Donald Trump’s security strategy fuels era of more fractious Sino-US relations: analysts
The claim that China, Russia are ‘attempting to erode American security and prosperity’ departs from past views about China’s motives, policy experts said
US President Donald Trump’s first comprehensive national security assessment pushed Washington further into a new, more fractious era of relations with China by alleging that Beijing is seeking to undermine American interests, policy experts said.
The report’s claim that China and Russia are “attempting to erode American security and prosperity” is a “somewhat radical claim” and a departure from assumptions that China only moves to counter the US when the country stands in the way of Beijing’s initiatives, Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China at the Washington-based Wilson Centre, said in an interview with the South China Morning Post.
The 55-page report, a requirement mandated by Congress, also called out China’s activity in the South China Sea, Beijing’s repression of its people and cast suspicion on mainland Chinese nationals working in US hi-tech companies and those enrolled in US universities.
“This constitutes Trump’s first major attack on China’s human rights record and employs that as part of the American tool kit in combating competition from China, which had taken solace in the fact that Trump didn’t care” about human rights, said Daly, who served as a Beijing-based US diplomat in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“The notion that we’re entering into a new era in which it is recognised that the relationship, which should still be cooperative whenever possible, is fundamentally competitive and maybe tracking more adversarial is probably correct,” Daly said.