Comparison of Security Policies between the Trump and Biden Governments toward China

Abstract

The Trump administration, following the Obama administration, criticized previous administrations' security policies toward China, heralding the emergence of a groundbreaking strategy. Biden also criticized the Trump administration's security policy toward China from the time of his presidential nomination, implying the emergence of various containment policies. In this study, the Trump and Biden administration's China security policies were examined and compared with an emphasis on the integrated deterrence declared by the Biden government. The Trump and Biden administrations simultaneously pointed to China as a country that would undermine US interests. Accordingly, the two governments pursued a containment policy against China to maintain a US-centered international order. The Trump administration pursued a reckless alliance strategy based on the US-first principle as its integration policy and maintained multilateral security cooperation centered on the Indo-Pacific strategy as its deterrence policy. The Biden government maintained an ideological alliance strategy based on alliance priority as an integration policy and sought multilateral security cooperation by adding the NATO alliance to the Indo-Pacific strategy as a deterrence policy. The US anti-China policy can be divided into integration and suppression, and the detailed strategies applied at this time covered nonmilitary and military areas. Therefore, this study investigated the possibility of applying the entire military or nonmilitary domain to the scope of the analysis of the theory of integration and deterrence within the framework of international relations.