Donald Trump’s ‘conditional engagement’ of China is not new, nor will it change when he’s gone
- The mercurial US president’s business background isn’t to blame for his growing list of contingencies in China talks. Rather, these conditions – from Hong Kong and North Korea to opioids – reflect core US interests and will outlast Trump
US President Donald Trump has a peculiar habit of linking Beijing’s cooperation on solving security and transnational problems to the ongoing US-China trade negotiations.
The most popular explanation for this is that it is a by-product of his long career as a businessman. Trump, so the theory goes, cannot help but see US-China relations – or most of his duties as president, for that matter – as a series of business transactions in which everything is negotiable.
While there may be a good deal of truth to this theory, Trump’s penchant for using linkages to try to influence China’s behaviour is remarkably consistent with a US strategy towards China put forward by former senior US defence and intelligence official James Shinn in the mid-1990s, called “conditional engagement”.
Shinn’s strategy, which he laid out in the 1996 book Weaving the Net: Conditional Engagement with China, was intended as a middle path between unconditional engagement and preemptive containment.
At the heart of conditional engagement was the idea that China might be integrated into the “community of nations” insofar as it abided by a set of 10 principles of acceptable behaviour.