US Foreign Policy vs. China Continues Under Trump

November 21, 2024 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The incoming Trump administration is poised to pick up where the Biden administration has left off on the decades-spanning centerpiece of US foreign policy - the encirclement and containment of China. This includes through an intense US military build up across the Asia-Pacific region, provocations over the island province of Taiwan, and continued interference in nations along China’s periphery. 

It also means a continuation of opposing cooperation between China and nations around the globe seeking alternatives to the debt, division, and destitution decades of US domination have imposed upon them, including across Latin America. 

With the appointment of leading neo-conservative war hawks to key positions including US Secretary of State, the US Secretary of Defense, and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, far from ending America’s wars abroad, the incoming Trump administration is poised to reprioritize and pivot toward the largest and most dangerous confrontation of all. 

Target China and the Continuity of Agenda

US foreign policy since the end of World War 2 has fixated on the elimination of all peer and near-peer adversaries including China. A 1965 memorandum from then US Secretary of State Robert McNamara to then US President Lyndon B. Johnson identified China as chief among these adversaries.

The memorandum noted that ongoing US military operations in Vietnam, “make sense only if they are in support of a long-run United States policy to contain Communist China.”

It stated explicitly, “China looms as a major power threatening to undercut our importance and effectiveness in the world and, more remotely but more menacingly, to organize all of Asia against us.”

The same memorandum would identify 3 fonts along which the US sought to contain China, “(a) the Japan-Korea front; (b) the India-Pakistan front; and (c) the Southeast Asia front,” fronts along which US efforts to contain China including through the stationing of tens of thousands of US troops continues to this day - US troops closer to Chinese territory than America’s own shores. 

When the Cold War ended, the US renewed its pursuit of global primacy in what is often referred to as the “Wolfowitz doctrine,” articulated in a 1992 New York Times article titled, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop,” stating: 

In a broad new policy statement that is in its final drafting stage, the Defense Department asserts that America's political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to insure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territory of the former Soviet Union.

The same article noted that US foreign policy, “makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.” 

And from the end of the Cold War to present day the US has fought wars of aggression cutting a swath of death and destruction from North Africa to Central Asia, spanning the presidencies of George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, George Bush Jr., Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, often with one administration helping set the stage for subsequent wars launched under successive administrations. 

Examples of this include preparations by the Bush Jr. administration for the overthrow of the Syrian government, a policy eventually executed during the 2011 so-called “Arab Spring” under the Obama administration, and continued throughout both the subsequent Trump and Biden administrations. 

The ongoing war in Ukraine likewise involved incremental steps pursued by US administrations stretching back to 2004 under President Bush Jr. where regime change was pursued, finally succeeding under the Obama administration in 2014, continuing under the Trump administration when US arms began flowing to Ukraine, and finally pulling Russia into direct conflict with Ukraine under the Biden administration. 

While supporters of the incoming Trump administration have claimed President-elect Donald Trump represents a break from these special interests and their agenda of US-imposed domination around the globe, both the first Trump administration’s National Security Strategy published in 2017 and the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) connected to President-elect Trump proposed and pursued policies indistinguishable from those laid out by America’s neo-conservative establishment for decades. 

The Trump administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy would claim: 

The United States will respond to the growing political, economic, and military competitions we face around the world. China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity. They are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.

The same strategy paper would insist in regards to the projection of American power abroad that, “we will advance American influence because a world that supports American interests and reflects our values makes America more secure and prosperous.”  

It is no surprise then that US political interference, proxy wars, and actual wars all continued under the Trump administration from 2016-2020 without exception. 

The subsequent Biden administration’s 2022 National Security Strategy would say of China: 

The PRC is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it. Beijing has ambitions to create an enhanced sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific and to become the world’s leading power. It is using its technological capacity and increasing influence over international institutions to create more permissive conditions for its own authoritarian model, and to mold global technology use and norms to privilege its interests and values. Beijing frequently uses its economic power to coerce countries. It benefits from the openness of the international economy while limiting access to its domestic market, and it seeks to make the world more dependent on the PRC while reducing its own dependence on the world. The PRC is also investing in a military that is rapidly modernizing, increasingly capable in the Indo-Pacific, and growing in strength and reach globally – all while seeking to erode U.S. alliances in the region and around the world.

This sentiment does not represent a separate or different strategy from that under the Trump or even Obama administration before that, or the 1992 Wolfowitz doctrine or those presented by Secretary MacNamara in 1965, but instead the evolution of a singular strategy pursued post-World War 2, continued post-Cold War, up to and including today.  

AFPI’s current website under a section titled, “Hold Communist China Fully Accountable for Chronic Unfair Trade Practices, Stealing American Technologies, and Polluting our Planet’s Air and Oceans,” says: 

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) represent the premier national security threat to the United States. China’s concerning activities include chronic unfair trade practices, stealing American technologies, aggression against its neighbors, abuse of the environment, and an accelerating nuclear weapons program. Additionally, China has displayed a complete lack of transparency about the origins of COVID-19. We must hold China fully accountable for its actions.

Just as with the 1965 State Department memorandum, the 1992 US Department of Defense strategy paper, the 2017 and 2022 Trump and Biden administration National Security Strategies, AFPI insists that China’s rise is a threat to US interests abroad and that military and economic measures must be taken to contain this rise. 

Beyond baseless accusations, no explanation is provided by any of these documents spanning half a century as to why the US is entitled to dictate the means by which nations beyond American borders interact including through trade and security cooperation or why China’s rise in the Asia-Pacific region and its growing influence around the globe somehow threatens the actual security of the United States within its own borders.

Instead, these documents are concerned that America’s own unwarranted influence abroad, built on political interference, as well as economic and military coercion, will be displaced by a more attractive and constructive relationship with China amid a greater balance of global power through what is often referred to as multipolarism. 

Chinese Infrastructure vs. American Interference 

Most recently, developments in the Latin American nation of Peru provide a showcase of China’s role in driving development, economic trade, and the construction of infrastructure with the completion of the Chancay Megaport, investments in energy infrastructure as well as the development of 5G telecommunication networks.  

The Chancay port not only supercharges imports and exports from Peru itself, but because of its strategic location in South America including a shared border with Brazil, it enables the movement of goods and people from one side of the continent to the other, transforming Chancay into a regional logistics hub. 

The US government has opposed Chinese investments, infrastructure projects, and growing trade around the world, including in Latin America. On US government-funded media platforms like Diálogo Americas, maintained by US Southern Command, a clear policy of opposing Chinese influence is pushed using fabricated claims of “dual-use infrastructure,” providing a “foothold for a future military presence in the region.” 

While Diálogo Americas is easily dismissed as transparent US government and military propaganda, identical narratives are uncritically repeated across mainstream Western media like the Financial Times. 

In FT’s 2023 article, “US raises concern with Peru over Chinese control of infrastructure,” it warned: 

The US has expressed concern to Peru that China is gaining control over critical parts of the South American nation’s infrastructure, including electricity supply to the capital Lima and a new megaport on the Pacific coast. 

Chinese companies have been buying power, mining and port assets across Latin America in recent years but the scale of Beijing’s investments in Peru, along with their strategic position, has caused particular concern, said a senior US official. Washington has raised the issue with Lima directly.

But even in the same article it is admitted that often, China is buying these assets from other foreign investors including Peru’s electricity business sold to China Southern Power Grid by Italian energy firm Enel. 

While US and European investors seek to maximize profit through controlling infrastructure, industry, and services worldwide - a practice that has caused runaway cost-of-living crises in their own respective nations - China’s interest is more practical. Energy infrastructure is required to facilitate both China’s own joint projects in Peru, as well as Peruvian industry exporting valuable raw materials, crops, and manufactured goods to China where they are needed. 

Beyond merely statements of protest, the US through its National Endowment for Democracy (NED), U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and adjacent private organizations like Open Society have funded and directed opposition groups both in Peru and around the world to oppose closer cooperation with China. 

Under the pretext of protecting “fishing,” USAID-funded opposition group Por la Pesca in Peru has attempted to create animosity between Peruvians and China over fishing rights. While Peru acquires badly needed infrastructure from China, the US provides the nation with the means to antagonize, vilify, and confront China over issues that would otherwise be minor and bilateral in nature.  

Peru and other nations across Latin America have turned to China half a world away in the first place because of the underdevelopment decades of US interference, exploitation, and abuse have caused. 

As evidence of both Washington’s disinterest and inability to compete with China, the US recently answered China’s inauguration of Chancay port with the “donation” of several 40 year old 1980s-era F40 diesel locomotives disposed of by California-based Calrail who is replacing them with modern, clean and efficient electric trains. 

Despite the obvious implications of sending used diesel locomotives to Peru because they are too old and polluting for US communities, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken would boast at the donation ceremony, “this agreement will support Peru in its sustainability and mobility improvements, and our former Caltrain passenger cars and locomotives will enable the start of new commuter service in greater Lima, cleaner air for commuters and community members, and the access to opportunity that great public transportation provides.”

Peru, the rest of Latin America and the world in general would benefit greatly from fair competition, even cooperation between the US and China, leveraging their respective resources, populations, and industries to build up global trade, infrastructure, and industry. The reality, however, is that the US has for decades and still openly pursues a policy of primacy around the globe, seeking to subordinate the world under US domination rather than lift it up alongside America. 

US China Policy To Come… 

The Trump administration, in its previous 2017 National Security Strategy, current AFPI proposals, and rhetoric amid this most recent US presidential campaign, has provided no evidence at all that it plans on breaking with this decades-spanning policy of encircling and containing China - and failing that - confronting it with increasingly aggressive measures. 

In fact, all evidence suggests the US is preparing a policy more aggressive than ever, including ramping up efforts to challenge both international law and bilateral agreements with China over the status of its island province of Taiwan. It also includes increasing the US military presence in the Philippines to threaten both China’s sovereignty over Taiwan and Chinese trade through the South China Sea. 

While the US under the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have claimed the growing US military presences in the South China Sea is to protect the free flow of trade through its waters, the US government and arms industry-funded Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) admits that over a quarter of exports in the region are coming from China with a large percentage of other regional nations’ exports moving onward to China. 

Surely the US isn’t suggesting it is securing what is primarily Chinese trade from China. Instead, the US is clearly positioning its military to threaten and eventually strangle Chinese maritime trade under the false pretext of upholding “freedom of navigation.” 

It is because of this growing US military encirclement, attempted containment, and encroachment, all predicated on false pretexts, that China invests heavily in expanding and modernizing its military. 

In particular, China has developed some of the best anti-access area denial (A2AD) capabilities in the world forcing a doctrinal shift across the US military known as multi-domain operations. This doctrine seeks to build capabilities able to penetrate Chinese defenses, not defend against feared Chinese offensive capabilities US policymakers admit are underdeveloped. 

In addition, the US military has spent years reorganizing its forces to fight China specifically, including the US Marine Corps transformed into a highly mobile anti-shipping missile force and the US Air Force into a highly agile and dispersed organization meant to evade and survive Chinese missile barrages targeting US forces that are - again - closer to Chinese shores than America’s. 

All of this took place primarily under the Biden administration despite the Trump campaign both in 2020 and 2024 accusing the Biden administration of being complacent or even complicit regarding China’s continued rise. This military force for confronting China will be fully ready as the vehemently anti-China Trump administration comes into office.

The next four years will see a continuation of what is essentially a post-World War 2 policy of attempting to eliminate peer and near-peer adversaries - first and foremost among them - China. If the Trump administration poses any sort of threat to US special interests, it certainly has chosen one of the most important and enduring policies of these special interests to eagerly advance. 

Because of China’s growing economic and military power, the likelihood of the United States succeeding dwindles year-to-year, increasing both the desperation and danger of US foreign policy and the cost it will inflict on the American people both in treasure and potentially blood. Despite many hopes invested in the incoming Trump administration, the only change will be in how continuity of agenda is pursued, not if it is to be pursued. 

If real change ever comes to US foreign policy, it will be first preceded by a change in rhetoric, recognizing and respecting China as a peer, and seeking constructive competition and even collaboration versus attempts to reassert unwarranted primacy over both Beijing and the rest of the world. That the Trump campaign - past and present - used some of the most aggressive propaganda to depict China as an existential threat is proof the only change may be how aggressive the incoming Trump administration pursues the policies of America’s unelected special interests. 

China, for its part, must assume that America will continue its pursuit of primacy and its policies of eliminating peer adversaries - especially China - until China and the multipolar world make it physically impossible for the US to continue doing so. Only when the US is left with one option - to work together beside other nations - will it ever abandon its desire to impose itself upon all other nations. 

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”