A Trump win splits the East Asian triangle

This article also appears in a collection of essays, Harris v Trump, written by Lowy Institute experts on the implications for Australia of the US presidential election.

“Of course, China wants Trump to win.”

This is something I have heard often in recent months — in Australia, in the United States, and in Europe — in relation to the idea that Chinese leaders see political advantage in a Donald Trump victory in November.

The same logic applied to Japan and South Korea — America’s most important allies in north Asia — reaches the opposite result: an assumption that both Tokyo and Seoul will barrack for the Democratic Party candidate Vice President Kamala Harris.

But talk to officials and scholars on the ground in China, Japan, and South Korea, and a different picture emerges.

Plenty of upsides for Beijing
The reasoning for the Chinese preferring Trump is sound enough. A Trump win represents decline, dilapidation, and chaos in the world’s most powerful democracy, and thus in theory helps Beijing in two ways.

Firstly, it would turn the United States inwards and diminish its ability to project power and support allies at the very moment that Beijing is challenging Washington head-on, especially in Asia.

Secondly, Trumpian chaos hurts the brand of democracy generally and bolsters Chinese advocacy for an alternative to the US-built and led world order.

In China, to be sure, there is not a singular view about the US election, even as the leadership anxiously awaits the outcome. As to what Xi Jinping himself thinks, that is a mystery. But Chinese officials and scholars, in private conversations over many months, are largely exceptionally wary of a Trump victory.

The Chinese see Trump as corrupt and transactional, all qualities they thought they could exploit and indeed did in the early period of his first presidency after he was elected in late 2016. But the Chinese approach did not work in the long run.

But China fears Trump’s unpredictability
In office, Trump eventually transformed America’s China policy because he had no hesitation in doing things that his predecessors would not. The most headline-grabbing announcements were on trade and the imposition of tariffs. But he also let his national security staff, and the likes of Mike Pompeo (Secretary of State) and Matt Pottinger (National Security Council), implement their own tough policies pushing back against China.

More than anything else, Trump is unpredictable and untethered by political precedence or commitments he may have made in the past, or even days, hours, or minutes before. Trump’s own secretaries of defence and chiefs of staff often had no idea what decisions he might take. How could the Chinese possibly know?

Beijing is executing a very deliberate salami-slicing strategy to gain ascendency in the region, around Taiwan, in the South China Sea, and near the Senkaku Islands, or Diaoyu Islands, where their navy and coast guard are challenging Japan.

Trump’s noisy unpredictability is anathema to China’s ambitions in this respect. The idea of a grand bargain between the United States and China, brokered by Trump as the self-styled master dealmaker, seems as distant as ever. Trump tried that in his first term with North Korea and failed.

There is no reason to think he could succeed with China, even if he were minded to try.

Japan has warmed to a Trump return while South Korea is ambivalent
But what about Japan and South Korea and a second Trump presidency? For very different reasons, surely, they fear a Trump victory?

After all, Trump has made no secret of his disdain for traditional allies who he thinks free-ride on American power and military spending. Trump’s earliest political statements in the 1980s attacked Japan, which was then running huge trade surpluses with the United States and competing head-on with America’s core industries.

Tokyo and Seoul already contribute large amounts of cash to pay the costs of the US troops stationed in their countries, and they did not like Trump’s overbearing threats during his first term to force them to pay more. But at the same time, the Japanese in particular, for all their resentment towards the United States, know they cannot manage China without Washington’s support.

In that respect, they like to see the United States display its power. What some outsiders see as warmongering, many senior Japanese applaud as deterrence. On top of that, the Japanese have in recent decades generally favoured Republicans over Democrats in the White House, as they see them as more focused on the kind of hard power that can keep China at bay.

Such attitudes drive people like Kurt Campbell, now Deputy Secretary of State and a longstanding, hard-nosed Democratic national security official, around the bend. The likes of Campbell can point to the record of Joe Biden’s administration, which has taken a tough line on China and worked hand-in-glove with the Japanese on bolstering deterrence.

As far as one can tell, Kamala Harris, should she win the election, would represent continuity in this tough-on-China foreign policy, at least in the short term. But on a recent trip to Tokyo, I was surprised to hear Japanese officials still muttering about the possible pitfalls of a Democratic win. “They are too intellectual,” one senior Japanese official told me.

The South Koreans do not necessarily align with the Japanese on policy towards the United States. Their tech companies have been less willing to fall into line with US-led sanctions against Beijing than have the Japanese. Seoul’s foreign policy also still largely revolves around North Korea.

Any preference for Trump in Tokyo and Seoul, such as it is, is heavily qualified by the former president’s indulgence of Russia and his infatuation with Vladimir Putin. Russia’s close ties with China and North Korea — which are both providing essential support for Moscow’s war in Ukraine — are red flags in Tokyo and Seoul.

However much value they might see in Trump, then, they clearly understand that the downside is precipitous as well.

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