It would be a great pity if a widely shared American concern about the PRC’s behaviour were to be turned into a highly partisan American political stoush.

Pence ends with the rather forlorn hope that ‘China’s rulers can still change course and return to the spirit of reform and opening that characterize the beginning of this relationship decades ago’. Nothing in his speech suggests that that hope is realistic.

What happens next? Trump remains mercurial and wildly unfocused, but Pence shows that there is a strategic plan behind the broader administration’s China policy. This has Beijing worried. China’s ambassador to the US, Cui Tiankai, told Fox News Sunday: ‘Honestly, I’ve been talking to ambassadors of other countries in Washington DC and this is also part of their problem … They don’t know who is the final decision-maker. Of course, presumably the president will take the final decision. But who is playing what role?’

Now here’s a curious thing: On 4 October—the same day Pence made his speech—Scott Morrison made an address to what was described as a Chinese–Australian community event. The speech appears on the website of the Australian embassy in Beijing, but not the prime minister’s official website.* Morrison says of China: ‘We welcome its remarkable success and we are committed—absolutely committed—to a long-term constructive partnership with China based on shared values, especially mutual respect.’

Shared values, indeed. Australia’s wiggle room to ‘balance’ American and Chinese interests is narrowing. The key message for Australia is that we need to get our own China thinking in order, reduce our dependence on Beijing’s money and set some realistic strategic policy goals for our national security. These are challenging times.

 

* As of the afternoon of Friday 19 October, we note that Scott Morrison’s speech to the Hurstville Community Lunch has been posted on the PM’s website.

Modelling the Trump effect

It might sound odd, but interstate behaviour turns out to be something that can be understood by modelling it as a complex system. Our modelling of interstate interactions over a very long timeframe seems to be robust enough to show the patterns of decline and fall of states. As an example, it’s solid enough to model the post–World War II period of prosperity and growth—and show the dominance of the US along with the rise of other powers we have experienced.

Looking ahead, it even seems able to indicate some important attributes that the interstate system might have as a result of the direction in which President Donald Trump is taking the United States.

A disturbing but not particularly surprising insight from the modelling is that Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda may well result in the US being the strongest nation—but mainly by creating a poorer and less capable future world—one where all nations lose, but other nations lose more than the US does. In other words, it’s not a ‘win–win’ world where all prosper, but a more selfish, narrower world.

Whether he realises it or not, Trump is trading off national wealth for global power. That’s because his isolationist policies seek to create events that are qualitatively different from the great run of historical events.

Those events—world wars, depressions, even the collapse of the Soviet Union—are, from a complex systems perspective, merely the working though of perturbations to the global system, the ensemble of competing and cooperating nation-states. Broadly, the system absorbs these perturbations over a relatively short period of time and returns to its trajectory.

But Trump seeks, instead, to reset the fundamental parameters of the world order rather than merely perturb them—and that will have consequences for the world’s balance of power.

We’ve modelled the ensemble of nation-states as a complex system, allowing us to examine the emergence and evolution of both wealth and power under different conditions of cooperation and competition. These models can be tuned for the different domains—such as land, sea, air, space and cyberspace—in which states interact. And, like all models of complex systems, they don’t purport to show precise behaviour, but rather the general classes of behaviour of the system—in this case, the classes of behaviour reachable by a system of real states that cooperate and compete with each other.

The graphs below shows some of our results with the model tuned for the physical domains, rather than the cyber domain. In these traditional domains, cooperation is manifested as trade in physical goods, and competition, in the limit, is manifested as kinetic warfare. We can see how the wealth (and hence power) of an interacting suite of initially equal states rises and falls over time for different levels of cooperation and competition. The upper graph shows a world where international competition rather than cooperation is the norm—a world not unlike that which existed in the lead-up to World War II. The lower graph shows a world with a bias to cooperation—not unlike the post-war world.

Changes in the wealth of states that emerge over time for model runs with two different levels of cooperation

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In the competitive world of the upper graph, a persistent structure to the international order emerges spontaneously. The structure consists of a long-lived hegemon of vast wealth, a relatively few middle powers whose wealth (or power) together don’t rise to the level of the hegemon and whose longevity is conspicuously less than the hegemon’s, and a tail of small, weak and relatively short-lived powers.

In earlier times, we saw these structures arise regionally, the Roman Empire being a case in point. But in more recent times the structure has become global, and today’s hegemon is, obviously, the US.

In the model, as in the real world, competitive challenges to the hegemon from rising powers are more often than not rebuffed, as can be seen at about time step 1600 in the competitive world of the upper graph in the figure. Thucydides’ Trap is a risky place for the challenger, as history shows. But such challenges are more likely to succeed in the cooperative world of the lower graph, as can be seen at about time steps 1500 and 1750. However, while these are successful transitions, the challengers don’t upset the system, but merely take the hegemon’s place in the same overall structure.

The two graphs capture the essence of the US’s strategic choices. In the aftermath of World War II, the US, the world hegemon, reset the international balance distinctly towards cooperation through the Bretton Woods agreement. It created a world with a bias towards international cooperation that ushered in 70 years of economic growth.

The Bretton Woods reset corresponds in the model to pushing the ensemble of nation-states from low levels of cooperation to higher levels—that is, from the system in the upper graph to the system in the lower graph. When that happens, global wealth rises, but with it more states rise in wealth, creating a significant number of wealthy middle powers (where before there had been few).

After Bretton Woods, the US rode on the top of the rising tide and remained the hegemon throughout the creation of what we now call ‘the rules-based international order’. But that allowed the emergence over time of a group of rising powers that could potentially challenge its hegemony, including Japan, the EU and, of course, China. That reset greatly advantaged the US, allowing it to grow richer and more powerful than it otherwise would have. But it also created a pool of possible challengers to its hegemony, and so created the catalyst for Trump’s reset—‘America First’.

There’s a certain logic in Trump’s agenda, even if it is not witting. It seeks to undo Bretton Woods and push the world’s ensemble of nation-states back to the low levels of cooperation seen in the upper graph.

This reset would have several distinct effects. First, all states, including the hegemon, would be poorer than they otherwise would have been. But the reset would have a second, more subtle effect. It would disproportionally impoverish the middle powers immediately below the hegemon in the pecking order, as can be seen in the upper graph. Thus, it would make it harder for other powers to rise and challenge the hegemon, extending the duration of US hegemony.

Can Trump’s perverse logic of narrow self-interest really be seen as a grand strategy? Or has he merely stumbled upon a policy setting that has vast strategic consequences? We may never know, but we will certainly experience the consequences.

China and the US: two ‘powerful victims’ that aren’t right to lead our world

I remember a fear strategic thinkers had less than a decade ago was that the US and China would agree between themselves how they would share power and influence, and that they would govern the rest of us as a new G2.

It was an anxiety of US allies that this would lock us out of decision-making and have our fates, and those of other states and peoples, decided by the ‘Big Two’. This was the ‘new type of great power relations’ that Xi Jinping said he was offering to the US under Barack Obama.

Whether that was ever what the Chinese Communist Party leadership in Beijing actually proposed to do maybe doesn’t matter so much now. The idea of the ‘Big Two’ ruling together seems a distant possibility just a few years on.

But even the notion of either of these states ‘ruling’ now looks bad for the rest of us, and in similar ways. For all their differences, the current leaders in Beijing and Washington have a disturbing psychology and outlook in common. Xi’s China and Donald Trump’s America are both great powers and both leaders see their countries and peoples as victims of the external world.

For Xi and the CCP, China is a nation that experienced a century of humiliation at the hands of stronger, more technologically advanced Western powers. Even now, with the Chinese economy big enough and the military now more than strong enough to feel secure, Beijing’s leaders feel sufficiently threatened and victimised that they’re acting coercively and aggressively—as we see in the militarisation and aggression by the PLA in the South China Sea. And all the while they’re telling the international community that this aggression is ‘defensive’.

For the Trump administration, with Trump himself being its embodiment, it’s all about others taking advantage of America, stealing its wealth, impoverishing and imperilling its people. He’s mad as hell about this and channels the anger of his base in rallies across America. ‘America First’ is all about the US ending an era of others exploiting the great nation.

Trump notes the costs to the US treasury from America’s engagement with the UN, presence in South Korea and contributions to NATO, while discounting the value of the global leadership that this engagement has brought to the US.

America has never been wealthier or more powerful than it is today. And yet America is a victim of the external world—whether of US allies like Japan, Canada, Germany or NATO more generally, or of its actual strategic adversaries, Russia and China.

Xi’s CCP state and Trump’s America First state are both acting out their psychologies as ‘powerful victims’.

Xi is overreaching by demonstrating the coercive way that a more powerful Chinese state intends to behave—showing that its Belt and Road infrastructure vision comes both laden with pitfalls for recipient governments and packaged with export of China’s model of authoritarian control through its Digital Silk Road elements.

The PLA—‘the Party’s Army’ in CCP literature—is similarly overreaching and revealing its willingness to escalate disputes (the USS Decatur incident in the South China Sea is the most recent example) and project power internationally where the CCP sees Chinese interests as threatened.

The US administration’s multibillion-dollar tariffs on Chinese exports are a solution to a problem, although just what problem is unclear. They are not a way of engaging with the CCP to change the root causes of Chinese economic policy, regulatory policy and practice, or cyber theft. Similarly, loud stump speeches criticising China like we saw from Vice President Mike Pence, when not backed up with a plan of action agreed with a coalition of states—built around US allies—will likely just be words mixed with US unilateralism.

At some point, America will probably rediscover the power of its alliance system and the value of working with allies and ‘like-minded’ partners—strategically and economically—although the America that emerges from the current period of leadership will be a changed country.

The root causes behind Beijing’s increasingly coercive use of power relate to the nature of Xi’s Communist Party, notably its own sense of victimhood and endless struggle to maintain power against domestic and foreign enemies.

Engaging with and changing the CCP’s deep-seated approach to its own people and to its external world will require a much deeper understanding of the nature and anxieties of the party than we’ve heard to date from America’s policymakers and current leader (and from many other world leaders). And it will require finding ways to connect with the 1.3 billion people in China despite the CCP’s ruthless censorship controls.

At its core, this isn’t actually about economics; and while it is about strategy, it’s also as much about sociology, psychology and political history.

So we’ve got the Big Two behaving like victims, while actually being great powers. Nations with a victim mentality that possess the wealth, reach and weapons of great powers are dangerous beasts.

We can’t wait for either of these two to lead us. It’s up to the rest of us to work this out. Maybe the US and China should start to consider the prospect of a world where multipolarity becomes real precisely because of their failures.