How Donald Trump or Kamala Harris could shape the future of East Asia

With barely two months until the US presidential election, and an increasing view among both Democrats and Republicans that America must focus on what they term the Indo-Pacific, many are asking what either a Kamala Harris or Donald Trump White House would mean for East and South-East Asia.

On the economic front, it seems likely that America will continue to miss a key trick in its engagement with the region. The reason for this, as the former Bill Clinton administration official Steven Okun wrote this week, is: “Whoever wins, the US will not be returning to the world of free trade.” Both parties are concerned about the jobs America has lost to globalisation and the threat of Chinese exports to domestic industry. To deal with this, Mr Trump’s proposals have varied but have included putting 10 to 20 per cent tariffs on most imports, and 60 per cent on those from China.

The Harris campaign has called the plans a “Trump tax”, but a spokesperson for the Democratic candidate conceded that his boss would impose “targeted and strategic tariffs”. In any case, President Joe Biden has not only kept in place the China tariffs that Mr Trump raised when he was in office but suggested a whole load more on semiconductors, electric vehicles and their batteries, and other goods.

The US remains outside Asia-Pacific trade agreements like the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, while China is in the former and has applied to join the latter. Mr Biden’s attempt to form a US-led pact – the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity – was never expected to amount to much, being a so-called “skinny” trade deal, but is now widely viewed as a bust. China’s Global Times could be expected to crow that it was “all talk, no real action, doomed to fail”, but the editorial board of Bloomberg also lambasted Mr Biden’s unwillingness to give the agreement any teeth as “bungling” that “jeopardises US global leadership”.

That’s not an overstatement. American administrations have consistently not grasped the fact that it is economic ties that will cement their place in the region. “Regardless of whether it’s Harris or Trump, paradoxically, the US will continue to walk away from trade while the rest of Asia embraces it,” said the Singaporean public intellectual and former diplomat Kishore Mahbubani. “Governments in the region led by China, India and Asean will continue their regional integration while the US sits on the sidelines.”

When it comes to security issues, there are significant differences between the two candidates. Ms Harris did not say a lot about foreign policy in her speech at the Democratic National Convention last week, but she did claim as Vice President to have “strengthened our alliances”, and said that as president “I will make sure … that America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century”, and that she would not “cosy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong-un”.

Although some have noted that Philip H Gordon, Ms Harris’s national security adviser, has been critical of US overreach in the past, the candidate herself sounds as convinced as Mr Biden that the world is divided between democracies and autocracies, and that her job will be to lead the former in what she called “the enduring struggle” between the two. There are dangers in this. A former official in the George W Bush White House has already called for her to “issue a formal, credible declaration of commitment to defend Taiwan” if China attempted reunification with even one of the smaller islands. This would upend decades of American “strategic ambiguity”, which has helped to keep the peace, and risk a catastrophic war.

Ms Harris’s declaration that she would spurn diplomatic efforts to open dialogue with the likes of North Korea’s Mr Kim has also been slated as “neoconservatism 101” in a commentary published by the bipartisan Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war, something anyone eyeing the presidency of the United States should have learned by now,” it concluded.

Mr Trump’s entourage and supporters include plenty of China hawks, such as his former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, and a potential future one, Elbridge Colby. But the former president’s own instincts are clearly to avoid US involvement in foreign wars, and he does not appear to share their prediction that conflict may be inevitable. In 2020, when still in office, he said about President Xi Jinping: “He’s for China, I’m for the US, but other than that, we love each other.”

Mr Trump’s concern is not democracy or human rights; it is trade and making sure that America gets what he feels is its due. In March, he said if Chinese car manufacturers “want to build a plant in Michigan, in Ohio, in South Carolina, they can, using American workers, they can. They can’t send Chinese workers over here, which they sometimes do. But if they want to do that, they’re welcome, right?”

Add to this Mr Trump’s unwillingness to publicly commit to defend Taiwan, and he may be the safer candidate for East and South-East Asia. I live in the region, in Malaysia, and I can say that many of us here don’t see two antagonistic blocs, democracies versus autocracies – because our neighbours have a variety of political systems, and we believe in sovereignty and the principle of non-interference.

We don’t want there to be a “competition for the 21st century” if that risks war, because we fear it will be fought on our doorstep. We don’t want kindling to be readied for flashpoints, be it Taiwan or the risky encounters between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea. We need compromises and solutions that enable all to save face – and a US that is finally ready to participate in meaningful trade agreements.

The latter may be unlikely under either Ms Harris or Mr Trump. As for face-saving “beautiful” compromises, the question for us in the Asia-Pacific is who is more likely to support them: the democratic idealist, or the transactional realist? The American people will make the decision, but we will face the consequences.