March 10, 2021| 10:37 a.m
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What would Joe Biden do if he had to choose between pleasing his political donors or endorsing a key Donald Trump policy? Well, obviously he’s going to…wait a minute. He what???
On the most consequential foreign policy issue that the Biden administration is likely to face—how to deal with the People’s Republic of China—the new Democratic president seems ready to follow the path set out by his Republican predecessor.
I believe that President Trump was right in taking a tougher approach to China,” said Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January.
Then, before the shock of that statement could sink in, he quickly added: “I disagree very much with the way that he went about it in a number of areas, but the basic principle was the right one, and I think that’s actually helpful to our foreign policy.”
It is hard to overstate what a sea change there has been in Washington foreign policy circles over the last four years—a change driven, as Blinken acknowledged, by Donald J. Trump.
Since Richard Nixon established relations with the People’s Republic of China in 1972, U.S. policy has consistently sought to integrate Beijing into an international order built by Washington in the post war era—to help it become a “normal” country.
When Deng Xiaoping began opening China’s economy to the world in 1978, the U.S. relied on trade and investment as the principal tools to bring China into the world and help make it, in the words of former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, “a responsible stakeholder.”
Successive administrations, from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, effectively stayed on the same course.
Then came Donald Trump. Elected in part because swaths of the industrial midwest had been devastated economically by low-cost Chinese imports, Trump vowed to stop Beijing, as he repeatedly stated on the campaign trail, “from ripping us off.”
To the dismay of the American foreign policy community and the Fortune 500, he dismantled the free trade status quo with Beijing.
He slapped significant tariffs on Chinese-made goods, sought to limit Chinese investment in key U.S. high-tech industries and tried to block high-profile Chinese companies such as Huawei not only from the American market, but from those of key allies as well.
Now, many of Biden’s key constituencies would love to turn back the clock. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley to Hollywood, they remain understandably fixated on the massive—and still growing—Chinese market.
But the early signs from the new administration are that they are likely to be disappointed.
In his confirmation testimony, Blinken forthrightly called relations with the PRC “the greatest foreign policy challenge of this century.”
The question facing him and the Biden administration is, what are they going to do about it?
