New Delhi: Even as US president-elect Joe Biden said that he doesn’t intend to immediately undo Donald Trump’s measures against China, his administration may be considering appointing a White House Tsar for Asia, with three senior officials under him to manage the portfolios of China, India and US treaty allies, international newspaper reported on Wednesday.
A Financial Times report said on Wednesday that “[f]ive people familiar with the debate inside the Biden transition team” have stated that the president-elect was considering the option of creating the role in the National Security Council. “Establishing the position would underscore how the region has become even more critical since the Obama administration’s ‘Asia pivot’,” the report stated.
The incoming national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, was considering the creation of a Tsar for Asia post as part of a number of ideas, but no decision has yet been taken.
“The president-elect has repeatedly made clear the Asia-Pacific region is one of tremendous opportunity, but also one where our interests and values face increasing challenges,” said one Biden transition team official.
The FT report had identified Jeff Prescott, a Biden transition official and former NSC senior director in the Obama administration, as a possible name for the White House Asia Tsar post.
The report says one formula being considered is to have three senior National Security Council directors to manage three geographical portfolios who will report to the Tsar. “One would oversee China, the second would manage India and the third would focus on Japan, South Korea, Australia and other US allies in the Asia-Pacific,” the paper reported.
It was noted that any such a move would also reflect that Biden would be have to deal with complications in the US-China relations, which are largely a result of the legacy of the Trump administration.
The new administration would have to deal with not just trade friction with an assertive China, but also look into human rights abuses in Xinjian and Hong Kong.
In his first interview after the election, Biden told Thomas Friedman of the New York Times that he won’t rush into undoing the measures imposed by the Trump administration against China, like the tariffs on half of Chinese exports to the US.
Biden stated that he would first conduct a review of the existing agreement with China and then consult with allies in Asia and Europe on the collective way to move forward.
“The best China strategy, I think, is one which gets every one of our — or at least what used to be our — allies on the same page. It’s going to be a major priority for me in the opening weeks of my presidency to try to get us back on the same page with our allies.”
He explained that dealing with China required “leverage”, which “in my view, we don’t have it yet”.
The US president-elect said that his “goal would be to pursue trade policies that actually produce progress on China’s abusive practices — that’s stealing intellectual property, dumping products, illegal subsidies to corporations” and forcing “tech transfers” from American companies to their Chinese counterparts.
In his article, Friedman wrote that Biden would also be developing a bipartisan domestic consensus for “massive, government-led investments in American research and development, infrastructure and education to better compete with China — and not just complain about it”.