Biden has been tougher on China than Trump

Biden has been tougher on China than Trump

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 12 minutes

Biden has been tougher on China than Trump

Reality matters more than mean tweets

A new episode of Bad Takes is available today! It’s about a YouTube star who paid for 1,000 blind people to be able to see and then aired their emotional post-op reactions. His critics argue blindness isn’t necessarily a “problem.” We call this a clear-cut bad take that misses the bigger point about access to revolutionary medical procedures.

I don’t have a particularly strong opinion regarding what America should do in response to the apparent Chinese spy balloon. It’s the kind of situation where specific factual details that are necessarily clouded by secrecy are genuinely very relevant — we don’t know everything the U.S. government knows about PRC espionage or about U.S. surveillance in China or about direct countermeasures or about quiet diplomatic talks or a dozen other relevant things. It’s a frustrating situation, journalistically, because officials aren’t going to share everything they know or that the government is doing. Even most of the information that leaks off-the-record is itself a kind of “official unofficial” communication rather than true whistleblowing. We just don’t know.

But when I read headlines like “Republicans paint Biden as soft on China as surveillance balloon soars over U.S.” or about how “pressure mounted on President Joe Biden to hit back at Beijing,” I think it’s clear that the political debate about China policy is happening in an information environment that really lacks context about the actual policymaking.

The audience for content about domestic political fighting is much larger than the audience for content about U.S. foreign policy. As a result, many more reporters cover domestic political fighting than U.S. foreign policy, and columnists dedicate many more pieces to domestic political fighting than to U.S. foreign policy. To be clear, this last category very much includes me — I am not throwing stones, just making an observation about the system in which we are all embedded. The upshot is that a casual news consumer is much more likely to hear about China policy in the context of domestic political fighting about China policy than in the context of actual policymaking.

Suppose that instead of sending a spy balloon over U.S. soil (and/or losing control of a balloon that was supposed to just poke around nearby), China acted to deliberately cripple some sector of the American economy. That would’ve been a bigger deal, objectively speaking, than the balloon thing. And yet last October, the Biden administration imposed sweeping export controls on high-end computer chips. These moves were not unprecedented (the Trump administration issued several rounds of semiconductor-related export controls), but they were much larger and more dramatic than anything that had come before. Matt Sheehan from the Carnegie Endowment wrote in November that “with the latest rules, the U.S. government is betting that it can so deeply undermine China’s semiconductor fabrication capabilities that it won’t matter how motivated or well-resourced China’s efforts are to create its own semiconductor industry — they simply won’t be able to catch up.”

At the same time, Sheehan noted that it wouldn’t be easy to make these restrictions stick because “many leading SME and component companies are headquartered in Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea” and those countries aren’t necessarily as into economic war on China as the United States is.

But guess what? On February 2, I read “South Korea chip sales to China almost halve in January under US pressure” and on January 31, “U.S. official acknowledges Japan, Netherlands deal to curb chipmaking exports to China.” The Netherlands piece of this is particularly important because a Dutch company called ASML is essentially a single point of failure for the global chip supply chain. The company makes the lithography machines needed to make chips, and if China can’t get these machines, that’s a whole other domestic industry they need to create. The headline is about the U.S. “acknowledging” the deal with Japan and the Netherlands precisely because the exact contours of the deals are somewhat secret, and the arrangement with the Dutch seems to have cut out the European Union in order to smooth the decision making.

All this is much more significant than a balloon. But it’s collectively received dramatically less coverage.

Not because “the media” refuses to report on it (I’m linking to stories in the media), but because actual U.S. foreign policy is a much smaller swathe of “the media” than Yelling About Politics. And because you, the audience, do not click as much on those stories, there is a tendency for neither the humans who decide what to put on television and front pages nor the algorithms that decide which stories to promote to amplify this coverage. The result is a vague sense that maybe Biden is soft on China or not doing much on this front, when the reality is that policymaking has gotten much more hostile to China than it was under Trump, even though Trump really did adopt a more hawkish line on China.

Trump was a halfhearted China hawk

American elites’ views foreign policy tend to range from hawks who want to see more U.S. involvement abroad (generally with heavy undertones of American moral exceptionalism) to doves who view America as a neo-imperial power that imposes harms on the world. Part of Trump’s political success is that he articulated a third view, one that is reasonably widespread among the general population but badly underrepresented among elites: a sense that the United States is being taken advantage of and victimized by foreign countries.

This viewpoint can sound “dovish” in its complaints about forever wars in the Middle East or the squandering of funds on Ukraine, but proponents often pivot to hawkish discourse about bombing the shit out of ’em and we should have taken the oil.

During the 2004 campaign, John Kerry had a line about how “we shouldn’t be opening fire stations in Baghdad and closing them in Boston” that I remember as having been extremely controversial among left-of-center intellectuals. Objecting to the war in Iraq on the grounds that we were being too generous to the Iraqis and should’ve been more selfish wasn’t the correct line on the war. Except I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Kerry, like Trump, over-performed in the midwestern swing states and did better in Iowa and Ohio than he did in the national popular vote. Trump was also, like Kerry, a strong critic of free trade agreements that hurt midwestern manufacturing.

In terms of China policy, this led Trump to be sharply critical of the Clinton/Bush/Obama consensus on China. But the specific nature of the critique was heavily focused on the idea that the trade deficit was bad.

Ideological China hawks have some overlap with this mercantilist view of China. But these are genuinely very different ideas. If your big complaint about the old bipartisan consensus is that it was bad for American manufacturing exports, then you’d hardly want to impose stringent export controls on U.S. high technology. The whole point was to try to export more to China. And you saw this very clearly with Trump. His signature China policy move was the imposition of a stringent set of taxes on Chinese imports. This was genuinely a tough China policy in that the intended purpose was to coerce the PRC government into making concessions. But the concessions Trump obtained in his January 2020 breakthrough negotiation were “China has committed to buying an additional $200 billion worth of American goods and services by 2021 and is expected to ease some of the tariffs it has placed on American products.”

If you’re assessing toughness in the abstract, this is an example of successfully coercing a partner into doing what you want. But the desired outcome here was just to sell China a bunch of stuff. It wasn’t a strategic win in terms of U.S. geopolitical goals, because Trump didn’t believe in those goals. That’s why in the critical early days of the Covid-19 outbreak, Trump’s message was specifically that everything was fine thanks to his confidence in the Chinese government:

2/7 Tweet: “Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation. We are working closely with China to help!”

2/7 remarks: “I had a great conversation last night with President Xi. It's a tough situation. I think they're doing a very good job.”

2/10 Fox Business interview: “I think China is very, you know, professionally run in the sense that they have everything under control.”

2/10 campaign rally: “I spoke with President Xi, and they’re working very, very hard. And I think it’s all going to work out fine.”

2/13 Fox News: “I think they've handled it professionally and I think they're extremely capable and I think President Xi is extremely capable and I hope that it's going to be resolved.”

Trump had gotten what he wanted from China (which ended up not actually buying the stuff they promised Trump they would) so he pivoted to lavishing praise on Xi. Trump promised to run the government more like a businessman and in this respect, I think he really did that. He looked at U.S.-China trade as a positive-sum venture. He thought his predecessors had allowed the PRC to get an unduly large share of the surplus of that venture. And he thought that with a mix of tough-minded willingness to walk away from the table and unprincipled willingness to suck up to a vile dictator, he could secure a better deal. But beyond that, he didn’t care. John Bolton even says Trump encouraged Xi to build concentration camps for Uighurs. Biden’s approach to China, by contrast, is focused on real ideological and great power competition from China.

Biden has focused on containing China

Biden’s approach, as you would expect from someone who is very much a veteran of American elite foreign policymaking, is much more concerned with actual geopolitical containment of the People’s Republic.

Within that sphere of discourse, he’s not a maximalist China hawk the way some members of Trump’s circle (Mike Pompeo, for example) were. And of course, as with all administrations, he contains a range of views and conflicting priorities. But the general policy orientation has been to avoid reversion to the old bipartisan consensus while also dropping Trump’s apparent desire to quash the dispute with China if they’ll agree to buy some stuff. Instead, Biden is acting on the assumption that China will in the near future seek to militarily dominate its neighbors in an effort to prevent that from happening. That’s why he’s restricting exports to China, not just imports from China.

And the hallmarks of this containment policy are everywhere:

The Biden administration made a deal to supply Australia with nuclear submarines and has stood fast on this in the face of Chinese objections.

Biden is very proud of the time he spent convincing Japan to boost its military spending.

South Korea has also agreed to increase defense spending.

Just last week an agreement was reached on U.S.-India aerospace technology sharing that would allow GE jet engines to be produced in India.

There was also an agreement last week about the U.S. securing expanded access to military bases in the Philippines.

Vietnam is now looking to diversify its military procurement away from Russia.

Biden keeps making “gaffes” where he says the U.S. has a defense commitment to Taiwanese independence and then staff cleans it up and says there’s been no official change in policy.

Similar balloon episodes occurred during Trump’s presidency, spurring Biden-era increases in American surveillance, which is why this most recent balloon was spotted.

Again, the news media has dutifully covered all these developments — that’s why I know about them and why I’m able to link to those stories — but none have been major news stories that broke through on television or had political analysts opining about what it all means.

The balloon, by contrast, was huge news. But it’s just patently clear that all this stuff is a bigger deal, strategically, than any balloon or possible balloon countermeasures. The U.S.-China trade relationship remains a big deal economically, but it’s now clear to any company on either side that the future is in more strained commerce rather than deeper ties. And the entirety of U.S. foreign policy in the region has been re-oriented around China containment. Part of what drove me crazy about the incredibly harsh coverage Biden got for the Afghanistan withdrawal was the failure to see how these things are connected. The mission in Afghanistan left the United States deeply dependent on Pakistan’s good will to maintain the logistics. But prioritizing the containment of China requires us to build stronger ties to India and wean them off their traditional alliance with Russia. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama complained bitterly about the dysfunctional U.S.-Pakistan-Afghanistan relationship, and by withdrawing, Biden has cut the Gordian Knot and allowed us to focus on China.

Meanwhile, the other Biden era story that has obviously made headlines is the war in Ukraine.

And here a lot of right-populists who fancy themselves China critics have put their heads in the sand and declined to see that the Russia-Ukraine issue is related to China-Taiwan. Logically, these things don’t have to be related; I’m not a huge believer in the idea that showing determination in one place magically transfers credibility halfway around the world. But it’s clear that all the most relevant actors see these issues as linked — China is clearly helping Russia, and it’s not a coincidence that the non-NATO countries sanctioning Russia are the European neutrals plus Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. The war in Ukraine is in part a proxy war, and that’s just how it is until Moscow decides to change direction and pivot away from a course that threatens to turn Russia into a distinctly junior partner in an alliance with China.

Constructive vs. destructive GOP China hawkery

Of course you can’t take the politics out of politics, and the opposition party is going to make political hay out of spy balloons and whatever else.

But a big question on U.S.-China competition going forward is whether the parties cooperate constructively on China-related issues or Republicans are so eager to beat up the Biden administration that they make cooperation impossible. I think the braying about the balloon is an example of the latter. Certainly causing a huge debt ceiling crisis for no real reason at all is not a great sign.

On a positive note, though, Kevin McCarthy stocked the new China Select Committee with a group of mostly non-clownish members. They also seem to be setting this committee up in part specifically to do policy work that’s segregated from various Hunter Biden investigations and show trials. That seems smart. That said, if Republicans insist on undermining material support for Ukraine in order to appease Tucker Carlson, that will be bad.

The biggest area where Republicans could intervene constructively, though, would be by pushing Biden to think harder about his trade policy.

Right now, Biden is pursuing a kind of mixed strategy that’s one-part strategic competition with China, one part naked protectionism. Noah Smith argues for a policy of “friendshoring” rather than Buy American — in other words, trying to make sure that our supply lines lead to reliable partners rather than trying to make sure we are producing everything at home. I’ve argued before that we should be specifically trying to outsource low-wage work to poorer countries in the Western Hemisphere rather than “bring jobs back from China.” This is an area where I think Biden tends to say the right thing but not always do the right thing, and political pressure to align all the specific choices with the stated strategic aims would be very helpful.

Either way, though, partisan politics isn’t going to vanish. And the broad trend in which more attention and coverage is given to partisan nonsense than to U.S.-Netherlands talks over export controls is also likely to remain. But even if most people mostly pay attention to partisan clashes, I do wish the people who cover the partisan clashes would take the time to read their colleagues’ coverage of actual foreign policy and acknowledge, for example, that whatever Republicans say about spy balloons, the Biden administration has been very hawkish on China. More hawkish than any prior administration! Perhaps they should go further than they have or perhaps they’ve gone too far already, but any sane debate needs to start with the recognition that the old bipartisan consensus has been ditched and that Biden is pursuing China containment more vigorously and more rigorously than Trump ever did.

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