By Lukas Fiala
With Kamala Harris’ campaign gathering pace over the past week, the race for the U.S. presidency is now more open than just a couple of weeks ago. And yet, with the specter of Trump 2.0 looming over policy discussions on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, it’s worthwhile reflecting on how a potential Donald Trump victory would reverberate across the Global South.
One might argue it’s difficult to infer any coherent policy frameworks from Trump’s rumblings on the campaign trail. There are, however, other sources that may help us approximate a Trump 2.0 agenda. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, for instance, aims to equip a potential Trump presidency with policy strategy, personnel, and training. And China features, as Trump might say, bigly.
And even though the former president has distanced himself from Project 2025, characterizing some of its ideas as “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” the initiative nonetheless serves as a repository of mainstream conservative ideology.
Indeed, in a 900+ page book published by the Heritage Foundation, a host of contributors outline recommendations for pretty much every major policy area. “China” is mentioned a whopping 475 times throughout the book.
Reminiscent of 1950s McCarthyism, the tone is confrontational, with the book painting the picture of “Communist China’s” concerted strategy to undermine American interests, workers, values, and supply chains.
Beyond Cold War 2.0 rhetoric, the book features an expected but nevertheless striking emphasis on systemic economic confrontation with China. Describing mainstream understandings of free trade as “propaganda,” one author recommends the U.S. “strategically expand tariffs to all Chinese products” (p. 789), reduce or eliminate U.S. reliance on Chinese supply chains relevant to national security, and sanction companies—even American firms—that enable China’s surveillance state.
While competition with China is thus at the core of the recommendations, it’s doubtful if the book truly offers a clear blueprint for doing so effectively across the Global South. References to China’s “highly aggressive” Belt and Road Initiative, for instance, or the “debt-trap diplomacy” that it enables (p. 725) will not appeal to many governments across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Emphasizing that the U.S. should “counter” the BRI by using all elements of statecraft, including information operations, discredit China’s official narrative, heralds a return – once again – to the conundrum of making U.S. engagement more about China than actual regional priorities. From the often debunked “debt trap” framework to the underlying demand to choose sides between Washington and Beijing, such proposals will be a non-starter across many parts of the Global South long before Trump’s potential accession to the White House.
In fact, this approach will likely create opportunities for China to frame its own engagement as inclusive and more receptive to the concerns of developing countries. With economic competition guaranteed, Beijing will feel vindicated in its pivot to the Global South, which was foreshadowed during the last Party Congress, to offset its deteriorating relationship with the U.S.
And for the Global South deciding how to approach the next U.S. administration, the ideological incongruence will be hard to ignore. For instance, renewal of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which provides eligible African countries duty-free access to U.S. markets beyond 2025, is, in principle, to be welcomed (p. 276).
Yet, the assertion that it should be tied to “good governance and pro-free market economic policies” seems hypocritical at best, given that the U.S. is—in the very same book—advised to throw such principles overboard. Displaying different opinions is certainly laudable, but it seems that neoliberal “propaganda” only applies to those who aren’t given a choice.
By U.S. political standards, the election is, of course, still miles away. And, whether Project 2025 will be implemented remains to be seen. Even though Trump 2.0 seems to have a more well-defined agenda, it is doubtful whether such ideas will enable America to compete more effectively with China across the developing world.
Lukas Fiala is the project head of China Foresight at LSEIDEAS.
