This article originally appeared in the Council on Foreign Relations’ Council of Councils on September 16, 2024.
The United States remains the world’s preeminent military power and largest economy. It is natural that the outcome of its presidential election will have global consequences, including for the Indo-Pacific. To some degree, there is a growing bipartisan consensus around China’s emergence as a peer competitor of the United States, but the details in policy approach between potential Republican and Democratic administrations after 2025 still matter in at least two ways.
The first is what a second Donald Trump or first Kamala Harris administration could mean for the United States’ security posture. This has implications for the kind of burden-sharing arrangements the United States will work out with allies such as Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea, and with partners such as India, Singapore, and Taiwan. Moreover, how will the next president harness the United States’ considerable military budget to counter China’s massive naval and rocket forces buildups in the western Pacific?
The second involves the implications for the United States’ economic engagement in the region. While formal trade agreements are effectively out of the question (due to a now bipartisan political consensus in the United States that Washington should not further increase market access in the region), there are a whole range of supply chain, technological security, and investment partnerships that are well within the realm of possibility. These could potentially shore up economic relations with friendly countries while building supply chain resilience in the face of a hostile China.
Trump’s economic advisors have pledged to be more liberal in their use of tariffs, but it remains to be seen how much those tariffs will be applied against friendly countries such as India, South Korea, and Vietnam, or if they would be targeted in a systematic manner against China’s overcapacity. Among developed economies, such as the United States and European Union, concerns about China’s overcapacity extend to electric vehicle batteries, legacy semiconductors, and solar energy supply chains. For Democrats, the degree to which the democracy and human rights agenda will feature in its Indo-Pacific engagement—given competing priorities—is also an open question.
For those reasons, the U.S. elections will likely be watched carefully in capitals across the Indo-Pacific, despite a considerable degree of commonality in the Republican and Democratic approaches to the region—as on Taiwan, the Quad, AUKUS, and the U.S.-Japan-South Korea trilateral partnership.