Biden’s efforts to contain Chinese power are also less vulnerable to presidential caprice. Trump tended to excoriate China with one breath and heap praise on China’s leader, Xi Jinping, with the next. He probably saw his tariffs as a means to eventually negotiate a better trade deal with China, until the pandemic threw all efforts to improve relations with Beijing off course.
The Biden administration is less narrowly focused on the US-China trade balance, and is making a more systematic effort to restrict the export of key technologies to China. Biden’s team can also claim to have put far more money into efforts to reindustrialise the US than Trump did.
SHARED PHILOSOPHY
But these are largely differences in implementation rather than underlying philosophy. Much as they would be loath to admit it, the Biden team has come to share many of Trump’s basic assumptions – about trade, globalisation and rivalry with China.
Two factors have driven this reassessment. First, Trump’s victory in 2016 forced Democrats to take the plight and anger of US workers much more seriously. The Biden administration has concluded that it can no longer sell globalisation to the American people.
Without an effort to address the economic drivers of Trumpism, democracy itself may be in peril. So Biden’s team has finally abandoned the free-trading nostrums embraced by Bill Clinton’s “New Democrats” in the 1990s.
Source: CNA
