Trump's major foreign policy focus to be on stronger ties with India, dealing with China challenge: Lisa Curtis

WASHINGTON: A major focus of President-elect Donald Trump‘s foreign policy is expected to centre around the challenges posed by China and may involve building stronger strategic ties with India, an influential American expert has said.

Lisa Curtis, senior fellow and director of the Indo-Pacific Security Programme at the Centre for a New American Security think-tank, also said the Quad will likely remain an important forum for engagement for the incoming administration.

Trump, 78, will be sworn in as the 47th President of the United States on January 20, making him the second president in American history after Grover Cleveland in 1892 to be elected to a non-consecutive second term. Trump served as the 45th President of the United States from 2017-2021.

“A major focus of the Trump 2.0 foreign policy will likely be on the China challenge, whether in the form of economic and military competition, the technology race, or countering China's strategy to dominate the Indo-Pacific,” Curtis, who was deputy assistant to the president and National Security Council senior director for South and Central Asia from 2017 to 2021, told PTI in an interview.

“We can expect the incoming Trump team to continue multiple lines of effort aimed at competing effectively with China. This will likely include investments in US defence capabilities that enhance deterrence in the Indo-Pacific and a greater focus on positioning US defence assets in the region," she said.

Trump will likely continue and may even strengthen the Biden-era restrictions on US high technology to China through export controls but may also focus more attention on reaching bilateral trade deals that protect US consumers, she said in response to a question.

Trump advisors like incoming National Security Advisor Michael Waltz and Secretary of State-designate Marco Rubio will likely focus on strategic competition with China and working with allies and partners to circumscribe China's growing power and influence in the region and to counter Chinese aggression and bullying of other Indo-Pacific nations," she said.

Trump's economic team, on the other hand, will likely want to maintain a steady economic relationship with Beijing, accounting for the interests of US businesses that have major investments in China, she said.

"The way in which these differing areas of focus on US-China relations play out inside the Trump administration could mirror the situation we saw in the first Trump term, in which Trump reached a trade deal with China in January 2020, only to see US-China relations plummet a few months later during the outbreak of COVID-19,” she said.

According to Curtis, a major aspect of the second Trump administration's strategy toward the Indo-Pacific will likely involve building stronger strategic ties to India.

“While friction over trade issues will certainly be a factor in relations, these differences are unlikely to define the overall strategic partnership or get in the way of their joint goal to check China's influence,” she said.

“For example, even though the Trump administration revoked India's GSP (Generalized System of Preferences) privileges in 2019, we saw tremendous goodwill between President Trump and Prime Minister Modi, for example during the 'Howdy, Modi' event in Houston in late 2019 and the 'Namaste, Trump' event in Ahmedabad in February 2020," Curtis said.

The first Trump administration also pulled out all stops to support India during its border crisis with China in the spring and summer of 2020, which contributed to an overall elevation of the US-India relationship by the time Trump left office in January 2021, said the former White House official.

Curtis said the Quad will also likely remain an important forum for engagement.

“The Quad was originally revived under Trump One and has since become an effective multilateral mechanism to support concepts like sovereignty and independence of nations, free and open seaways, transparent lending and investment, broad-based economic development, and peaceful resolution of disputes.

"Though not a military pact, the Quad is about four powerful democracies coming together with a shared vision of the region and pooling their resources and capabilities to realise that vision,” she said.