Opinion | Trump or Biden: the implications for China and the rest of Asia in the next four years
- Trump’s and Biden’s foreign policies diverge the least on China, but handling Beijing will be complicated by the economic downturn, Pyongyang’s nuclear dreams and eroding Asian trust in the US
- Restoring US credibility across the region, meanwhile, will be an enormous task
It is hard to find in post-war America a greater divide between two presidential candidates on foreign policy than between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Biden is the custodian of one of the oldest beliefs in the American political tradition; that the United States is a grand experiment whose wealth and power are testament to the eternal truth of its values. The responsibility that comes with its wealth and power is leadership – the word that has most characterised Biden’s outlines of his foreign policy platform.
For Biden, there can be no American greatness without American leadership; an America that does not lead cannot, by definition, be great.
Trump’s views draw on a different conception of the US, as a society of people who removed themselves from the grubby politics and rivalries of the old world. The danger for American values and institutions is corruption, by becoming entangled with those rivalries and tawdry dealings again.
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Trump vs Biden: The 2020 US presidential election