Republican candidate and former US president Donald Trump is to be the 47th president of the US after beating his Democratic rival, US Vice President Kamala Harris, in the election on Tuesday.
Trump’s thumping victory — winning 295 Electoral College votes against Harris’ 226 as of press time last night, along with the Republicans winning control of the US Senate and possibly the House of Representatives — is a remarkable political comeback from his 2020 defeat to US President Joe Biden, and means Trump has a strong political mandate to implement his agenda.
What does Trump’s victory mean for Taiwan, Asia, deterrence in the Taiwan Strait and the wider alliance of liberal democracies?
Some analysts have said that given Trump’s remarks on the campaign trail that Taiwan “stole” the US’ chip industry, his election would mean rockier Taiwan-US relations.
However, these concerns are unwarranted. Support for the US-Taiwan relationship is not only a bipartisan consensus in the US, but with the Republicans likely taking Congress and the White House, the support is likely to be turbocharged.
US-Taiwan relations went from strength to strength during Trump’s first presidency, beginning with the then-president-elect’s unprecedented phone call with then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) on Dec. 2, 2016. Relations have since developed onto an even firmer footing, and given the strong people-to-people ties, deep diplomacy and the stakes of the US’ competition with China, Taiwan-US ties are sure to continue their positive development.
For the wider region, Trump’s victory means that the US’ “pivot to Asia” strategy, which was initiated by then-US president Barack Obama’s administration in 2011, would finally become a reality.
Washington never made that pivot as it continued to allocate resources to Europe and the Middle East, failing to meet the challenge of a rising China — “perhaps the most consequential” US policy failure since 1945, wrote former US deputy national security adviser Robert Blackwill and Center for a New American Security chief executive officer Richard Fontaine in their recent book Lost Decade: The US Pivot to Asia and the Rise of Chinese Power.
Trump’s incoming administration is likely to address this by definitively shifting the US’ focus to Asia. Many of Trump’s foreign policy advisers and potential political appointees — including former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former US national security adviser Robert O’Brien — believe strongly in the Taiwan-US partnership, and that US statecraft in the 21st century must be laser-focused in meeting the challenge posed by China.
This prioritization would certainly bolster deterrence in the Indo-Pacific region, especially in the Taiwan Strait. Beijing has been emboldened by a distracted US to push the envelope around Taiwan, including by ramping up air and sea incursions, seeking to alter the “status quo” and bullying Taiwanese to accept the new reality. Asia as the US’ primary theater would chasten Beijing in its escapades, and with Taiwan focused on defense reforms and boosting military spending, deterrence is only likely to increase.
While Trump’s foreign policy goals are hard to interpret, a consistent theme has been for allies to share more of the defense cost burden. This is a positive and necessary development for liberal democracies and US allies in Europe and Asia, as it puts the international rules-based order — which is backed by US power — on a firmer, more sustainable footing.
As Daniel DePetris wrote in The Spectator recently, a “status quo US foreign policy has been remarkably durable,” and while Trump would make changes, Taiwan, the US and the wider democratic world would continue to work closely to uphold an international order that protects their shared interests and values.
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