WALLED IN
WHAT WOULD JOE BIDEN DO IF HE HAD TO CHOOSE BETWEEN pleasing his political donors or endorsing a key Donald Trump policy? Well, obviously he’s going to…wait a minute. He what???
On the most consequential foreign policy issue that the Biden administration is likely to face—how to deal with the People’s Republic of China—the new Democratic president seems ready to follow the path set out by his Republican predecessor.
“Let me just say that I believe that President Trump was right in taking a tougher approach to China,” said Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January. Then, before the shock of that statement could sink in, he quickly added: “I disagree very much with the way that he went about it in a number of areas, but the basic principle was the right one, and I think that’s actually helpful to our foreign policy.”
It is hard to overstate what a sea change there has been in Washington foreign policy circles over the last four years—a change driven, as Blinken acknowledged, by Donald J. Trump.
Since Richard Nixon established relations with the People’s Republic of China in 1972, U.S. policy has consistently sought to integrate Beijing into an international order built by Washington in the post war era—to help it become a “normal” country. When Deng Xiaoping began opening China’s economy to the world in 1978, the U.S. relied on trade and investment as the principal tools to bring China into the world and help make it, in the words of former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, “a responsible stakeholder.” Successive administrations, from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, effectively stayed on the same course. The U.S. policy toward Beijing was that of “engagement,” and economics was its lynchpin.
Then came Donald Trump. Elected in part because swaths of the industrial midwest
