Abacus | Would ‘America First’ Trump be Xi Jinping’s first choice for president?

There’s one standout candidate for helping the Chinese president realise his own long-term political goals. Guess who ...

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Hawk: John Bolton, Donald Trump’s national security adviser, has suggested a war with China is better sooner rather than later. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 7:03am, 2 Apr 2018Updated: 7:03am, 2 Apr 2018

Would Xi Jinping vote for Donald Trump? That might sound like a crazy question; consider how Trump has turned US-China relations on their head. In his first 14 months in office, the US president has thrown his predecessors’ “one China” policy out the window by backing official contacts with Taiwan. His administration has declared China a strategic competitor rather than a partner. He has threatened a trade war by promising to impose a 25 per cent tariff on imports from China. And last week he appointed as his national security adviser John Bolton, a man who last year called for the US to go to war with China now, while it can still be confident of victory, because in five years it might be too late.

So, at first glance it might seem that Xi Jinping has little if any reason to favour the orange-hued former reality television star as US president.

But to jump to such a conclusion could well be a mistake. If Xi really were to have a vote in a US presidential election, there is every reason to believe he would cast it for the candidate likely to give him the best chance of realising his own long-term political goals.

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As the unchallenged big boss of China, Xi wants China itself to ascend to become the unchallenged big boss of the whole Asia-Pacific region, if not the entire world.

Considered in those terms, from Xi’s perspective Trump could well be a much better US president than almost any other potential candidate.

Trump’s aversion to overseas entanglements, his criticism of the US military umbrella, and his suspicion of multilateral trading arrangements seem almost tailor-made to create a regional power vacuum into which China can step.

Trump’s withdrawal of the US from Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership dismantled at a stroke the region’s most effective tool for countering a future Chinese economic hegemony. And the US president’s boorishness and unpredictability only make China look like a credible regional leader by comparison.