Donald Trump’s new Indo-Pacific strategy is moving too slowly to address the US’s most pressing issues, claims Zhang Jiadong, director of Fudan University’s Center for South Asian Studies.
Writing for The Paper, Zhang said the North Korean nuclear threat and trade issues would remain central problems for the US, leaving Trump little energy and resources for other strategies. The scholar also said there was a contradiction in the fact the president has insisted on reverting to bilateral practices in trade, despite proposing a security scheme based on multilateral principles.
Although globalization has provoked a backlash in some quarters, he said, the world is nonetheless more interconnected now than ever before. The current level of interdependence among countries means even one as strong as the US will find it hard to isolate others, or form Cold War-style strategic blocs. Many nations are looking for an external power to balance US influence, Zhang claimed, because a rival power would lead the US to make more rational decisions.
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