Foreign policy not part of US presidential elections

Even as President Donald Trump was crisscrossing key battleground states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, was in Hanoi, meeting Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh and Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc. It was the last stop for his five-nation tour to Asia. He earlier visited India, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Indonesia

In his earlier stops in New Delhi, Colombo, Male, and Jakarta, Pompeo continued the tirade Trump Administration launched against China, slamming the communist country for the Covid-19 pandemic as well as for its belligerence, not only along its disputed boundary with India but also in the Taiwan Strait as well as in the disputed waters of South China Sea, East China and elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific region. Even in Hanoi, he underlined the United States’ respect for the sovereignty of Vietnam thus tacitly committing support of Washington D.C. to the Southeast Asian nations, which has a protracted maritime boundary dispute with China.

Pompeo in fact did his bit to help Trump, who is seeking a second term in the White House and facing a stiff challenge from his rival and former Vice President Joe Biden.

Not that foreign policy has been among the central themes of the re-election campaign of Trump. Neither has Biden focussed much on US relations with the other nations.

“Foreign policy is really not part of our election campaign, not this year, not four years ago and not four years before that,” Charles Shapiro, a retired US diplomat and the president of the World Affairs Council of Atlanta, said during a virtual briefing on presidential polls organized by the US State Department for foreign journalists.

The world may be keenly watching the US presidential elections. But, for the majority of the voters in the US, the rest of the world does not matter much when it comes to choosing the next President.

Shapiro was also joined by eminent broadcast journalist Rickey Bevington, who said that if an average US voter was asked to share her or his opinion about the foreign policy of America, one could just get “blank stares” in response.

Yet, one nation has indeed made its way into the political discourse in the poll-bound US and it is China.

With the SARS-CoV-2 wreaking havoc across the US and his administration’s way of dealing with it drawing flak, Trump and his aides have kept on blaming China for the pandemic. His campaign has also sought to reap the political dividend of the US-China trade war, highlighting the tariff imposed by his administration on imports from the communist country or the restrictions imposed on its telecom companies like Huawei Technologies Company and the ZTE Corporation.

“What I hear from conservative voters, particularly Trump’s supporters in Georgia is that this messaging against China very much resonates with the conservative base and not just the far right of the Republican Party base, I mean, mainstream and even conservative Democrats,” said Bevington, who hosts the popular “All Things Considered” programme on the National Public Radio.

“There seems to be a consensus among Americans that we've been too lax in China. We've been trying to be too friendly and whether this be politically or economically, that the US needs to grow a little bit more of a spine, but again, whatever that means in policy is different from the actual public talking points, as we see,” she said. “But I will say that that messaging really is resonating right now in the US, whether it regards to Huawei or 5G technology or trade, that that messaging is resonating.”

No wonder, Trump’s Secretary of State Pompeo sought to consolidate his boss’s “tough on China” image during his tour to Asia just days before the election.

Trump sought to accuse Biden of being soft on China. But the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate and his aides also argued in favour of taking a tough stand on China, not only on trade issues but also on atrocities and human rights violations by Xi Jinping’s regime in Tibet and Xinjiang as well as on crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong.

“So, in that sense, the Republicans have moved the Democrats to the right on dealing with China. And I think that that's fascinating,” Shapiro, a former US envoy to Venezuela, said. “I would bet that a Biden Administration would not get in the sort of trade war with China that we're having now and with tariffs, which of course the result of tariffs in the opposite direction and her trade in both ways. But we'd have, I would hope a more nuanced response to China, dealing with China on trade issues.”

Biden did accuse Trump of being a ‘puppet’ of Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The US agencies detected attempts by the troll farms and hackers based in Russia to do a rerun of what they had done during the 2016 polls. But neither US-Russia relations nor the Trump Administration’s way of dealing with Moscow turned into a major electoral issue. Nor did US-Iran relations, although Trump did try to take credit for the sanctions he imposed on the Islamic Republic. His campaign also highlighted the Abraham Accords his administration inked with Tel Aviv, Abu Dhabi, and Manama for normalization of Israel’s relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. But none of these resonate much with the US electorate ahead of the polls.

Trump made two critical comments about India during pre-election debates with Biden, despite flaunting his personal friendship with Prime Minister Narendra Modi to make a dent in the traditional support base of the Democratic Party among Indian-Americans. He alleged during his first debate with the former US Vice President on September 30 that the Government of India was not making public the actual number of people who died of the Covid-19 in the country.

He also said during the debate on October 22 that the air in India, Russia, and China were “filthy” – a comment, which was not in the context of air pollution in the three nations, but about their contribution to climate change. He made the remark while defending his government’s June 2017 decision to withdraw the US from the 2016 Paris Agreement. Biden on the other hand announced a $2 trillion plan to cut emission and mitigate climate change, which includes “transition away from oil”, a proposition that Trump seized on to attack the former Vice President.