Meet the World’s Double Haters

SINGAPORE — Every place I’ve visited overseas this year, people are remarkably well informed about our election — no surprise, really. America, give us a vote!  you hear. It impacts all of us as much as it does you.

The surprise is something else: a divergence in views about the candidates and their impact on the world that divides America’s allies in Europe and those in Asia.

When I checked in on Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and Kyiv in recent weeks, the mood ranged from anxious to fatalistic about Donald Trump’s possible return. For Western Europe’s establishment, Trump is the disruptive devil they know who threatens the status quo — a postwar liberal order built and sustained by American power. (The exception is Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Trump’s most vocal friend in Europe.) Further east, in Poland and Ukraine, leaders there will gladly embrace any president who stands up to Russia and hope that if Trump wins, the internationalists in his orbit win out over the party’s anti-Ukrainian isolationist wing. Kamala Harris is preferred, but barely gets a mention. 

When you travel to Asia, however, the story changes. In conversations here in Singapore, as well as in Seoul and Tokyo, I was struck by how little difference senior government and business leaders see between Trump and Harris. Not in terms of their personalities, obviously, but how they will impact this part of the world.

“There is no enthusiasm for either one,” said Kishore Mahbubani, a veteran Singaporean diplomat, summing up a kind of consensus. “We don’t think either will lead to big changes for the region. The question is who will do more damage.”

The Asian “double hater” tends to voice concern about and frustration with America that won’t change after next month’s elections. The policies that most matter for allies in Asia are the approach to China, and security in general, and trade. For them, Harris and Trump sing similar tunes.

Security Anxieties

America’s Asian allies are dependent on America’s defense umbrella to a greater degree than Europe. The Europeans have two nuclear powers in France and the U.K. What’s more, Japan and Korea, the closest military allies that are directly defended by the U.S. military stationed there, are looking at three imposing threats — China, North Korea and Russia — where the Europeans see one from Moscow. Southeast Asia also tightened its military ties with the U.S. in the Biden era, in response to Chinese nationalist muscle flexing in the region.

Trump hasn’t called those commitments into question the way he has America’s vows to protect Europe through NATO. His bearishness on China reinforces the impression that America’s military umbrella remains secure, for the near term at least. Biden continued Trump’s tough approach to China and Harris would continue his, they assume. 

“Establishment Japan seems to prefer Harris to Trump,” said Yoichi Funabashi, a member of the said establishment who has just published a book on former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. “She is much more assuring, predictable, and a more bottom-up, process type whom Japanese bureaucracies of both government and corporate find more comfortable to deal with.” But that endorsement of sorts comes without enthusiasm for her or European-style distaste for him. Funabashi added that Trump, “although highly unpredictable in behavior, is quite predictable in his thinking, ambitions, agenda and priorities. He is a known commodity.”

As president, one of Trump’s warmest relationships with a foreign leader was with the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who regularly visited him in Mar-a-Lago. One senior Japanese official joked new Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba should learn to play golf. 

“Harris isn’t much of a change,” the official continued, flatly. “Maybe she would push more human rights, which isn’t good to do toward southeast Asia.”

There are several security challenges that could test Trump or Harris soon, from China’s aggressive moves toward Taiwan and in the South China Sea to North Korea’s nuclear bluster and burgeoning alliance with Russia.

In ways that we don’t appreciate in Washington or Europe, the war in Ukraine does resonate here — more than the conflict in the Middle East. It’s seen as a test of America’s will and staying power with allies and against the new condominium of authoritarian regimes. If Putin wins, China will be seen as a victor. They used to say, first Ukraine then Taiwan. Japan’s former Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who left office last month, updated it to “first Ukraine, then East Asia.” 

Any move by Trump to abandon Ukraine could soon turn a lot of Asians into Europeans, at least in how they think about him. But for now, their immediate concerns are closer to home. 

Biden helped bring South Korea and Japan closer together and that rapprochement redefined the security outlook in east Asia. Memories of Trump in Seoul are less warm than in Tokyo. “There is anxiety there,” a senior Korean official told me, asking not to be named. “The problem is Trump himself. I’m not sure how committed he will be to a continued unified approach” with South Korea and Japan. “He is a very transactional player.”

I asked another Korean minister for the first word that comes to mind when you mention Trump: “Unpredictable,” he responded. Trump’s attempts to strike a deal on nuclear weapons with North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Il wasn’t unwelcome but “we needed prior coordination. The U.S. should not embarrass us.” The first Korean official contrasted that with the Biden administration’s “coordinated approach” to North Korea and China, which would presumably continue under a Harris presidency. But this official added that Trump was ultimately restrained and reluctant to get sucked into any armed conflict, which echoes what I heard in Tokyo. These concerns about Trump didn’t in my conversations in Seoul translate into warm endorsements of Harris.

Has-Been Trade Power

 As much as security is top of mind out here, the reason why the U.S. is seen as a declining power in Asia is rooted in economics. America isn’t seen as leading on trade and investment anymore. China is stepping in. The Asian allies hate — not too strong a word — the new “Washington Consensus.” The old consensus from early in the post-Cold War era preached free markets and free trade. The new one is about tariffs and industrial policy, and rules out the kind of free trade deals that provide Asia’s dynamic economies what they desire most — access to the U.S. market, the world’s largest.

Neither Trump nor Harris would ever, barring some dramatic change, go for anything like the last attempt to do that, which was Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact. Trump threatens to slap tariffs on China and other countries in the region fear they will be targeted as well, “regardless of whether they are allies or adversaries,” said Funabashi, the prominent Japanese foreign policy analyst. The Biden administration has embraced a policy of a “small yard, high fence” that limits America’s commitments around the world and doesn’t make space for grand trade initiatives. 

“Whether you like it or not the lack of trust and the rivalry, even confrontation with China, is baked in” with any president, said a senior official in Singapore, who requested anonymity to speak openly. “I think tariffs and trade friction and certainly the ‘small yard, high fence’ is also baked in regardless of who is in place.”

The senior official in Tokyo noted dryly that “Nippon Steel caught our attention,” referring to the Biden administration move this summer to veto the Japanese steelmaker’s proposed takeover of U.S. Steel. Japan is, after all, one of America’s closest allies and signed up to the sanctions on Russia as well as the stringent limits on technology exports to China pushed by Washington — at no small cost to Japanese companies. 

“The concern is whether the U.S. will not appreciate the value of its economic engagement with Asia across the Pacific,” the senior Singaporean official said. “Trade is strategy. Investments even more so than trade. The key question for America is, what are your strategic interests, defined in your own terms, in the Pacific?”

America still wields economic hard power to complement its military supremacy out here. It is the biggest foreign investor in many of the region’s countries. But China is catching up. The dollar is the fiat currency of course, but it’s no secret that countries even friendly to the U.S. are talking openly about creating an alternative. “We want the Americans to regain their supremacy — economic above all,” said a former Korean official, now in the private sector, whom I spoke to in Seoul. 

That isn’t a leadership role that either candidate is currently selling to the American electorate. 

Speaking at a Milken Institute conference in Singapore, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair told an audience of Asian business leaders that yes, America’s politics are “dysfunctional.” But he added these data points: The U.S., relatively speaking, hasn’t been this strong in a long time. It’s the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer. It has its most dynamic large economy. It’s a tech powerhouse and unmatched militarily.

But the harsher perception is becoming more the reality here. Whoever wins the election next month, American power in Asia will be seen, until further notice, as in decline.

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