Given that we now have a full term of Trump and Biden as comparison to reflect on, it’s become rather plain that the Trump administration is more dangerous than Biden's for China because Biden’s China strategy became primarily diplomatic isolation and economic suppression while Trump tried to actively bind China into unequal treaties like that “Phase One trade agreement” and manufacturing color revolutions. The Xinjiang atrocity propaganda campaign began under Trump; Trump’s State Department fostered the 2019 Hong Kong color revolution and the anti-China propaganda hysteria that came out of this secured the current Taiwanese ruling party in their re-election;
(though it should be said that every administration has certainly done this). For all the India-addicts on this thread, I’m sure Trump’s admin had no small part, directly or indirectly though bolstering Modi’s ego via establishing QUAD, in motivating India to incite the Galwan conflict which ended the 2010s Sino-Indian general detente. They went as far as to rope Nepal into that Millennium Compact agreement to attempt to subvert that neighboring country.
Trump and his cabinet, including even robot-boy Rubio if you read that gusano's recent writings on China, show that they understand China’s advantages on a pragmatic level far more than Biden’s administration did. Now that it can be put in retrospect, Biden’s foreign policy can be characterized as the height of American "end-of-history" arrogance, lashing out at every adversary at the same time because they hubristically thought the American empire had the capacity to take on China, Russia and the Middle East all at once. The Ukraine War and the Middle East conflicts that Biden initiated, from a cold realpolitik standpoint, ultimately benefited China and made the “Pivot to Asia” into a meme.
Trump’s plan (so far) for his second term appears to be to retreat America into its own hemisphere, licking its wounds and digging in within its “backyard” in the Americas (literally so in the case of "renaming" the Gulf of Mexico) so that a future administration can make America potentially re-emerge like Roosevelt’s America did in the 20th century. One thing he’s currently hinting at is sacrificing America’s short term hostility against its main adversaries in his own administration (peace in Ukraine and withholding immediate tariffs on China) so that America in a successive presidency can effectively maintain the capability for reigniting long term hostility against them. That is to say, using his administration to attempt to clean up house so that America can eventually re-emerge, with its internal and hemispheric affairs in order, to try to retake the unipolar position of absolute global hegemony once again. If this is the case, it would be quite a forward-thinking agenda and accentuates the danger of his administration by showing that he has the capability to go against the "American presidencies can't do non-instant gratification long-term strategies" stereotype.
For a bigger farce, the Trump admin might even try to propose a “G2” detente to con China into agreements that would help America recover from its manufacturing and technological deficits in the long term. Given that Xi agreed to that Phase One agreement, the Chinese liberal Gorbachev-wannabes lurking within the Chinese government might lobby for cooperation and this may receive some significant public support. This recent XHS moment with all the gushing over American working class (the world's "labor aristocracy") sob stories and the so-called “great reconciliation” on the Chinese domestic internet is revealing there’s a massive portion of Chinese people, just as it was with the Soviet and Russian people, who just want to be noticed by America-senpai above anything else.
With regards to the US imperialist ambitions, which will cause some hilarious hypocrisy as the US seizes new territories while fearmongering about China at the same time, it should be noted that all of his target locations for expansionism have tangible geopolitical benefits and now that he appears serious, it should be not treated as if he’s taking America on some misadventure like wanting to invade Monaco or Tasmania.
The Panama plan is to gain the ability to eventually blackmail China or anyone else with access to the trans-Central American shipping lane. Alongside the new US military bases that will be established in the Galapagos and turning Argentina into a vassal, the US will gain the ability to also block the southern route. Alongside the US military bases in Greenland and subordinating Canada even further, the northern Arctic route is additionally blocked. With all three in conjunction, the US would gain the ability to "legally" shut down sea passage up and down the entire Western Hemisphere.
Trump’s obsession with space, including his “Space Force” military branding gimmick from his first term and his new Musk-inspired plan for Mars seem equally amusing but they demonstrate an understanding that outer space and its resources are the future domain for humanity. While focusing on space may seem wildly premature, these ambitions are laying the groundwork for a medium-term scenario to legitimize the full weaponization of orbital space and a far-future scenario where space colonization is set on Western terms to mirror the way the West has established its dominance by stealing away the Americas and Oceania. The colonization of these three continents secured 500 years of Western supremacy, and with space, the West, unless to destroy a rival’s colonies, does not even need to resort to indigenous genocide to repeat its historical feat.
These plans to "future-proof" America can easily flop, as just because you know the recipe doesn’t mean you can cook the dish, but people should at least understand the pragmatic intent behind the “humorous" Trumpian news headlines. This "watch what I say, not what I do” outrage distraction scheme that many people continually bought hook-line-and-sinker was tedious to see and was the defining gimmick of his first term and it’ll be certainly a mainstay in this one as well.
