President Trump’s foreign policy record boasts significant accomplishments and noteworthy gains. But there is unfinished business and unfulfilled potential that should give us an idea of where the administration would seek to finish the job in a second term. First and foremost: Another four years would allow the president to redefine America’s relationship with the People’s Republic of China fundamentally — tackling the single biggest geopolitical challenge America faces today.
In 2017, the Trump administration released its National Security Strategy, a foreign policy lodestar that marked some notable departures from decades of conventional thinking in Washington. The report placed America in a “competitive world” that required us “to rethink … policies based on the assumption that engagement with rivals and their inclusion in international institutions and global commerce would turn them into benign actors and trustworthy partners.” It was a clear-eyed road map that has been generally followed in the president’s first term and has resulted in a number of foreign policy successes.
In the Middle East, the Trump administration oversaw the destruction of the ISIS caliphate, killed terrorists such as Abu Bakr al Baghdadi and Qassem Soleimani, and helped convince the United Arab Emirates and Israel to establish diplomatic ties. Under Trump’s watch, the United States has been a steadfast ally of Israel. And by decisively moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem, he succeeded at something that others have only talked about.
Trump withdrew from poorly negotiated agreements such as the Paris Climate Accord and the Iran nuclear deal. In our own hemisphere, his administration rolled back President Barack Obama’s misguided rapprochement with Cuba and recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as the country’s interim president. Trump and his team should be credited for standing up to China, calling out its malign actions, and questioning the efficacy of decades of patient engagement with Beijing. Finally, Trump led America out of multilateral organizations that consistently seem to work to undermine our friends around the world or against our national interest, such as the U.N. Human Rights Council and the World Health Organization.
The president has also surrounded himself with a national security team that has a principled view of the best way to advance America’s interests around the world. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser Robert O’Brien, in particular, have been influential advisers to the president who have served the public well.
Key to Trump’s foreign policy doctrine has been a merging of the pursuit of economic and national security interests. The use of trade policy to effectuate broader geopolitical goals is not unique to Trump but has been featured more prominently and directly than in any other recent administration. Trump has eschewed multilateral trade pacts, instead pursuing bilateral trade deals with countries as wide-ranging as China, the United Kingdom, and Kenya. While the application of tariffs has produced uneven results, and even been counterproductive in some cases, Trump’s actions have demonstrated that he’s unafraid to defy the conventional wisdom on trade, even within his own party. And the merging of economic and geopolitical considerations — that is, the clear recognition that politics and economics are not separate disciplines in the international arena — reflects a more realistic perspective.
In a potential second term, Trump should establish a single, overriding goal for his foreign policy: how America can compete and win the “strategic competition” we are engaged in with the People’s Republic of China. More broadly, the National Security Strategy’s call for a “free and open” Indo-Pacific, the region of the world where arguably the most is at stake for us in the coming decades, is a laudable and achievable goal. But it will require the right approach to China.
Critics argue that Trump’s actions toward and words about China caused irreparable harm to the relationship. It is true that some of the president’s rhetoric has been overly heated — for example, calling the novel coronavirus “the China virus,” needlessly antagonizing the Chinese people and making domestic debate about solutions more difficult. But he and his advisers are right to view China for what it is: a regional power with global ambitions. Skeptics of Trump’s policy tend to downplay all of the Chinese Communist Party’s provocations against the U.S. in recent months, from the disinformation it propagated about the source and spread of COVID-19 to the use of its consulate in Houston, Texas, as a spy outpost. Also troubling are actions Beijing has taken to exterminate systematically the Uighur minority in western China and dismantle the “one country, two systems” approach in Hong Kong.
The president must recognize that Xi Jinping himself is the problem. Trump’s desire to get along with foreign leaders, particularly ones he thinks he can make deals with, is particularly counterproductive when it comes to Xi, an autocrat who has installed himself as the permanent ruler of China, solidly in charge of the Chinese Communist Party, military, and government bureaucracy. His efforts to exert global influence (for example, through the One Belt, One Road initiative) are all part of his grand vision for China. While members of Trump’s team such as Pompeo and O’Brien have done well with confronting Xi directly, Trump himself must be willing to raise fundamental concerns about the country’s actions in the region and around the world.
On trade, Trump must address China’s fundamental predation. It’s nice that we can convince Beijing to buy more American soybeans, but these efforts do not address China’s unfair trade practices, which have become all too commonplace and continue to hurt American workers and businesses. If there is to be a “second round” trade deal with China, the Trump administration must take action against the country’s mercantilist system, which uses subsidies to a combination of state-owned enterprises and favored firms to engage in unfair competition with America and the rest of the world. Trump should seek greater assurances on cybersecurity and data privacy and continue to block market access for firms such as Huawei, whose technologies and relationships with the People’s Liberation Army threaten national security by enabling China access to our crucial technological infrastructure.
Ultimately, confronting China will require partnerships with our friends and allies in the Indo-Pacific. Other countries in the region, Australia, for example, have caught on to Beijing’s game. We are stronger when we work with others to contain China’s ambitions than when we go it alone. This means strengthening the already solid military relationships we have with Japan and South Korea, but also expanding cooperation with India. A free and open Indo-Pacific will only materialize if the administration also redoubles its efforts to work with Southeast Asian partners such as Singapore and Vietnam and to, as the National Security Strategy asserts, “re-energize” our alliances with the Philippines and Thailand. The Trump administration, broadly speaking, has fostered these valuable relationships. But the president himself must acknowledge and speak forcefully about the value of working together with other nations to deal with the challenge from China.
A strong U.S. relationship with Taiwan should also be an important component of our efforts to promote a free and open Indo-Pacific. This is another area in which the president has seemed less enthusiastic than members of his administration. For decades, relations between Washington and Taipei have been conducted informally, delicately, and ambiguously. All the while, serious questions have been left unanswered about America’s partnership with Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province.
Taiwan is the world’s eighth-largest consumer of U.S. agricultural products, purchasing almost $4 billion worth in 2018. Trump should pursue a free trade deal with Taipei. He should also promote more senior-level exchanges between Taiwan and U.S. officials, something that previous administrations have shied away from. Most importantly, he must work with Congress to clarify America’s intent to defend Taiwan against China’s efforts to “reunite” with the island by force. Specifically, this means ensuring that the U.S. has a proper military presence in the region to stop China from using force to take Taiwan and continuing to transfer modern weapons technology to Taiwan to help it defend itself.
Regional stability will also require Trump to recognize that North Korea continues to pose a significant threat. The president’s efforts to engage North Korea have resulted in media-friendly summits and historic photo-ops, but Kim Jong Un has evinced little willingness to make earnest progress toward our standard of complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization. In a second term, Trump needs to press toward that goal.
Beyond the Indo-Pacific, Trump should continue his “peace through strength” posture when it comes to our military, modernizing and augmenting the strongest fighting force in the world to ensure, in the words of the National Security Strategy, “that America’s sons and daughters will never be in a fair fight.” He should also see Russia, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, for what it is: a country with a revanchist mindset — a menace toward our allies in Europe with ambitions on influence in our hemisphere. Finally, a nuclear-capable Iran is an existential threat to Israel and a destabilizing factor in the Middle East. Trump should continue his maximum pressure campaign, with the goal of bringing Iran back to the table for a real negotiation about its ambitions and future.
In the national security space, President Trump has accomplished a good deal during his first four years in office. But it’s the next four that will allow him to cement his legacy — either as a president who addressed big challenges and rose to the moment or as a cautionary tale of opportunity lost.
Lanhee J. Chen is the David and Diane Steffy fellow in American public policy studies at the Hoover Institution and an affiliated faculty member in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.
