With polls in as many as 76 countries, 2024 is the biggest election year in history. This year’s raft of elections has already produced a left-leaning government in Britain, political gridlock in France, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s return to office for a third term, and the elevation of the pro-sovereignty William Lai (賴清德) as Taiwan’s president, but with his Democratic Progressive Party losing its majority in the legislature.
But no election will have a greater global impact than the one in the US. Whether American voters elect Kamala Harris or Donald Trump as the next president, and whether the Republicans or Democrats gain control of the US Congress, will reverberate across the world, including in Taiwan, which confronts increasing Chinese coercive pressure.
At a time when a major geopolitical reconfiguration is underway, with America’s global preeminence at stake, the US is heading to its most consequential presidential election in a generation.
US domestic politics has a bearing on international issues of peace and war. In fact, hardened polarization in the US has created a partisan divide on some key foreign policy issues. For example, according to one poll, Democrats worry about Russia above all while Republicans are most concerned about China.
Outgoing President Joe Biden’s national security team largely comprises “liberal interventionists” — essentially, hawks on the left — whereas many on the right, including Trump, can be considered non-interventionists (or, as their critics call them, “isolationists”).
If Harris, who has a biracial Black and Indian American identity, becomes the first female president of the US, she is likely to sustain the Biden approach to the Ukraine war, thereby precluding American support for any ceasefire effort. The US, without putting its own soldiers in harm’s way, is deeply involved in the war that has increasingly devastated Ukraine.
By contrast, if Trump returns to the White House, he is unlikely to prolong the US involvement in the war or support sending tens of billions of dollars in additional military aid to Ukraine. Tellingly, he has chosen as his running mate J.D. Vance, who led the opposition in the Senate to this year’s fresh US$61 billion Ukrainian assistance package.
Indeed, Trump’s record as president between 2017 and 2021 underlined his aversion to America funding wars or getting entangled in conflicts around the world, instead of focusing on rebuilding its power capabilities.
In 2020, he famously said at a White House news conference that the “top people in the Pentagon” want to “do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy. But we’re getting out of the endless wars.” This statement echoed then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about America’s “military-industrial complex.”
Last month, Trump reiterated a promise that, as president, he would end “the horrible war with Russia and Ukraine.”
But Trump has also made controversial comments about Taiwan recently, implying that he might be willing to leave Taiwan to its fate. “Taiwan should pay us for defense. You know, we’re no different than an insurance company. Taiwan doesn’t give us anything,” Trump said in a newsmagazine interview, while suggesting that the US would have difficulty defending the island because of its distance, stating “Taiwan is 9,500 miles away (from the US). It’s 68 miles away from China.”
By tacitly asking for a “protection fee,” those remarks underscore Trump’s long-held transactional approach to foreign affairs. In practice, though, a new Trump administration, if it assumes office, is likely to be tougher on China than Team Biden.
It should not be forgotten that it was the Trump administration that in 2017 reversed a 45-year US policy of aiding China’s economic rise. That policy, initiated by then-President Richard Nixon, helped spawn not only a more aggressive and expansionist China but also the greatest strategic adversary the US has ever faced.
Today, Trump has China in his sights again, which may well explain why he wants the US to stop squandering resources on the war in Ukraine, a country he sees as not being vital to American national interests. If Trump returns to the White House, the last thing Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) may want to do is to order a Chinese invasion of Taiwan on the new US president’s watch.
But even if Harris defeats Trump in November, Biden’s conciliatory approach toward China may not survive. Biden could go down in history as the last American president with a softer approach toward Beijing.
Much before Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden began easing Trump-era pressure on China. He effectively let China off the hook for both obscuring COVID-19’s origins and failing to meet its commitments under the 2020 “phase one” trade deal with the US. He also dropped fraud charges against the daughter of the founder of the military-linked Chinese tech giant Huawei.
But since the start of the Ukraine war, Biden has sought to focus on containing Russia by stabilizing US ties with China. This has allowed Xi’s unrelenting expansionism — from the South and East China Seas to Hong Kong and the Himalayas — to remain cost-free. US sanctions over China’s Muslim gulag have essentially been symbolic, despite the Biden administration acknowledging that the mass incarceration constitutes “genocide” and “crimes against humanity.”
To advance its long-term interests, the US needs to focus more on a globally ascendant and aggressive China, which is seeking to supplant America as the world’s foremost power, than on a sanctions-battered Russia whose ambitions remain regionally confined.
At a time when the risk of Chinese aggression against Taiwan looms ever larger, the next US administration will have to redouble efforts on a priority basis to deter China from using force against that island democracy. With Xi’s appetite for risk having grown, a greater US stress on deterrence than on diplomacy has become imperative to forestall a military confrontation in the Taiwan Strait.
Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).
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