White House meeting with Modi follows close on the heels of Ishiba’s visit

Brahma Chellaney

Nikkei Asia

Donald Trump and Narendra Modi prepare to shake hands as they attend a joint press conference at the White House in Washington on Feb. 13, 2025.  © Reuters

U.S. President Donald Trump is seeking to swiftly reorient foreign policy in his second term, shifting America’s strategic focus from Europe and the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific — an increasingly pivotal region in shaping the global order. Trump has already hosted the prime ministers of India and Japan separately and initiated efforts to end the Ukraine war, a conflict that has diverted U.S. attention from pressing Indo-Pacific challenges and made China the big winner.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on his first day in office, held a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Quad, a strategic alliance of leading Indo-Pacific democracies that Trump revived in his first term after a decade-long dormancy. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, speaking in Brussels on Feb. 12, warned Europe that “the U.S. will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency” and that Europe must take “responsibility for its own security” by leading “from the front” so that America prioritizes “deterring war with China” in the Indo-Pacific.

Vice President JD Vance followed up from European soil in Munich by reinforcing Hegseth’s warning — Europe needs to shape up before many of the more than 100,000 American troops stationed there begin to be shipped out. Vance’s statement that Europe’s main security threat is “from within” suggests the fraying transatlantic alliance is headed toward a fundamental transformation.

The U.S.-India strategic partnership was a cornerstone of Washington’s strategy from Trump’s first term for a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” a vision originally conceived by then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as a shorthand for a rules-based, liberal order. The China-Russia “no-limits partnership,” which developed during Joe Biden’s presidency, has only intensified the U.S. strategic imperative to forge a “soft” alliance with another nuclear-armed power: India.

Against this backdrop, Trump’s Feb. 13 meeting in Washington with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi underscored both leaders’ commitment to revitalizing the U.S.-India relationship.

Successive American presidents since Bill Clinton have left bilateral ties with India stronger than they inherited. However, under Biden, momentum stalled as differences cropped up, including over New Delhi’s reluctance to take sides in the Ukraine war and U.S. policies toward India’s neighbors, including Bangladesh, Myanmar and PakistanA Quad meeting is held on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, in May 2023.   © Reuters

The outcome of Modi’s White House visit attests to a good start toward rebuilding mutual trust. Trump and Modi, maintaining the warm rapport they developed in their first terms, exchanged a bear hug and projected unity at a joint news conference. Notably, they avoided discord over Trump’s hot-button issues like trade and immigration.

As he did with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba on Feb. 7, Trump touted strong bilateral ties while pressing Modi for “fair” and balanced trade, including increased Indian imports of American hydrocarbons and weapons. In his trademark style of blending some public flattery with hard bargaining, Trump called Modi “a much tougher” and “much better negotiator than me,” just as he had said Ishiba is “a very strong person, I wish he wasn’t so strong.”

Trump, along with the Japanese and Australian prime ministers, is set to visit India in the fall for the Quad leaders’ summit, by which time he hopes significant progress will have been made by negotiators on the U.S.-India trade agreement to which Modi committed in Washington. This strategy mirrors Trump’s previous approach in leveraging tariffs to secure a trade pact with Japan in 2019.

As the U.S. pivots to the Indo-Pacific, stronger ties have become essential with India and Japan, China’s main Asian rivals strategically located on its opposite flanks. The balance of power in the Indo-Pacific will be largely shaped by developments in East Asia and the Indian Ocean.

Japan, hosting over 80 U.S. military facilities and more American troops than any other U.S. ally, is critical to the defense of Taiwan, whose annexation by China would mark the end of U.S. global dominance. Meanwhile, India, locked in a lingering military standoff with China, has actively challenged Beijing’s power and capabilities in a way no other nation has in this century.

Long before Trump entered national politics, U.S. policymakers recognized the need to shift strategic focus to the Indo-Pacific, a region emerging as the world’s economic and geopolitical hub. In 2011, then-President Barack Obama unveiled a “pivot to Asia” strategy, but it remained largely rhetorical, lacking substantive strategic initiatives.

When Trump took office in 2017, he replaced Obama’s symbolic pivot with a comprehensive strategy for a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” He also fundamentally redefined U.S. policy toward Beijing, reversing a four-decade-old U.S. approach of aiding China’s economic rise by classifying that communist behemoth as a strategic rival and threat.

Biden maintained this approach, preserving the free and open Indo-Pacific strategy, including the Quad as a key pillar, while acknowledging China as America’s primary challenger that is bent on world dominance. However, his administration’s entanglement in conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East left little space for a genuine pivot to the Indo-Pacific.

Trump’s new administration is prioritizing the resolution of these conflicts to focus on the Indo-Pacific, where U.S. global primacy is at stake. Ending involvement in the conflicts would free military resources for the Indo-Pacific, particularly from Europe.

More broadly, America’s grand strategy has long centered on driving a wedge between Moscow and Beijing — a strategy that helped the West win the Cold War without direct military confrontation. However, thanks to Biden-era policies, the U.S. has become the bridge that unites Russia and China.

Ending the Ukraine war could provide an opportunity for Washington to peel Moscow away from Beijing or weaken the Sino-Russian partnership to help isolate China.

More importantly, it would allow the U.S. to concentrate on countering the challenge from a globally ascendant China, with support from allies like Japan and strategic partners like India, whose rise as an independent power meshes with the Trump administration’s aversion to friends’ dependency on the U.S.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press), which won the Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

Taipei Times, February 10, 2025

For Taipei, last year was a particularly dangerous period, with China stepping up coercive pressures on Taiwan amid signs of US President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, which eventually led his Democratic Party to force him to abandon his re-election campaign.

The political drift in the US bred uncertainty in Taiwan and elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific region about American strategic commitment and resolve. With America deeply involved in the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the last thing Washington wanted was a Taiwan Strait contingency, which is why Biden invested in personal diplomacy with China’s dictator Xi Jinping (習近平).

The return of Donald Trump to the White House is anything but good news for Xi’s regime. In his first term, Trump fundamentally changed America’s approach to Beijing by ending a four-decade-long US policy since the Richard Nixon era of aiding China’s economic rise, saying his predecessors “created a monster.” Trump’s national security strategy identified China as a strategic rival and threat.

Now, in his second term, Trump has fired a warning shot across Beijing’s bow by imposing new tariffs on imports from China.

The additional 10 percent US tariffs place Xi’s regime in a predicament. Any retaliatory Chinese measures would likely invite further rounds of American tariffs, resulting in Beijing exhausting US exports to target, as happened in the first Trump administration when tariffs were initially slapped on China in 2018. But doing little against Trump’s latest punitive action would make Xi look weak at home.

Given China’s sputtering economic-growth engine, a widening trade war with the US, with its likely international spillover, would seriously harm Chinese interests. China not only exports almost four times more goods to the US than it imports, but also its economic troubles at home have made it even more reliant on exports of excess industrial output that cannot be absorbed in the domestic market.

To make matters worse, China is running into long-term structural constraints, including a shrinking and rapidly aging population and slowing productivity growth, as well as a Western pushback against its neo-imperial ambitions. This may well explain why Xi seems to have concluded that China has a narrow window of strategic opportunity to shape the Asian and international order in its favor. Still, Xi is likely to think twice before seeking to provoke the US on Trump’s watch.

To be sure, Trump’s return is also set to create challenges for Taipei in its economic relationship with the US, given that Taiwan’s trade surplus with America has reached a record high. Trump is intent on wielding the tariffs card to close all of America’s bilateral trade deficits.

Many countries run trade deficits with China that they partly or wholly offset by running trade surpluses with the US. But Taiwan has large trade surpluses with both China and the US.

Trump views tariffs as a game-changing instrument to help fill the nation’s coffers and bring manufacturing back to the US. As he vowed in his inaugural address, “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”

Taiwan’s growing trade surplus with the US puts it in the crosshairs of Trump’s tariff strategy. Trump has already lamented that chip production “left us and went to Taiwan,” while slamming his predecessor’s US$6.6 billion funding award to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in November to establish three chipmaking facilities in Arizona.

While stepping up pressure on Taipei to boost its defense spending, Trump could use the tariff card against Taiwan as part of his broader plan to cut reliance on foreign suppliers for critical semiconductors by reversing decades of offshoring in the technology industry. Almost all of the advanced chips used in the US are currently imported from Taiwan.

Against this backdrop, Taipei may have little choice but to encourage its semiconductor companies to significantly boost investments in America for producing next-generation chips. That could help tame Trump’s tariff threat, given that tariffs alone cannot help the US to replicate at home Taiwan’s semiconductor model. Taipei could also seek to placate the Trump administration by offering to jointly establish an international semiconductor supply chain.

It is in Taiwan’s own interest to significantly boost its defense spending so as to deter a Chinese attack. Unfortunately, Taiwan’s opposition-controlled legislature recently imposed significant cuts to the defense budget, including programs for developing asymmetric capabilities like drones.

Diplomacy is in part transactional, and Trump’s predecessors gave precedence to national security and geopolitical calculations even if it meant ignoring human rights and democratic governance issues. One example was Nixon’s China “opening” of 1970-71. Another example was Jimmy Carter’s presidential memo to various US government departments instructing them to help in China’s economic rise.

What stands out about Trump is that he is first and foremost a dealmaker. To advance US interests, he is willing to cut deals with America’s friends and adversaries.

Trump’s new tariffs against China, however, seem to be part of an effort to turn the tables on a country whose foreign policy has long been driven by assertive mercantilism. The deal Trump may eventually offer is likely to be too unpalatable for Beijing.

Yet, with its economic slowdown deepening, China may be reluctant to escalate tensions with the US, let alone risk a military confrontation with a Trump-led America by launching overt aggression against Taiwan.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).