India needs to leverage Trump's China antipathy

The electoral victory of Donald Trump, and his comeback as the United States (US) President, has led to speculation as to the contours of his administration's policies with respect to the Indo-Pacific region.

- Harsh V Pant

US presidents are said to get more ambitious in their second term, and if the past is prologue, Trump 2.0 may have a profound impact on the US's China policy. This is because, in his first term, Trump changed Washington's fundamental engagement with Beijing. Since the normalization of relations between the two nations in the late 1970s, cooperation in economic, scientific and cultural spheres flourished. Trump mooted de-coupling, meaning the gradual severing of the intertwining between the two. He also sought to address challenges in trade, geopolitics and security. The Sino-US trade war escalated on the back of the Trump administration levying tariffs on Chinese imports to reduce the trade deficit. Under the terms of the trade deal that China signed, it agreed to increase purchases of American products, address issues related to intellectual property, and give American financial institutions greater market access. The Trump administration labelled Xi Jinping's China as a strategic rival. Thus, national security concerns became paramount and led to curbs on Chinese investment in sensitive sectors, restrictions on Chinese majors like Huawei and ZTE, and a thrust on countering Chinese influence in telecom networks, cellphone app ecosystems, and cloud computing.