“The Trump Administration’s withdrawal from TPP was the single worst self-inflicted wound imaginable in terms convincing key economic partners that we could offer an enticing economic alternative,” Warner said in emailed responses to CQ Roll Call. “And in that vacuum, China has accelerated not just a trading partnership, but an even deeper economic partnership — contained in the Belt and Road Initiative — that, at least on its surface, seems really attractive to Asian, African and even European trading partners.”
Populist sentiment is strong in both the Democratic and Republican parties against further trade deals over concerns that such deals would cost Americans jobs.
‘Cut China off’
Even as Republicans and Democrats have been able to unify on certain policies toward China, such as denying Chinese telecommunications companies such as Huawei access to critical U.S. technology, the rest of the world, including major economic powers like Germany and France, remain much less convinced that an aggressively competitive policy toward Beijing is one that they want to join.
This concern is underlined, particularly in Europe, by worries about what happens to their own economic and security interests if the next U.S. administration after President Joe Biden returns to some form of the incongruent and unpredictable “America First” foreign policies of the Donald Trump years.
“I think this approach probably overstates the ways in which the United States can or cannot get other countries to follow the United States if the United States wants to take this almost isolationist approach to cut China off,” said Mary Gallagher, who directs the University of Michigan’s Center for Chinese Studies. “One potential end result is the United States is cut off because other countries that do care about addressing climate change and global public health and recognize that the United States is not going to work with China, it may be that the United States is the one that is left off. That’s sort of what is happening with global trade.”
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