What comes next for US-China relations

Despite the seemingly cordial meeting between US and China leaders in May, Jake Sullivan, Harvard academic and former national security advisor to Vice President Biden during the Obama administration, believes it did little to address key tension points between Washington and Beijing.

At the Fiduciary Investors Symposium, Sullivan, who is Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order at Harvard Kennedy School, said it’s important to recognise that President Donald Trump views the US-China relationship as a personal relationship between himself and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

“[Trump] thinks he and this other great leader can collectively both manage the relationship and frankly, to a certain extent, manage the world, and he wanted to put that on display, so he got what he wanted out of it,” Sullivan said at the symposium.

But the meeting was heavy on diplomacy and light on details, especially around the two areas where there will be genuine frictions between the two superpowers: semiconductor export control and arms sales to Taiwan.

“Because what’s happened over the course of the past year and a half is the Trump administration has successively reduced the enforcement and removed the restrictions on certain chips for sale to China, and this has generated antibodies among Republican leaders in Congress,” he said.

“They’re advancing legislation actually to mandate the reimposition of a bunch of restrictions that otherwise the president would take off, that’s where the rubber is hitting the road right now.”

On Taiwan, Sullivan said Trump has already “mused” about pausing arms sales to the island even though there haven’t been any official policy changes.

“If the [Capitol] Hill, particularly Republicans on the Hill, judge he actually is really altering US policy towards Taiwan in a quite fundamental way, I think you’ll start hearing some pushback,” he said.

“That pushback will coincide with the end of the Republican primary season, where they feel less exposed to assaults from the President and the White House.

“I think there’ll be more friction on US-China next year than there was this year, particularly on these couple of issues, but by and large, President Trump has been able to impose his will and his frame on the relationship.”

Rise of the middle power

Aside from great power competition, another prominent geopolitical theme around the world is the rise of middle power nations, including Canada, Australia and many members in the Eurozone.  

In a speech at Davos at the beginning of this year, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said that the rule-based world is increasingly a “fiction” and great powers no longer play by the old rules of global cooperation.  

This speech signifies that two things are happening among middle power nations, Sullivan said. For one, they are building indigenous capabilities and diversifying their alliances – be they economic or geopolitical – with other middle powers.

“And two, a greater degree of balancing off – even among the democracies – between the US and China than was true just a couple of years ago, when you saw a huge amount of alignment among the democracies vis-à-vis China.”

The speech also shows that the US and China are now treated as equivalent, “malevolent” super power actors in the world, which puts the US in a conundrum.

“My friends Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi, who I worked with in the Biden administration on Asia policy, wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs called Allied Scale, and their basic argument was the US cannot straight up compete with China on scale.

“However, the US – working with its allies – can, and that’s how we can maintain the commanding heights of key frontier technologies.

“But I would say the risk currently that our allied relationships are damaged to the point where that is not a viable strategy is real, in which case the US will be at a significant disadvantage going forward.

“How you operate in the world writ large across the board matters to your ability to align allies and partners in that kind of common purpose.”