Van Jackson

In January 2021, the norm-destroying administration of Donald J. Trump comes to an end in the United States. Many in Asia will breathe a sigh of relief to see former Vice President Joe Biden, a known quantity, take over the White House. But Biden’s task will be far from easy: restoring the United State’s reputation in Asia while dealing with the long-term geopolitical challenge of China’s rise, and flashpoints like North Korea. 

Van Jackson, a specialist in Asian foreign policy and U.S. national security who formerly served in the Pentagon under the Obama administration, discusses the challenges facing the Biden administration — and potential paths forward. Jackson is also the author of the recent book “On the Brink: Trump, Kim, and the Threat of Nuclear War.” 

China looms large as a foreign policy question for the Biden administration, with competition in nearly every area: security, economy, and diplomacy. What aspects of the Trump administration’s China strategy are worth keeping, and what parts are best discarded?

The motivations of China policy under Trump were so corrupted — sometimes literally, but often in the sense of being personalized or inconsistent with the national interest — that I expect Biden will be looking to develop his own conceptual approach with a blank slate. You can’t pretend the past four years didn’t happen, but you also shouldn’t be looking to salvage any of this “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” stuff just because it’s what was decided previously.

So what to keep from a fairly broken policy? In the near term, keep the tariffs until you can review which are arbitrary and which do more harm than good. In the long term, it’s worth continuing to decouple in high technology areas sensitive to national security, and to maintain closer ties to Taiwan. Those things are imperatives no matter what China strategy Biden settles on. Beyond that, everything should flow from a strategic rethink.

One of the Biden administration’s top tasks will be repairing U.S. alliances in Asia, where Trump’s transactionalism has taken a toll. What are the most urgent priorities in that regard?

The alliance system is in rough shape. South Korea is the most urgent ally situation because it’s intertwined with the giant unanswered question of what to do about North Korea’s nukes. It also intersects with a nadir in Japan-ROK relations that’s trending toward strategic rivalry. Australia is enduring direct and expanding economic coercion from China, and as yet there’s been no solution or intervention involving the United States; that’s a huge problem. And in the Philippines, Biden has a really thorny challenge. President Duterte is aligned with China, anti-American, and responsible for societal oppression and extrajudicial killings, yet there are important anti-China constituencies in the Philippines and the military itself is not implicated in the country’s authoritarian turn. There’s a reservoir of goodwill for Biden among the allies, but that’ll dry up quickly if he doesn’t figure out how to navigate these issues.

North Korea’s nuclear program remains a perennial problem, now having outlasted the past four U.S. presidents. Under the Obama administration, we saw “strategic patience”; Trump, of course, held high-profile summits alongside “maximum pressure.” Neither approach, however, made much progress toward U.S. goals. How would you recommend tackling the issue of a nuclear North Korea?

We have to meaningfully probe North Korean nuclear intentions. We’ve never engaged with North Korea on nukes in a way that prices in how important they are to the regime. To pursue a credible probe, give up on denuclearization and seek an end to the Korean war, but orchestrate those things with a number of other gestures, compromises, and confidence-building measures — including some unilateral sanctions relief. If you do it right, you not only encourage North Korean nuclear and military restraint; you increase the likelihood of actual nuclear reductions.

Alongside the more traditional foreign policy appointments, Biden also unveiled a brand-new portfolio: John Kerry as the special presidential envoy for climate. How will U.S. action – and diplomacy – on the issue of climate change reshape its role in the Indo-Pacific region?

It’s a vital issue and someone with political clout like Kerry sends an important signal. But this is going to go over like a lead balloon in Asia. Australia has a bunch of climate change deniers in government. China’s progress on environmental protections is unlikely to come from elite-level bargaining with a U.S. envoy. And for Asia’s newly industrialized countries, Kerry’s liable to be viewed as the climate change version of the IMF — first we badger them about economic deregulation and now we’re going to badger them about climate regulation. None of that means you don’t do it; Asia hands have a way of measuring policy as if it were a popularity contest in the region and that’s silly. But it’s a tough portfolio, and making progress in Asia will almost certainly require using political capital that could’ve been spent on other issues.

Biden has promised to reinvigorate democratic and liberal values – first at home, but also on the global stage. That could conflict with U.S. geopolitical goals in Asia, where valuable partners (for example, the one-party state of Vietnam, but even democratic India) face accusations of right abuses. What role should human rights play in the overall U.S. Indo-Pacific policy?

Nobody has offered a comprehensive way of reconciling the “values versus interests” question, even though in the long run I think the more you separate them the more you cause problems for yourself and the region. Two clichés that might apply here are “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” and “Do no harm.” So to operationalize those slogans in the Asia context, first you have to deal with arms sales and security assistance. Governments responsible for human rights abuses don’t get American weapons. It’s that simple. This gets difficult in places like the Philippines because their military is one of democracy’s guardrails. But we don’t want future generations looking back and shaking their head in condemnation over our amoral but politically convenient choices.  

The other way Biden could approach this is by not allowing democracy promotion and good governance to be reducible to human rights abuses. Presidents Carter and Reagan started us down a path where we conflate democracy promotion with virtue signaling about human rights. But encouraging good governance — and taking stock of progress — addresses the causes of human rights abuses upstream, rather just reacting to them as they occur. So a country like Singapore is not a liberal democracy but exhibits lower levels of inequality and corruption than Cambodia, or even Thailand. That should count for a lot and Biden’s approach to democracy in Asia should distinguish the gray areas of public good and policy competence rather than be too binary. U.S. strategy in Asia errs when it tries to make naked geopolitical calculations unsullied by questions of justice.  

Over the past 20 years, Asian governments have time and again seen U.S. presidents promise more attention to the region, only to become bogged down in other priorities. If the Biden administration recommits yet again to the Indo-Pacific as its key focus area, what will it take for countries in the region to actually believe in U.S. staying power?

I don’t think it’s possible to adequately sate the region’s desire for attention because everyone has a different rubric of success. I was in government working on Asia strategy at the time of Obama’s rebalance to Asia. We did sounding sessions with regional elites. By a large margin, the biggest gripe we heard was that the rebalance was too militaristic, too antagonistic toward China. And yet, there was a minority of voices who complained about not doing enough militarily. They said we weren’t actually checking Chinese ambitions and we couldn’t possibly live up to some of the force posture claims the Pentagon was making about increasing military presence in the region. So given that the region is full of both hawks and doves, I think it would be a foolish, pandering Asia watcher who tries to simply design U.S. policy to appease regional elites. There is no Goldilocks Asia policy because Asia’s not of one mind about what it wants from Washington.  

Having said that, U.S. standing in Asia has been at record lows under Trump, and the theme I’ve repeatedly heard across Asian capitals is that they lack confidence in U.S. competence. So there’s a lot of reassurance Biden can provide simply by showing competence and a steady head. Most importantly, I think Asian policymakers need to understand that the United States has a number of existentially bad problems domestically — conspiracy theory movements, radical right-wing militias preaching civil war, worst-in the-world response to the pandemic, a great depression economy. America is approaching an inflection point when it comes to its regional role. We portray ourselves as an anchor of stability and a leader in various ways, but none of that matters if the United States collapses in on itself. So given the challenges at home, we don’t want Biden spending too much time on geopolitics; he’s got advisers (and good ones!) for that.