A Protectionist America Won’t Be a Global America
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, as the United States began devoting significant amounts of military and diplomatic resources to helping Kyiv defend itself against Russian aggression, some analysts have argued that the effort would undermine Washington’s ability to counter China. Once again, they lamented, the postponed “pivot to Asia” was being preempted by a crisis in a “legacy region” of U.S. strategic focus, diverting scarce resources needed in the Indo-Pacific region to Europe.
In fact, the reverse is true. Washington’s increasingly hawkish posture toward China, particularly with regard to trade policy, is more likely to undermine assistance to Ukraine as well as U.S. alliances in Europe and Asia.
Those alliances, and the U.S. global security role in which they are embedded, were always only a means to an end: at first to defend the market-based economies of Europe and Asia against Soviet encroachment during the Cold War, and later to expand and secure what has come to be known as the liberal international order. But Washington is now abandoning one of the central pillars of that order: the commitment to open markets in which governments interfere as little as possible with free competition, including for foreign trade partners.
That shift is being driven primarily, if not exclusively, by Washington’s hardening attitude toward China. While it began with former President Donald Trump, the truth is that—as with almost every other issue—Trump was both symptom and cause. Symptom, because the emerging consensus among the U.S. foreign policy establishment by 2016 was that the U.S. indeed needed to get tougher on China. Cause, because Trump adopted an extreme version of the “tough on China” playbook that pushed U.S. policy further and faster toward the confrontational posture with Beijing that has now crystallized in Washington.
In the process, what had been a marginal view of China as an adversary and even enemy, rather than a competitor or rival, became mainstreamed and used to justify Trump’s trade war with Beijing. It’s a testament to how radically the China consensus in Washington has shifted in the past six years, however, that what at the time seemed like an earth-shattering development upending the foundations of the post-Cold War global order has now become a normalized feature of the geopolitical landscape.
Washington’s view of China was further dimmed by Beijing’s behavior in the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, from its lack of transparency on the origins and spread of the virus to its “wolf warrior” diplomacy and leveraging of personal protective equipment for geopolitical advantage. The result is that upon succeeding Trump as president in 2021, Joe Biden didn’t change much with regard to China policy. The Trump-era tariffs remain in place to this date. In fact, Biden tightened the screws even further last year, slapping export controls on high-end semiconductors to starve China of the chips needed to develop next-generation technologies like artificial intelligence.
But Trump’s hostility to free trade was not limited to China. Here, too, he was both symptom and cause, riding the wave of Rust Belt resentment over closed factories and lost jobs to champion a broader hostility to liberalized trade, even with U.S. allies and partners. And here, too, Biden seems to have decided that the political risks of breaking with Trump outweigh the costs of continuity.
Ever since Biden took office, analysts have likened his “foreign policy for the middle class” to a more polite version of Trump’s America First doctrine. He belatedly removed the Trump-era tariffs against European Union steel and aluminum producers, only to fuel more recent tensions with the EU over the subsidies for U.S.-based production of clean energy technologies included in the Inflation Reduction Act. The CHIPS Act similarly uses industrial policy to subsidize investment in chip-making factories in the United States. And the impact of the export controls designed to choke off China’s supply of the most advanced semiconductors will also be felt strongly in Europe and Asia, which supply the high-end chip-making machines and chips, respectively, that are affected.
In abandoning the liberal international order that it helped build and backstop, Washington is removing the principal justification for the U.S. global security role.
The Biden administration has justified all these policies by the need to outcompete China in “the battle for the future.” Only belatedly, however, has the realization dawned on Washington that the U.S. cannot go it alone if it hopes to outcompete China. For their part, Washington’s allies in Europe and Asia have begun to reconsider their own relations with Beijing, recognizing that they can no longer afford to be complacent when it comes to the vulnerabilities created by economic dependence. But they recoil from any suggestion of a broad decoupling and are already wary of being drawn into a battle they simply don’t see as their own. The emerging tensions are only likely to get worse now that, rather than actually competing with China, the U.S. is instead pressuring its partners to sign on to noncompete clauses, even as it closes its own market to competition from their companies.
Together, Trump and Biden have turned U.S. policy on China since 2001 on its head. Instead of trade integration making China become more like the U.S., as was hoped, it has made the U.S. become more like China—more protectionist, more statist and more mercantilist—with one exception: Trade deals have now become anathema in Washington, even though what the states at the heart of U.S.-China competition most want is greater access to the U.S. market.
In abandoning the liberal international order that it helped build and backstop for the past 30-plus years, however, Washington is removing the principal justification for the U.S. global security role. Here at least, Trump was more coherent than Biden, who has been a more conventional foreign policy president when it comes to managing U.S. alliances and maintaining U.S. security guarantees. Because in addition to being hostile to free trade, Trump was also hostile to U.S. alliances, particularly given the unequal burden-sharing within them.
In this, he met resistance from within the mainstream of his own party while he was president. But the GOP is now beginning to operate the same reversal of poles in the domestic debate over alliances—and defense budgets—that Trump effected on trade. And that shift will only be reinforced by the new domestic consensus on trade, which by undermining liberal internationalism, turns U.S. alliances into protection rackets, in which subordinate allies must shut up and accept the terms, or go it alone.
This was a common criticism of Trump’s approach to alliances. At the time, institutional inertia and the hope that Trump would be an anomaly in U.S. politics sufficed to keep U.S. allies on board despite his provocations. But that is unlikely to hold true if they begin to perceive Washington’s global security role as an attempt to salvage U.S. primacy for primacy’s sake, rather than for a greater good. The result is that U.S. allies could very well begin to abandon these alliances even as U.S. support for them erodes in Washington.
For now, Western support for Ukraine is in large part driven by the normative case for defending a sovereign state against a brutal war of aggression. But states ultimately act for reasons of national interest. And the United States’ national interest in this conflict is to make sure Russia cannot threaten the security of its NATO allies and the stability of Europe as a crucial trade partner, while also sending a message to other states—notably China—that acts of aggression will not stand.
That makes sense in an interconnected global order based on open and integrated trade. It sits less easily with one in which trade, too, is seen as a form of conflict, and in which all countries—even U.S. allies—are seen as a threat that must be stopped at the border.
In reality, two of the United States’ greatest advantages in the competition with China are its openness and its alliances. It would be a bitter irony if Washington ends up sacrificing those advantages through the very steps it is taking in the effort to compete with Beijing.
Judah Grunstein is the editor-in-chief of World Politics Review. You can follow him on Twitter at @Judah_Grunstein.