Obama's response to contain China was the TPP. It could have been more (or less--no way to know) effective than Trump's, Obama just didn't tweet about it.
Obama was quietly working on the TPP. It or something like it would probably have been the better strategy to check Chinese power and put us on a path to decouple from them, while boosting friendly allies in their orbit.
Trump pulled out of the deal and decided to do a trade war instead.
Obama's TPP was a much better counter to China than anything the Trump administration accomplished. Too bad your "tarred and feathered," President didn't have the vision to take effective steps, and instead took loud, boisterous, and largely ineffective measures instead.
Obama spent a lot of political and reputational capital on the TPP. The only purpose of TPP was to counteract China. I think it would be very surprising if they were treating China as an ally.
Trump had a lot of rhetoric over China but was weak on action.
Pulling out of TPP was a massive geo-political and economic win for China. And nothing was done about widespread IP theft, trade imbalances, data sovereignty concerns or the use of trade to influence other country's policies.
Obama (and Bush before him) identified China as a threat at least a decade ago, that’s why the US entered the TPP discussions in early 2008, and if the US had ratified, would have been a significantly more effective strategy that would have enhanced the US’s economic and geopolitical position and hurt China’s as opposed to this, which is damaging the US significantly, and while hurting China’s domestic economy, strengthening it on the global stage relative to the US.
Trump has not been a leader, but he has definitely been loud and used a “let’s throw a tantrum till I get what I want” approach, which makes far more noise, but achieves far less.
Nothing Trump has done has come close to the massive gift Trump gave China by killing the TPP.
This idea that Trump is somehow harder on China is laughable.
Trump has been screaming China loudly, but his actions amount to barely a whimper, and the cost has been paid overwhelmingly by Americans.
TPP on the other hand would have actually been effective by giving American companies 4-5 alternative countries they could relocate their operations too, with the added incentive that the TPP requirements would have protected their IP from being stolen like it is in China. And it would have cost the US nothing, because the relocated businesses were not in the US anyways, but were in China.
In fact, the added diversity of countries to manufacture would have probably made it even more of a win for the US.
The idea that Trump has been anything but a massive gift for China is ridiculous. There’s a reason China has ramped up its aggressiveness worldwide towards the end of the Trump admin (although they are probably clearly overreaching, but they realize this might be their last chance to make hay without the US doing anything).
I wonder if TPP would have fared better than tariff threats. That seemed to be the way Democrats we’re going to contain China, by forging trade alliances with SEA and chinas neighbors.
Obama and Trump administration demands are pretty much similar, but when China said NO, their responses are totally different. Trump is taking China to the mat which Obama did not (what ever the reason may be).
I'm not sure how TPP was supposed to be a China containment strategy. I've heard this said a few times, but the explanations for how it was supposed to work always seemed like hand-wavey versions of "well, it would make US partnerships with non-China countries stronger and that would somehow contain China".
The best analysis I saw of the TPP pointed out how ironic it is that Democrats with elections coming up are against it, but Obama is for it.
The reason? Because if we don't implement TPP, the Chinese will likely create their own trade policy with the countries in question and we'll be left out. Sometimes in diplomacy and global economics it's not a zero sum game, but a game of compromises.
Remember when the US government successfully formed a partenrship agreement with 13 countries called the TPP that would have been a strong counter to China's growing influence but Trump threw it in the trash as soon as he got into office. Making us weaker just for political purposes.
I think that Obama was far far harder on China than Trump. Trump gave up any semblance of influence in the region, and China has gained massive power due to the absence of US leadership in the area. The tariffs are a pointless show that have done nothing to weaken China in the least. If Biden follows Obama's direction we will gain far more geopolitical power in the region, but it will be impossible to regain all the ground that we have lost on the international stage due to Trump's general weakness and unwillingness to engage in basic statecraft.
I don't think the current White House is capable of dealing with a multilateral world. The actions taken up to this point -- tariffs and market restrictions -- are a relic of last century (even then, they never worked that well).
A lot of Obama's foreign policy focused on containment and strength in numbers.
Both the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) were as much about developing business as they were about Chinese containment.
TTP in particular grouped many of China's adversaries in the region into one large, free moving bloc. Combined with an IP protection mechanism, this group offered global manufacturers a strong alternative to China, reducing the rest of the world's dependence on the PRC.
Second, Obama realigned the military to contain China.
Unfortunately, 2016 happened and Trump, out of his principles and reasons unknown, scuttled these efforts.
I don't see the Trump administration making an about-face any time soon since it would go against their world-view.
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