Analysis: Trump and U.S. Policy in the South China Sea

TaiwanPlus News

The U.S. has been stepping up security cooperation with the Philippines in light of China's increasingly aggressive activities in the South China Sea, But how will the incoming Trump administration deal with these tensions? TaiwanPlus speaks to Ray Powell, director of the Sealight Initiative at Stanford University.

Transcript

00:00Ray, I want to first start off with asking you about what to expect with this next administration,

00:04President-elect Trump, and what maybe to expect differently in managing tensions in the South

00:09China Sea.

00:10Well, so it's going to take a little bit, of course, to get the nominations through

00:14and figure out who is actually going to be in the seat.

00:17What we've seen so far is we've seen some very hawkish names come through, which indicates

00:22that there may be a fairly muscular approach.

00:24And you'll recall that in the South China Sea during the first Trump administration,

00:29there were quite a lot of, for example, a lot of freedom of navigation operations.

00:32They're sort of like a last line of defense, and in a sense, just kind of going back to

00:36them was sort of like what we had at the time.

00:38But with now the ability to do multilateral sales in the South China Sea, I wouldn't be

00:44surprised to see a lot more of those.

00:47And how do you think the Philippines is reacting to all this rhetoric from the Trump administration,

00:53or this incoming administration, about more engagement in Asia?

00:56Well, Trump will always push allies to do more.

01:00But having said that, the Philippines has done more, and I think that they can make

01:04a pretty substantial case in that direction.

01:07So Trump tends to be worried about imbalances, if he thinks that the U.S. is paying too much

01:13and that other countries that should be paying more should be paying more.

01:17I don't think that the Philippines will have a hard case to make that they have actually

01:20been stepping up to the plate a lot.

01:21In fact, they have very much been on the front lines, and I think that he should appreciate

01:26that.

01:27And of course, mostly they will be dealing not with Donald Trump himself, but with his

01:30appointees.

01:31And again, all of the appointees that I've seen in the national security space, for the

01:35most part, have been very, I would say, alliance-friendly, actually, on the international stage.

01:42And in fact, the Secretary of State nominee, Marco Rubio, wrote a very prominent article

01:49last year in The National Interest, basically saying that the U.S. should lean into the

01:53Philippine alliance.

01:56Do you think maybe there's an opportunity for the Philippines to ask something different

02:00of the United States now that this next administration is coming in, maybe something that they couldn't

02:04ask the previous Biden administration?

02:07I think that from a Philippines perspective, because they have been so tight with the U.S.

02:11on the alliance, being able to talk about trade arrangements or even economic arrangements

02:17that are sort of China-free.

02:18So if you want to build a China-free supply chain, come to us in the Philippines, because

02:23unlike maybe some of other Southeast Asian or other Asian neighbors, we don't have that

02:29tight relationship with China.

02:31And if you're trying to make your supply chains resilient against China, then the Philippines

02:40is a destination you should look hard at.

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