Washington, Jan 29: On the campaign trail last year, President Donald Trump talked tough about imposing tariffs as high as 60 per cent on Chinese goods and threatened to renew the trade war with China that he launched during his first term.
But now that he’s back in the White House, Trump appears to be seeking a more nuanced relationship with the country that both Republicans and Democrats have come to see as the gravest foreign policy challenge to the US.
China is also a major trading partner and an economic powerhouse, and it has one of the world’s largest military forces.
“We look forward to doing very well with China and getting along with China,” Trump said on Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in comments that suggested Beijing could help end the war in Ukraine and reduce nuclear arms.
As he moves forward with plans to impose 25 per cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico on February 1, Trump has not set a firm date for China. He’s only repeated his plan for a much lower 10 per cent tax on Chinese imports in retaliation for China’s production of chemicals used in fentanyl.
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump was “very much still considering” raising tariffs on China on February 1.
Trump, who spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping days before taking office, seems to be showing restraint and bowing to a more complicated reality than he described while running for office.
Speaking of potential tariffs on China in a recent Fox News interview, he said: “They don’t want them, and I’d rather not have to use it.” Liu Yawei, senior adviser on China at the Carter Centre in Atlanta, said Trump has become “more pragmatic”.
A Chinese expert on American foreign policy acknowledged that there are many “uncertainties and unknowns about the future” of US-China relations. But Da Wei, director of the Centre for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, also said Trump’s recent change in tone offers “encouraging signals.”
Trump invites Israel’s Netanyahu to White House
Meanwhile, Trump has invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House next week as the first foreign leader to visit in Trump’s second term, Netanhayu and the White House said Tuesday.
The announcement came as the United States pressures Israel and Hamas to continue a ceasefire that has paused a devastating 15-month war in Gaza. Talks about the ceasefire’s more difficult second phase, which aims to end the war, begin next Monday.
The White House letter shared by Netanyahu’s office, dated Tuesday, said “I look forward to discussing how we can bring peace to Israel and its neighbours, and efforts to counter our shared adversaries.” The meeting on February 4 is a chance for Netanyahu, under pressure at home, to remind the world of the support he has received from Trump over the years, and to defend Israel’s conduct of the war. Last year, the two men met face-to-face for the first time in nearly four years at Trump’s Florida Mar-a-Lago estate.
Israel is the largest recipient of US military aid, and Netanyahu is likely to encourage Trump not to hold up some weapons deliveries the way the Biden administration did, though it continued other deliveries and overall military support.
Netanyahu also wants Trump to put more pressure on Iran, and renew efforts to deliver a historic normalisation agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a rival of Iran and the Arab world’s most powerful country.
Even before taking office this month, Trump was sending his special Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, to the region to apply pressure along with the Biden administration to get the current Gaza ceasefire achieved.
But Netanyahu has vowed to renew the war if Hamas doesn’t meet his demands in negotiations over the ceasefire’s second phase, meant to discuss a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. (AP)