The International Manifesto Group (IMG) organised a webinar on ‘Trump’s Presidency and the Prospects for Peace in 2025’ on Sunday 19 January, the day before the US presidential inauguration.
The speakers were:
- Ramzy Baroud (Palestine Chronicle)
- Jacquie Luqman (Black Alliance for Peace)
- Andrew Murray (Stop the War Coalition)
- Gabriel Rockhill (Critical Theory Workshop)
- Keith Bennett (Friends of Socialist China); and
- Sara Flounders (International Action Center)
The event was moderated and introduced by Radhika Desai on behalf of the IMG and was also sponsored and supported by Friends of Socialist China, Palestine Chronicle, Critical Theory Workshop and the International Action Center.
Building for the event, the IMG wrote: “Given that the US is usually the prime instigator of our world’s conflicts and given that Trump sometimes spoke on the campaign trail about ending at least some of them, we ask what prospects the incoming Trump administration offers for peace. Will Trump’s second term be more or less aggressive than his first? Will he honour his campaign promise to end the war in Ukraine? Will he double down on his enthusiastic support for Israeli genocide? Will he escalate the New Cold War on China or attempt another ‘deal’? Will opportunities for peace in Korea and Iran be seized or squandered? What to make of Trump’s bellicose rhetoric in relation to Central America? How will the new administration affect humanity’s trajectory towards peace and multipolarity?”
Keith’s contribution focused on China and Korea and we reproduce his remarks below. Videos of all the contributions can be viewed on the IMG’s YouTube channel.
Meeting on the theme of Trump’s Presidency and the Prospects for Peace in 2025, it is natural we look especially at the war raging in Ukraine for nearly three years and at the situation in West Asia, as a tentative ceasefire emerges after more than 15 months of unrelenting genocide in Gaza. With so many thousands of lives being lost is it self-indulgence or overreach to also turn our attention to the Asia Pacific region?
But today, no bilateral relationship is more important, more strategic and more fraught with dangers of global conflict than that between the United States and China.
Faced with the peaceful rise of China, a rise unparalleled in human history, it has essentially become a consensus among the otherwise contending wings of the US ruling class that the preservation of US global hegemony necessitates taking China as Washington’s principal adversary. From Greenland to the South Pacific. And from semiconductors to social media.
As with Cold War One and the Soviet Union, the US seeks to reverse China’s progress and, at best, bring it to heel, through a combination of a debilitating arms race, ideological subversion and economic and technological strangulation. A key difference is that not only has China drawn lessons from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Whereas the USA and the USSR were essentially economically insulated from one another, China has spent the best part of half a century integrating itself into the global economy, creating such facts on the ground in the process as ever more complex global supply chains, and with China accounting for some 11% of US foreign trade.
So, what does Trump’s return mean for China/US relations?
First, Trump revels in his role as Disruptor-in-Chief, so the first thing we should expect is the unexpected. Certainly, if he carries through on even a fraction of his recent threats regarding tariffs, not only will China face an economic challenge. The entire global economy, in a parlous enough state as it is, and not least the US economy itself, will be plunged into crisis.
But overall, there seems little reason to anticipate a fundamental change of direction. When Biden assumed the presidency, many had hopes for a return to a more rational and constructive China policy in Washington. This did not materialise. Far from reversing Trump’s anti-China measures, the Biden administration ratcheted them up substantially, especially in terms of trying to restrict China’s access to computer chips and other advanced technology.
To the extent there was change under Biden, it came essentially in two areas:
• His administration largely eschewed the openly racist rhetoric of Trump (kung flu, Chinese virus, etc.), which undoubtedly made life somewhat more tolerable for many Chinese and other Asian and Pacific Islander Americans.
• Whereas Trump was an ‘equal opportunities bully’ when it came to insulting and threatening allies and adversaries alike, Biden’s team worked hard, and with a considerable degree of success, to reinforce cohesion in NATO, get the EU onside, and reinvigorate and reinforce old alliances, such as those with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, all with a view to confronting China, along with Russia, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and other states in Washington’s crosshairs.
So, even if Trump ups the ante with China, it will not break the essential continuum established by Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton with their 2011 ‘pivot to Asia’.
The ‘team of rivals’ that Trump has been assembling certainly lacks the intellectual brilliance of that forged by Abraham Lincoln, but it is not monolithic on China.
Trump himself cares little for ‘liberal democracy’ and, on that level, his antipathy to China probably lacks the deep ideological foundation that the US Democratic Party has come to increasingly embody. His motivation is more straightforwardly venal and mercenary. He will fight ruthlessly but may be prepared to cut a deal if he feels the terms are good. Or, perhaps as importantly, can present it as a win. We need to think only of his apparent volte face on TikTok, doubtless related to its ability to help feed his social media obsession.
The same cannot be said for his proposed Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who clearly will not be satisfied with anything less than the overthrow of the Communist Party of China.
A similar orientation can be seen on the part of a number of Trump’s other nominees, including those to be given trade, defence and national security portfolios.
But this, in turn, is different from the stand of Trump’s current ‘bestie’ (although for how long is anyone’s guess) Elon Musk, whose Shanghai factory accounts for half of Tesla’s global production.
Another area where this pattern can be expected to assert itself is in diplomacy and hence on the international balance of forces. As mentioned, while the Biden administration strove, with considerable success, to unite the imperialist camp, in the case of Trump, from Angela Merkel to Justin Trudeau, if there’s one thing he seems to enjoy more than insulting America’s adversaries it’s insulting America’s allies.
The Asia Pacific region is where key issues still unresolved from the 1940s continue to fester and where the interests of nuclear powers, principally the United States, China, Russia and the DPRK, collide and at times coincide. How will Trump, in his second presidential term, react to tensions in the Taiwan Straits or the South China Sea?
On the Korean peninsula, will he once again resort to threats of unleashing “fire and fury”, as he did in the early stage of his first presidential term or will he seek a further meeting with Kim Jong Un? No other serving US president ever dared to meet the top leader of the DPRK, something that Trump did three times, even accepting Kim Jong Un’s invitation to step into the DPRK. Even after negotiations broke down, the two men are understood to have continued private correspondence. On the campaign trail, Trump spoke of his relationship with Kim Jong Un and of his desire to get back to dialogue.
But the DPRK is not the same country as in Trump’s first term. Its nuclear weapons program, along with its delivery mechanisms, is considerably further advanced and its international position apparently strengthened by its new strategic alliance with Russia. On the other hand, the DPRK appears, at least for now, to have tired of the volatile, unpredictable and unreliable diplomacy of the USA, which had stymied and frustrated some three decades of DPRK efforts to normalise relations.
Regarding China, as Inauguration Day looms, Trump appears to be playing the same game of personalised diplomacy. An invitation to President Xi Jinping will see the unprecedented attendance of Vice President Han Zheng at tomorrow’s ceremony. Commenting on his phone call with President Xi on Friday, Trump said it was, “a very good one for both China and the USA. It is my expectation that we will solve many problems together and starting immediately. President Xi and I will do everything possible to make the world more peaceful and safe!”
According to China’s Xinhua News Agency: “Trump thanked Xi for his congratulations, saying that he cherishes his great relationship with Xi, hopes to continue to maintain dialogue and communication, and looks forward to meeting Xi at an early date. The United States and China are the most important countries in the world today, and they should maintain long-lasting friendship and work together to safeguard global peace.”
Of course, Trump never seems to have a phone call with another world leader that he doesn’t seem to think has gone great. And just the day before, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson slammed comments by Marco Rubio, as “unwarranted attacks” after the senator – in his confirmation hearing – called China “the most … dangerous near-peer adversary” the US had ever faced.
But significantly there has been no repetition of Trump’s December 2016 pre-inauguration phone call with the secessionist leader of China’s Taiwan province. Although there will be quite senior Taiwan representation, from both the ruling DPP and the opposition Kuomintang, at tomorrow’s inauguration.
And last night, describing it as an exclusive, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had told his advisers that he wants to visit China within his first 100 days in office. Perhaps significantly, the Xinhua News Agency was quick to report this.
How these relationships play out will have a major bearing on the future of the world in the days to come.
