Trump's China policy was a fiasco -- not a triumph
Opinion by Max Boot
If you listen to President Trump’s cheering section, he is responsible for “the most significant United States foreign policy shift in a generation.” That braggadocio is from a collection of speeches by administration officials about China released by soon-to-be-former national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien. “We are no longer turning a blind eye to the People’s Republic of China’s conduct,” he writes, “nor are we hiding our criticism of its Communist Party behind closed doors.” He even absurdly compares the administration’s anti-Beijing bombast to George Kennan’s brilliant dissection of Soviet conduct in the 1946 “Long Telegram.”
No one who has not drunk the Kool-Aid would go that far, but some otherwise sober commentators are willing to give Trump credit for reorienting the U.S. approach to China. The Economist, for example, recently wrote: “The achievement of the Trump administration was to recognise the authoritarian threat from China. The task of the Biden administration will be to work out what to do about it.”
Some “achievement.” U.S. administrations have been recognizing the “authoritarian threat from China” ever since the Communist takeover in 1949. Indeed, it has long been a staple of U.S. politics to accuse one’s opponents of being soft on Beijing. As a commentator noted in 2012: “Ronald Reagan repeatedly criticized President Jimmy Carter for establishing diplomatic relations with Beijing. Bill Clinton excoriated the ‘butchers of Beijing’ in the 1992 campaign. . . . Candidate Barack Obama labeled President George W. Bush ‘a patsy’ in dealing with China and promised to go ‘to the mat’ over Beijing’s ‘unfair’ trade practices.”
Hardliners will object that previous presidents became “panda huggers” once in office. That’s unfair. Past administrations tried to strike a balance between competing with China and cooperating with it on issues of mutual concern such as trade and the environment. But even before Trump came along, the U.S. approach had been getting tougher because of China’s growing power, brutality and assertiveness since President Xi Jinping took office in 2013.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/15/trumps-china-policy-was-fiasco-not-triumph/