The Rules of the Security Game between China and the US Will Change Under the Trump Presidency

The Rules of the Security Game Between China and the US Will Change Under the Trump Presidency 

Roilo Golez

In my series of blogs and Facebook postings, I stated that the rules of the security game between China and the US will be changed under the Trump Presidency. It will be a total war so to speak with the US using diplomatic, economic and military weapons.

The first salvo has been fired with Trump's conversation with Taiwan President Tsai. The Taiwan card is on the table and this is not only Trump's thinking but those of his close foreign policy advisers who don't like Clinton's and later Obama's strategy of engagement with China hoping a prosperous China would be a benign China. He has some hardliners as advisers like Pillsbury, Bolton and Rohrabacher and I think even Armitage.

Then of course there is the trade war which is the exact opposite of the Clintonian approach. Clinton helped China become a member of the WTO and that dramatically boosted China's economy achieving 10% growth per annum over a ten year period. This time Trump will, as announced, attack China's $489 Billion exports to the US. There will be negative repercussions for the US, but it looks like Trump is prepared to accept some economic pain for as long as China is hurt more. Millions of Chinese workers losing jobs would destabilize not only the existing leadership but the CCP itself. 

Then there is the military approach and this is very obvious with the selection of Mattis as DOD head. China is not prepared for a military confrontation now because it would set them back economically irrespective of whoever wins. America with its vast economic alliance can easily recover and reconstruct while China would end up a trade pariah. Expect a more assertive US Navy in this part of the world. Push back time.

Note also that Trump's strategy is to engage Russia and confront China. Russia historically is more wary of the China threat than the US threat. 

Luttwak has a book: The Rise of China vs. The Logic of Strategy. He noted there that only 10% of Russians favored China's military rise.

"Yet among respondents worldwide, a higher percentage of Germans expressed a negative view of China’s military aggrandizement than Americans (79 percent), Canadians (82 percent), British or Russians (both at 69 percent), though in Russia only 10 percent were favorable, distinctly fewer than the UK’s 25 percent; finally, Italians, antagonized by commercial rivalries and more anti-militaristic than most, were 81 percent negative." from "The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy" by Edward N. Luttwak.

I had the good fortune of hosting Luttwak when he was here in October and discussed China very lengthily with him. He believes China will avoid a hard confrontation at this time.