Opinion | Why the US is losing to China in the battle for Southeast Asia

The negative shift in American policy against China now dominates US policy in the Indo-Pacific region – one of two top policy arenas of US rivalry with China. The other is competition for dominance in the high technology industries that will determine which country will be the world’s economic and military leader.

American domestic politics drove the negative turn against China. While continuing to take advantage of benefits gained from interaction with the existing international order supported by the United States, China also continued to challenge a wide range of American interests through often coercive, intimidating, and covert security, economic and diplomatic practices. These practices eventually prompted a shift in China policy in Washington that emerged in public with the Donald Trump administration’s National Security Strategy in December 2017.

The shift emerged erratically. Division within the Trump administration on economic countermeasures against China prevailed for a time. Trump vacillated between criticism of China’s practices and avowed friendship with China’s leader Xi Jinping. Bipartisan majorities in Congress proved much steadier in establishing a “whole-of-government” US effort to counter China. The Trump administration’s punitive tariffs and restrictions on high technology sales to China resulted in a trade war until a truce in December 2018 led to talks resulting in a phase-one agreement in January 2020.

The negative shift against China ran up against US public opinion in 2019 which showed little support for a tough approach. Democratic presidential candidates infrequently discussed China, with Joe Biden prone to disparaging China’s capacities relative to the US.