Constructive Engagement: Are We Going to Do This Again?

The BBC described President Trump’s approach toward China during the recent summit meeting in Beijing as “softer.” Dennis Wilder, who advised President George W. Bush on China, praised Trump for respecting China’s national interests and recognizing Sino-U.S. responsibilities to the world. Al Jazeera noted that during the summit Trump focused on “pragmatic areas of common interest” between the U.S. and China. The Los Angeles Times characterized Trump’s approach to China’s President Xi Jinping as “conciliatory.” Charlie Campbell of Time magazine claims that Trump’s performance in China, which Campbell characterized as “deferential,” was based on a recognition that geopolitical power has shifted to the east. If there was a “Spirit of Beijing,” according to most news analyses of the Trump-Xi summit, it was détente.

Among many, if not most, conservatives, détente has a bad reputation. In the 1970s, conservatives routinely attacked the Nixon administration for its less confrontational policies toward the Soviet Union. Nixon, whose reputation as an anti-communist hardliner dated back to the Hiss-Chambers case in the late 1940s, eased relations with the Soviet Union as part of a brilliant geostrategic policy that rearranged the global chessboard in America’s favor and set the stage for Ronald Reagan to win the Cold War.

Nixon’s strategy included ending the divisive war in Vietnam, instituting the Nixon Doctrine to shift the burden of regional security to allies, ending the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East in a way that dramatically lessened Soviet influence in the region, opening relations with Communist China to exploit the Sino-Soviet split, and conducting “triangular diplomacy” to position the United States closer to the Soviet Union and China than they were to each other.

Trump’s critics on the right are accusing him of reinstituting a policy of “constructive engagement” with China — the same failed policy approach, they argue, of every U.S. administration since the end of the Cold War. The atmospherics surrounding the Trump-Xi summit, some of Trump’s flattering statements about Xi, and Trump’s overall less-confrontational approach toward China’s leader during the two-day visit to Beijing feed into the idea that détente is on the horizon.

But what if Trump, instead of pursuing constructive engagement with China, is really being magnanimous to an opponent he has on the geoeconomic ropes? While Trump talks about business deals and trade with China, he is simultaneously demonstrating that he intends on rebuilding American military power — especially its naval power — to wage what former Marine officer Gary Anderson calls “chokepoint warfare.” Trump’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, his insistence on maintaining access to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, his recent defense arrangement with Indonesia that will enhance U.S. capability to control the Strait of Malacca, and his strengthening of U.S. ties to Japan and the Philippines, present China with a geoeconomic dilemma that it cannot escape.

Trump’s magnanimity may be based on his and his strategic advisers’ estimate that it is China, not the United States, that is the declining power. That doesn’t mean that China is not dangerous and does not need to be deterred from its aggressive, expansionist ambitions. It was, after all, the first Trump administration that shifted America’s strategic focus away from peripheral conflicts and toward great power competition. The intellectual architect of that policy in Trump’s first term was Elbridge Colby, who now serves in the key position of Under Secretary of War for Policy. Colby, War Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are all China hawks.

President Nixon in the early 1970s used détente as a strategic pause. Nixon was rhetorically less confrontational toward the Soviets while reshaping geopolitics to eventually shift the “correlation of forces” against Soviet long-term interests. Trump’s less confrontational rhetoric toward China may be designed to accomplish the same goal.

In the end, it is not rhetoric, but facts on the ground that decide geopolitical competitions. Trump’s consolidation of U.S. hegemony in the Western hemisphere, his energy policies, his proposed naval buildup, and his encouragement of Asian allies to increase their defense efforts, are facts on the ground. So, too, are his geostrategic moves from the Middle East-Persian Gulf region, across the Indian Ocean, through East Asia into the western Pacific.

As Otto von Bismarck once said, “it is not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of the time are decided … but by iron and blood.”

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By kevin