Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January is already giving Asian governments and industry leaders the jitters. No one knows for sure whether the president-elect will follow through on his threat of imposing across-the-board tariffs on friends and foes, whether he’ll seek to weaken the dollar, or whether he will squeeze out more cash from allies like Japan and South Korea for hosting U.S. troops.
Will he pull America out of NATO? Will he continue to fund Ukraine in its war with Russia? Will he seek a meeting with Kim Jong Un? Will he sit by and let strongman leaders rule by fear? And perhaps most pertinently for security in the Indo-Pacific, will he back Taiwan in the event of a conflict with China?
The Trump administration’s stance on Taiwan, Lev Nachman argues, depends on whether Marco Rubio (his nomination for secretary of state) or Elon Musk gets his ear on foreign policy. Rubio is a conservative China hawk and avid Taiwan supporter who has introduced a number of bipartisan bills on Taiwan and raised the profile of Beijing’s human rights violations long before it was trendy in Washington to do so. Musk, who has become one of Trump’s most favored advisers, has strong business ties to China and sympathy with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, and he has argued that Taiwan ought to simply accept a Hong Kong-style “one country, two systems” deal with Beijing.
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Elsewhere, Priyanka Kishore sees it as unlikely Vietnam will be able to avoid being slapped with tariffs for reasons including its expanding trade surplus with the U.S. Yuqing Xing predicts Apple will be the biggest victim of Trump’s proposed 60% tax on imports from China, and Richard Heydarian argues that Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will have to step up his game to avoid becoming a cog in the Trumpian imperial machine against a resurgent China.
Here is a selection of other viewpoints on Trump 2.0.
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