Prof. Wang Jisi on Trump and US Foreign Policy (Part 2)
"When the world’s most powerful country abandons its principles and loses any sense of morality, it becomes exceedingly dangerous and may inflict great harm upon the world."
This is the second part of Contemporary American Review’s conversation with Professor Wang Jisi. If you haven’t read Part One, you can find it here.
Key Points
In recent years, the US has increasingly prioritised its own interests, often at the expense of international rules and the concerns of other countries.
Under Trump, strategic competition with China is set to focus even more on trade, finance and technology, and less on human rights, ideology or traditional security concerns.
Nonetheless, he will make sure to leverage ideological, values-based and sovereignty-related issues as bargaining tools against China.
He is unlikely to abandon the US’s One-China policy, continuing military support for Taipei without backing independence.
Although Trump shows little interest in the systemic dimension of US–China rivalry, America’s entrenched bipartisan "Cold War mindset" towards China leaves little room for a significant shift in strategic framing.
• Wang: “At this stage, there is little value …