Ever since the war in Ukraine began, analysts had been asking what the implications were for East Asia. Now that the US has made an abrupt U-turn on its previous support for Kyiv, and startled European leaders who had assumed they would always be able to rely on America for their security, questions are being asked about the solidity of US commitments in the rest of the world.
Could American President Donald Trump pull the rug from under US treaty allies in the Asia-Pacific, including the Philippines, Australia, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, the last of which does not have that status, although former president Joe Biden repeatedly spoke about the island as though it did?
In the case of the latter, the comparison with Ukraine is not surprising. As Russell Hsiao of the Washington-based Global Taiwan Institute was quoted as saying earlier this week: “Taiwan spent the better part of the past three years making the case for how the fate of democracies is intimately tied and what happens to Ukraine affects Taiwan.”
Mr Trump is certainly far less bullish on the island, which China sees as a renegade province. He has regularly accused Taiwan of “stealing” the US chip industry, and has evinced no interest in the idea of defending “democracies” against “autocracies”, which is, in any case, a Biden-era distinction that does not fit with the transactional America First policy of the new administration.
The former Trump protege Vivek Ramaswamy has said in the past that the US should defend Taiwan, should China attempt reunification by force, but only until 2028. By that point, he reckoned, the US would have achieved “semiconductor independence”, and would then have “very different commitments, significantly lower commitments” to the island.
The new President is unlikely to be at all sentimental about these relationships. Last year, he called South Korea a “money machine”, and said the country should be paying $10 billion a year – almost 10 times more than it currently does – to host the 28,500 US personnel stationed on the Korean Peninsula. Will Australia ever get the submarines it expects under the Aukus trilateral security partnership it has with the UK and US?
According to Hugh White, an emeritus professor at the Australian National University and one of the country’s most eminent international affairs analysts, “Australia matters a lot less to [Trump] than it did to Biden. The best Canberra can hope for is that Trump, recognising that he has us over a barrel, will jack up the price – and not just be demanding more dollars,” he told ABC News this week. “More likely, as the handover approaches, he will pull out of the deal. Quite possibly he will do both.”
Mr White believes – and I agree with him – that “Trump is fixated on China as an economic rival, and on keeping China out of America’s backyard in the Western Hemisphere, but he has no real interest in resisting China’s strategic ambitions in Asia”. If I were Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, I would be nervously wondering whether it had been wise to put all my eggs in the American security basket, and whether a return to the warmer ties with China under his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, might be possible.
This also touches on a key reason why imagining that Europe could be a template for US foreign policy in the Asia-Pacific is wrong: leading members of the Trump administration have long advocated for less focus on the old continent precisely because they believe their concentration should be on East Asia, and China in particular.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called China “the most potent and dangerous near-peer adversary this nation has ever faced” at his Senate confirmation hearing in January, and said “if we stay on the road we’re on right now, in less than 10 years everything that matters to us in life” – from medicines to movies, he said – “will depend on whether China will allow us to have it or not”. He added that America needed to improve its domestic industrial capability and partner with allied nations to secure its supply chains.
In an interview last week, Mr Rubio was firm that US allies in the region had no interest in becoming “sort of tributary states in a Chinese zone of influence”, as he put it. “We are a Pacific nation. We intend to remain one and maintain our relationships there. So that is a red line for us,” he pointed out. (That’s particularly interesting to me, as about a decade ago I asked a US State Department official if they had any red lines in the South China Sea, and the answer was “no”.)
Elbridge Colby, Mr Trump’s nominee to be Under Secretary of Defence for Policy, is a hawk who received acclaim in the US for his 2021 book titled The Strategy of Denial, which detailed how to prevent Chinese regional hegemony. Nevertheless, he has said that “my strategy is not designed to suppress or humiliate China” but to maintain the status quo. Mr Rubio has also told Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi that the US “does not support” independence for Taiwan.
There are shades of opinion in the Trump administration. Elon Musk has extensive business interests in China. I believe, as I’ve mentioned before, that Mr Trump may well be up for some grand bargain with Beijing, and he may not value traditional allies as deeply as does Mr Rubio, who is at heart a far more conventional Republican conservative.
But to conclude, there are two points that underline the difference between the new administration’s approach to Europe and East Asia.
First, while US Vice President JD Vance once famously said “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other”, the region where I live does matter, very much, to the Trump White House. They care, because they believe it is imperative to Make America Great Again to do so.
And second, as if this isn’t clear enough by now, US engagement with the Asia-Pacific will have nothing to do with spreading democracy and liberal values, let alone some of the more exotic ideas the US government used to support abroad. As Mr Rubio put it at the end of January: “This is an approach to foreign policy based on concrete shared interests, not vague platitudes or utopian ideologies.”
When it comes to those: sorry Europe. You’re on your own. As for the Asia-Pacific, due warning has been given that the US is back, but this time shorn of any idealism, and fuelled instead by a ruthless pragmatism and relentless realism.
