Trump's revival of idea of US-China G-2 raises eyebrows

News analysis

- Bhagyashree Garekar US Bureau Chief

Mr Trump dropped a large hint heading into his first face-to-face meeting with Mr Xi since he returned to the White House.

“The G-2 will be convening shortly,” Mr Trump said in a Truth Social post before meeting Mr Xi in South Korea’s port city of Busan on Oct 30. Emerging 100 minutes later, he rated the encounter as a “12” on a scale from one to 10.

He resurfaced the idea at the weekend. “My G-2 meeting with President Xi of China was a great one for both of our countries. This meeting will lead to everlasting peace and success,” he said in a Nov 1 post on the social media channel he owns.

The idea of G-2 is that a partnership between the US and China - the world’s largest economies and permanent members of the UN Security Council - can address the world’s great economic, security and political problems.

Not an idea popular with US allies, including Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Philippines, its resurrection by Mr Trump is raising eyebrows in the US foreign policy establishment.

It was postulated in 2005 by former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and economist C. Fred Bergsten.

Dr Bergsten served as an aide to former president Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Dr Henry Kissinger, who had laid the groundwork for normalising US relations with China in 1972.

Mr Brzezinski advised then President Jimmy Carter, who switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979.

The G-2 idea enjoyed some attention among policymakers when the US struggled to recover from the 2008 financial crisis and proponents argued that a partnership between the two major economies could improve global financial resilience.

But China, under then President Hu Jintao, was reluctant. Mr Xi, who took over in 2012, seemed more amenable and pushed for a G-2-like formulation of a “new type of great power relations”. But Mr Barack Obama, then the US president, resisted the idea of parity with China.