Trump will end Biden’s warmongering with China
Last of two parts
THERE’s no stronger message for US President Trump’s likely policy of rapprochement with China, reversing his predecessor’s saber-rattling, than the fact that he personally invited Chinese President Xi Jinping to his inauguration, the first head of state to be so honored. Not even the heads of America’s mother country and closest ally the United Kingdom, nor those of the US neighbors, Canada and Mexico, were invited.
While he will likely continue and even intensify his moves to change what he has considered during his first term as unfair trade arrangements with China and other countries, including Mexico and Canada, Trump’s social media operators have called Biden’s foreign policy a “war trap”: America’s saber-rattling that risks a full-blown war with the rising superpower. His social media’s favorite slogan already has been “Tariffs, not war” and “Tariffs, not troops.”
Of course, America’s puppets here headed by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. — who, after all, knows foreign relations as much as he knows agricultural economics — will follow Uncle Sam’s line, the very rare times that a US directive will be good for us.
Biden had intensified President Obama’s overarching project started in 2009 to politically and militarily contain China’s emergence as a superpower, thinly disguised as a “Pivot to Asia.” This was based on the American elite’s prevailing ideology of exceptionalism, that the US is destined to become the sole superpower in the world, with its exceptional people, political structure and capitalist economic system championing democracy and the individual’s freedom.
After dismantling the Soviet Union in 1991 that made the globe a unipolar world ruled by the US, China in the new century, mainly because of its phenomenal economic growth, emerged to challenge America’s hegemony, with its ally Russia, which had phoenix-like risen from the ashes of the Soviet Union.
Biden intensified Obama’s Pivot campaign, adding four more US as-needed military bases in the Philippines to the five the latter had created; installing Typhon mid-range missile systems in one of these bases; building military alliances with countries in the Pacific (Aukus, the Quad, and trilateral pacts with Japan and the Philippines) clearly intended to confront China militarily in the event of conflict; increasing the frequency of the so-called freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea that questioned the validity of Chinese territorial claims; setting up anti-China propaganda machines the Asia Maritime Transparency Institute, the Gordian Knot Institute in Stanford University headed by obviously US intelligence officers and here the ADR Stratbase propaganda machine; and providing intelligence reports and covert support to the Philippine Coast Guard’s challenging of Chinese-claimed territory in the Spratlys.
China will demand that Trump order an end to these provocative activities, which will lead, finally after the insanity of the Aquino III and Marcos Jr. policies, to a new era in which the Philippines gets closer to its neighbor that could help it grow with its powerful economic engines.
Dictator
Biden’s rhetoric had been sharp, calling Xi Jinping a “dictator” and pledging to defend Taiwan if attacked, the first time the US stepped beyond its traditional official stance of ambiguity.
While the Trump administration is only less than two months old, there are several reasons why it is likely to undertake a rapprochement with China.
First is the fact that Trump personally has been antagonistic to his predecessor, an ideological Democratic Party creature, whose worldview he doesn’t share.
None of Biden’s foreign policy and security advisers — who basically told the aging Biden what to do — are in this administration, such as his National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan (the architect of our arbitration case against China) and Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell (who tricked then-foreign secretary Albert del Rosario into abandoning Scarborough Shoal).
The most important factor that would determine Trump’s stance toward China would be his background as a businessman. Biden has been a politician of the ideology-driven Democratic Party all his working life. His knowledge of China was through ideological prisms, that it was still the “Red China” that emerged out of World War II, which has an authoritarian government that recognizes no human rights, with even its leader Mao allowing famine that led to tens of millions of his people to die of starvation.
Biden’s knowledge of China was secondhand, through briefings by policy wonks and ideological advisers such as Sullivan and Campbell, and in dinners or lounges with the leaders of the Democratic Party, the consensus among whom is that China is the dangerous ideological twin of the defeated Soviet Union.
Firsthand
In contrast, Trump’s is firsthand, as it were, through the businesses he set up in China and with dealings with Chinese companies in New York. The Trump organization has chased hotel and licensing deals in China since 2005, securing over 126 trademarks by 2025. His Shanghai office (2012-2016) had ties with state-owned entities like International Commercial Bank of China (a Trump Tower tenant), which means he has dealt with Chinese officials and markets directly. The Trump Organization took out loans from Chinese banks such as the $950 million from Bank of China (2012) for a property purchase, and he has had an account with a Chinese bank which made him familiar with Beijing’s economic ecosystem.
His business past in China would make him wary of burning bridges. Pushing too hard — like military escalation — also risks retaliation against US companies, a world he is a part of, whose welfare he will take care of. Tariffs hurt China, but they’re calculated, not reckless — he’s said, “I love tariffs, they’re my favorite.”
Trump navigated China’s bureaucracy and business culture, and profited. He’s boasted about this, like in a 2016 debate: “I’ve made a lot of money dealing with China.”
Trump has had dinners in 2017 with Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago (2017), giving him an opportunity to size up the Chinese leader. Trump’s business lens would likely see Xi as a negotiator wanting the best deal for his country, not as Biden sees him — a “bully.” Trump has seen its economic levers up close — state-backed banks, fast-tracked trademarks during his presidency and manufacturing for his brands. He “knows” China as a dealmaker, not just a geopolitical rival.
Musk
And then there’s Elon Musk, Trump’s adviser primus inter pares. Musk became the world’s richest man mainly because of his Tesla electric vehicles. Tesla operates a major manufacturing facility in Shanghai, known as Giga Shanghai, which opened in 2019, which has produced 1 million of his Model Y Tesla, the most popular electric vehicle in China. Tesla is the first foreign automaker allowed to establish a wholly owned factory in China without a local partner, following a change in Chinese ownership regulations.
The Shanghai plant is Tesla’s largest production hub globally, surpassing its Fremont, California, facility in both size and output. It produces over half of Tesla’s global vehicle deliveries, with a capacity exceeding 750,000 cars annually.
The factory’s success is supported by significant financial backing from Chinese state-owned banks, which provided approximately $1.4 billion in loans at favorable rates, and a robust local supply chain that has bolstered China’s electric vehicle ecosystem.
China is Tesla’s second-largest market after the United States, accounting for roughly 40 percent of its global sales and about 22 to 25 percent of its total revenues in recent years (e.g., $18 billion in 2022). Tesla also benefits from China’s position as a key player in the global battery supply chain, with nearly 40 percent of Tesla’s battery materials sourced from Chinese companies, a partnership that continues to expand.
It is inconceivable for Musk to just sit on his ass while the US continues its belligerent stance against China that Obama started.
Sticking
There’s a sticking point here though; Trump’s street-smart approach to China, honed through years of dealmaking, could run headlong into the hard-line stance of his own team. His Secretary of State Marco Rubio branded China a “generational threat” during a fiery 2024 Senate hearing; Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Pick in an X post in January 2025 declared that he will “confront Beijing’s aggression head-on.” Republican hawks in Congress as well as Trump’s X cheerleaders, like @EndWokeness, are pounding the drum for toughness, barking warnings like “Don’t go soft on us, Mr. President!” in a March 2025 thread that racked up retweets.
Trump though is not known to be so pliable to his staff’s views, seeing them after all as his employees, nothing more. His most famous two-word liner after all has been: “You’re fired!” Or has Trump taken in hawks as a smokescreen for his embrace of China?
Under Trump, China is safe — but then so is a world pulled out of the brink of a nuclear war. Can’t wait to watch Biden’s puppets here suddenly change their tune.
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Trump will end Biden’s warmongering with China
Source: Breaking News PH
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