By Mel Gurtov
Trump’s China Policy
Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times came away from a China trip convinced that cooperation to regulate and contain artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the single most urgent, and most neglected, issue in US-China relations. While “fully aware of how absurd it can sound calling on the two of them to trust each other to collaborate,” collaboration is essential “to create a global architecture of trust and governance over these emerging superintelligent computers.” Otherwise, they and the robots they create will surpass us, with unpredictable consequences in trade, warfare, labor, and much else.
Will Friedman’s impassioned plea be heard? Not likely; as was true in the US-Soviet arms race, the country that is behind will do everything to catch up, and the country that is ahead will do everything to stay ahead.
US-China relations have been on a downward arc since the end of the Obama years. It accelerated in Trump’s first term, thanks to his tariff war and the anti-communist, anti-Chinese thinking among his top advisers.
Biden continued and expanded Trump’s tariffs, emphasizing denial of high-tech exports and investments. Biden’s advisers specifically rejected giving priority to engaging China. And now Trump’s tariff wars and accompanying ideological bombast are back with a vengeance. The Chinese are appealing to Trump on the basis of win-win globalization, but such appeals are falling on deaf ears.
The essence of the Trump China policy is to pursue trade and other advantages within the framework of a strategy to isolate China. One specific way to accomplish that is by cozying up to Russia, starting with a one-sidedly pro-Russia position on the Ukraine war.
Trump is all in on making a deal with Vladimir Putin that not merely “settles” the war but resets US-Russia relations across the board, with an eye to dramatically reducing US involvement in both Europe’s and Ukraine’s security. Doing so will presumably make it easier to focus on getting the better of China on trade.
But playing this game, now dubbed the reverse-Nixon strategy, seems very unlikely to bring China around to his position. In fact, it may solidify China-Russia relations. Even Mitch McConnell has warned that selling out Ukraine for the sake of better relations with Russia will undermine US credibility with allies in Asia and beyond.
Taiwan on Edge
The Trump strategy also affects Taiwan. Trump has made several comments that suggest a lesser commitment to Taiwan’s security than his advisers have.
China is all ears. That’s his bargaining position, which waxes and wanes depending on how many concessions he can extract from both China and Taiwan.
Whereas his advisers are planning for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan—note the Pentagon’s secret guidance paper reported over the weekend that gives an invasion top billing in US war planning—and therefore want to keep plowing money into military aid to Taiwan and force redeployments to East Asia—Trump’s priorities are access to Taiwan’s advanced chipmaking and a reduction in US defense support. His price for supporting Taiwan is an increase in Taiwan’s defense spending and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s (TSMC) fulfillment of a longstanding commitment to build a plant in the US.
On paper, at least, he’s gotten both. Taiwan’s president has announced a major increase in military spending, and the president of TSMC has increased the company’s commitment to a new plant by $100 billion (for a total of $165 billion, by far its largest outside Taiwan).
Clearly, the Taiwanese worry that they might be sacrificed on the altar of a Trump trade deal with China. All they can do is increase Taiwan’s importance to the US, and that’s going to be measured in money, not democratic values.
China Knows Trump
On November 7, 2024, Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory message to President-elect Trump that said:
“A stable, healthy, sustainably developing China-US relationship fits with the common interests of the two countries and with the expectations of international society. I hope the two sides will keep to the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation, strengthen channels of dialogue, improve control over differences, expand mutually beneficial cooperation, and move down the road of correctly getting along in a new period, with prosperity for both countries and benefits to the world.”
Since then, Xi and other high-ranking Chinese officials have repeatedly said that China wants more rather than less cooperation, in particular on business relations. But they must surely know by now that Trump & Co. are not interested in high-minded principles, win-win cooperation, and ways to find common ground.
Haven’t they read the Project 2025 handbook? Aren’t they by now familiar with Trump’s The Art of the Deal, in which winning is everything and going for the jugular is the way to get there? To judge from recent exchanges of enduring friendship between Xi and Putin, Beijing knows the answer to these questions and has made its choice.
To get back to Tom Friedman’s call for US-China cooperation on AGI: So long as zero-sum competition is the name of the game in US-China relations, and cooperation even on matters of mutual interest is hard to come by, hope is scant that the perils and potential of AGI will suddenly bring the two governments together any more than will climate change or pandemic research.
Mel Gurtov, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Portland State University and blogs at In the Human Interest.
