By Miya Tanaka,
President Donald Trump has spoken highly of his accomplishments during his three and a half years in office, taking credit for pulling the United States out of international agreements he views as unfair, fixing bad trade deals and standing up to China in ways the country never has before.
But even as his showdown with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden looms in November, the Republican incumbent has been scant on details about his second-term agenda on foreign policy, other than that he will simply carry on with his "America First" mantra.
During his speech to officially accept his party's renomination as president on Thursday, Trump outlined his goals for the next four years, including the recovery of the coronavirus-hit economy, measures to tackle illegal immigration and what he calls steps to end reliance on China.
"We will go right after China. We will not rely on them one bit. We're taking our business out of China. We are bringing it home," Trump said at the White House, while vowing to hold Beijing "fully accountable" over the novel coronavirus, which was initially detected in central China late last year and since spread globally.
Zachary Hosford, an expert on foreign policy and security issues in Asia, said it is a "reasonable objective" for the president to try to boost the economy by bringing outsourced jobs back to U.S. soil.
However, the details remain unclear, and this is where the "important issue really lies," said the deputy director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a think tank based in Washington.
"If he's suggesting decoupling our economies, number one, that's not possible, and two, even if the United States were to pursue some kind of decoupling or try to partially decouple from the Chinese economy, we don't know what the objectives are, and we don't know what the strategy is to get there," he said.
Other second-term core priorities listed by the Trump campaign have included the enactment of "fair deals" that protect U.S. jobs and getting allies to pay their "fair share" of defense costs, a sign that countries such as Japan and South Korea will continue to be pressured to fork over significantly more money in exchange for U.S. security protection.
Hosford, who has served as an adviser on Asia strategy at the Department of Defense, said the promises indicate that Trump's current stance, which views alliances "as purely transactional, as mostly for U.S. financial benefit," would be unchanged in a second term.
He also said it is "very hard to imagine a comprehensive strategy" on China coming out of this administration, characterizing Trump's foreign policy since he took office in 2017 as "confusing."
"It's been full of contradictions...where on the one hand, he himself on some occasions has taken a tougher line on Chinese government policies, at other times, he's portrayed China and President Xi (Jinping) as great friends of the United States," Hosford said.
"There's also a contradiction between statements that he's made, and policies that have come out of the executive branch -- the State Department, the Pentagon -- and so I think that has left allies and partners and countries around the world unsure of the exact direction of a China policy," he added.
Earlier this year, Trump was lauding Xi and the Chinese government over their response to the coronavirus pandemic, despite concerns over the Asian country's transparency in dealing with the outbreak.
But as his re-election prospects dimmed in the wake of the intensifying pandemic that has devastated the U.S. economy, Trump has started pinning the blame on Beijing for the spread of the virus while taking a more confrontational approach to the country.
The U.S.-China relationship has since been in freefall, with the two major economies at loggerheads on issues ranging from trade to technology, human rights and Hong Kong, as well as control of the disputed South China Sea.
Trump has admitted to reporters that he had at one point been "complimentary" about China because it was around the time he finally signed a partial trade deal following their two-year trade war. The deal took effect in February, but has lost its value significantly amid the economic downturns due to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
Political pundits say China-bashing could be received well by U.S. voters.
A study released in late July by Pew Research Center showed that 73 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of China, the most negative reading in the 15 years the Washington-based institution has been measuring such views.
Americans have also been highly critical of the way China has handled the virus outbreak, and half of the survey's respondents thought the United States should hold China responsible for the role it played in the global spread of the virus, even if it means worsening economic relations, according to the phone survey that involved around 1,000 U.S. adults.
But many voters in the United States may not be especially interested in whether Trump has an ideologically coherent foreign policy on China.
"The first thing to remember is that in the United States, there's very little attention on the part of the public to anything that has to do with foreign affairs," said Kathleen Jamieson, a communication professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
While Trump, 74, and Biden, the 77-year-old former vice president, have sought to outdo each other on tough talk on China during the election campaign, the professor said the verbal brawl is not translating into any substantial discussions about the future of the important relationship between the world's two largest economies.
"So what we're basically seeing with the China debate is, it's a surrogacy debate...China is standing in for which candidate is tougher and more masculine above foreign enemies, and who is to blame for the death (caused by the pandemic)," she said, noting that showing such "masculine posturing" is what is important for voters.
Characterizing Trump as a leader who takes "whatever position is convenient for him at the moment," the professor said she feels Trump has not laid out a "coherent" plan for a second term.
"And this is largely an assertion which says, 'Trust me. I got you to a good place economically before COVID, blame China for COVID, it's not my fault. I will get you back to where we were,'" she said.
