What Would a President Hillary Clinton Trip to Asia Have Looked Like?
If not for the votes of some tens of thousands of people in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin last November, it would have been Hillary Clinton — not Donald Trump — embarking on a multi-city Asian tour as U.S. president this year. How might her visit — and her administration's policy more broadly — have differed from President Trump's?
The simplest and most accurate answer might be "not that much." Aside from his usual array of colorful tweets and comments, President Trump stuck to the basic script that has guided U.S. Asia policy since President Nixon: full-throated support of key allies in Japan and South Korea, and constructive engagement with China.
Nevertheless, there are ways in which a Hillary Clinton administration might have approached a big Asia trip differently.
One area is in trade. Like President Trump, Clinton came out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement during the presidential campaign, breaking from President Obama and reversing her earlier support. Once in office, could Clinton have reneged on her campaign promise to withdraw and kept the U.S. in TPP?
"I don't think it'd have been very easy for her administration to make a 180-degree turn on TPP this quickly," Bonnie Glaser, senior adviser for Asia for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said at Asia Society on Wednesday. "I think perhaps by the mid-point of her four-year term, maybe she'd have been able to come up with ways in which the U.S. could have returned to the TPP." By contrast, she noted, there is little indication that anyone in the Trump administration — from the president on down — has any desire to revive U.S. involvement.
Then there's China. President Trump's China policy has consisted of two main elements: accusing Beijing of getting the better of the U.S. in trade agreements and leaning on China to help resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis. There's little doubt that the latter issue would dominate U.S.-China relations under Hillary Clinton — but Glaser said that she would also have brought up matters that the Trump administration seems largely to have ignored such as the South China Sea, human rights, cyber-security, and China's squeezing of non-governmental organizations. In addition, Glaser noted, Clinton is likely to have had less tolerance for the pomp and ceremony that so beguiled Trump and might have insisted on making the two presidents available to questions from the press.
"You would have seen a much more conventional trip," she said.
Glaser was joined in the discussion by Daniel Russel, diplomat in residence at Asia Society Policy Institute and a State Department official under President Obama; and Orville Schell of the Center on U.S.-China Relations. Schell, who had accompanied the Trump delegation on the trip, spoke of the warm bonhomie between Presidents Xi and Trump and said that a similar camaraderie under a President Hillary Clinton would have been unlikely.
"The Chinese were not very well disposed to her," he said. "One of the reasons is that she’s representative of ways in which President Trump is not as America as a democratic country.Watch the complete video below: