Chinese exports are booming—but ties with the U.S. are collapsing. Across Asia, from Beijing to Manila, Washington’s shifting strategy under Trump is reshaping alliances and testing security guarantees that have underpinned the region for decades.
Eric speaks with James Crabtree, a distinguished visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society, about how Asia’s leaders are adapting to a world in flux:
- 00:00 Intro & why Southeast Asia matters
- 02:05 China’s export surge vs. U.S. slump
- 06:10 Trump, the anti-China coalition, and strategy drift
- 11:40 Japan–ROK–Australia: diversification without the U.S.
- 16:55 Taiwan risk calculus under Trump
- 22:45 The Philippines, Second Thomas Shoal, and alliance tests
- 28:30 Vietnam’s tariff hit and diversification
- 34:10 Europe’s role and limits in the Indo-Pacific
- 39:25 India’s hedge toward Europe; future of the Quad
- 44:30 Takeaways and where this is heading
Show Notes:
- European Council on Foreign Relations: Pivot to Europe: India’s back-up plan in Trump’s world by James Crabtree
- Substack: 12 thoughts from Beijing by James Crabtree
- Financial Times: James Crabtree on Taiwan’s Trump problem by Gideon Rachman
About James Crabtree:
James Crabtree is a distinguished visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Crabtree is a geopolitical analyst and author with extensive experience living and working in Asia. His book The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age, was named an Amazon book of the year and short-listed as a Financial Times & McKinsey business book of the year. Prior to joining ECFR, he was the Singapore-based executive director of the Institute of International Strategic Studies in Asia, where he led the organization of the Shangri-La Dialogue security summit, and an associate professor in practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School, Asia’s leading school of public policy.
Transcript:
ERIC OLANDER: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the China Global South podcast, a proud member of the Sinica podcast network. I’m Eric Olander. Today, we’re going to focus our attention on Asia in general, but specifically on Southeast Asia and the burgeoning competition between China and the United States in this vital region.
We got some trade numbers this week that really show how this region is absolutely essential in understanding the great power competition between the US and China. So let me just quickly review some of the top-line numbers that came out. For the month of September, Chinese exports increased by 8.3 percent, imports up just over 7 percent, but that export number is very important in part because we saw a dramatic decrease in exports to the United States, around 27 percent. Most crucially, and this is very important, Chinese exports, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, have now shrunk to about 10 percent. That is, Chinese exports to the US have shrunk to about 10 percent of their total exports. That’s a very important number because it gives the Chinese much more leverage in their negotiations and their actions with the US.
One reason why overall exports to the United States have fallen, while Chinese trade exports more broadly have gone up, is that regions like Southeast Asia, and specifically countries like Vietnam, have seen exports increase by 25 percent in September. So that’s one of the reasons why this region is so important. We also saw this week that the United States and Singapore have opened investigations into a company that was in Singapore that was shipping NVIDIA chips to China.
This was also an issue in Malaysia. So, this question of rerouting of products coming from the US into China and from China into the US through this region is so important. But what I wanted to do today in the show was take us on a journey throughout the region, starting in the north and ending in the south, just to update everybody on the status and where we are in this competition.
It is unfolding incredibly fast, and it’s hard to keep up with, and that’s why it’s important that we check in with people like James Crabtree. James is a guy who, if you’re not familiar with, is one of the smartest guys out there. He’s been in Asia for a long time.
He was with the FT in India. He was in Singapore for a long time as well, where he organized one of the most important defense conferences that brought together many security professionals from across the region. He’s a distinguished visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society, and he recently traveled throughout the region, meeting with many senior-level stakeholders.
And so I wanted to check in with him to get his firsthand take on where we are right now in this crucial moment. Let’s take a listen now to my discussion with James Crabtree.
James Crabtree, welcome to the show. Wonderful to have you on today.
JAMES CRABTREE: Thanks for having me.
ERIC OLANDER: James, I’ve been looking forward to our discussion.
I’m an avid follower of your sub-stack. I’m an avid follower of all the work you’ve been doing over the years, back when you were in Singapore as well. And one of the things I’d like to do today is have us join you on some of the journeys you’ve been on over the past eight, nine months to different Asian capitals and to the U.S., to talk about the situation we’re in today. You, like me, we oftentimes have a chance to speak with stakeholders, and the key question that everybody’s asking today is, what’s happening? Everything that they used to know doesn’t feel like it applies, and everything that is new is still unknown. So I thought, let’s start up in China, and then we’ll make our way down to India.
You were in China earlier this year, and you wrote on Substack that you had many observations. You know, China today feels like it has the wind in its back, given the fact that what’s happening with the U.S. I mean, Xi Jinping had a, what I think a lot of people could describe as a very successful summit with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. That said, while things appear to be going well on the surface, you noted in your discussions with Chinese stakeholders that there’s a lot of confusion and even some disappointment.
Maybe you can talk to us a bit about the perceptions you’ve picked up from Chinese stakeholders and where you see China in all of this.
JAMES CRABTREE: So, the big picture is that China sees a lot of opportunity in the Trump moment. That is, the thing they disliked most about American statecraft over the last decade was when the U.S. was able to assemble an anti-China coalition working with a broader range of allies and partners. And Trump clearly is very bad for that approach.
He treats his allies as, you know, sort of weaklings to be extorted and spends a lot less time trying to build this balancing coalition in Asia. So in a broad sense, that’s good for China. There are lots of opportunities.
And the SCO summit that just happened was part of that. But I think there are a couple of caveats to that. I mean, the first is that China’s economic position is still precarious.
And so there’s a lot of anxiety about that. I went to see Michael Pettis when I was in Beijing, who’s a well-known economist who a lot of people look to. And his sort of central scenario is that China is facing a kind of period of decades-long Japanification in which you will have slow growth and all of the attendant sort of social problems that will come with that.
So I think that’s a big challenge for China. I mean, the second is that China sees the world predominantly through its core relationship with the United States. That’s its challenger.
That is the nation that is seeking to compete with and supplant. And when that relationship is unstable, that is a cause for anxiousness as well. And so Trump is an inherently destabilizing force.
And I think the Chinese are very distrustful of the Americans now. They believe that fundamentally, they’re out to get them. But Trump is a very sort of strange beast, as in he blows hot and cold.
On the one hand, he has the capacity to do things which are very coercive in the way of removing access to technology or hitting heavy tariffs. On the other hand, he hints that there may be some kind of rapprochement, some sort of grand bargain to be struck. And if you go back to the later Obama years, China was keen on this idea of a new model of great power relations that effectively a G2 in which the US and China would find some condominium format in which they could respect each other’s interests and work out the problems of the world together.
And so I think until they have some sense of where the US sort of sits on these areas, and particularly on Taiwan, which is the sort of core of the core interest, then in a sense, there’s a lot of anxiety. So when I was in Beijing at Tsinghua in the spring, you know, every conversation was about Trump and what Trump was trying to do and how you could read America’s intentions and what was going on in their system. And in a strange way, both systems are very difficult to read.
The sense of disappointment, it’s interesting you pick that up. I mean, I sensed in China that there was a, you know, that there was a sort of there’s been a grudging respect for the United States, as in China feels the US is trying to contain its rise, and it has it in for it. And it’s trying to hobble it in various different ways.
But on the other hand, it is the superpower, it’s the marker of China is going to rise to become by 2049, a kind of global great power, then it has to match or surpass the US. And therefore watching the US behaving in this way that appears to be so irrational, somehow was an almost belittling experience, as in China was trying to, it’s a bit like a kind prize fighter, you want to win the heavyweight bout in a in a fair fight in which you beat an opponent on their best day. If you see the opponent behaving in a way that is, you know, that they’re suddenly kind of out of shape and behaving in a way that is not in their best interest, then somehow you’re puzzled as to why your adversary is doing that.
And so I felt there was a sort of strange pathos to the way China was viewing the US that they couldn’t quite understand why the US was behaving in this way.
ERIC OLANDER: Yeah. And I think one of the things that’s confounding to a lot of people, particularly out here in Asia, but I imagine elsewhere as well, is that on the one hand, the Republicans, MAGA, and Trump have been outspoken in their suspicion of China, the anti-China hawks, Elbridge Colby, who’s in the Pentagon, Marco Rubio is the Secretary of State, Tom Cotton, who was the senator who led the charge against TikTok.
Trump comes into office on this wave of anti-China, containing China, countering China rhetoric. And yet, when he gets into office, he defangs most of the US government’s efforts to counter China. So he gets rid of the China team at the National Security Council.
He neuters most of the China hawks. You don’t hear any anti-China rhetoric coming out of the administration, not out of Washington, but out of the administration today. And all in pursuit of a deal that Trump wants to make with Xi.
And I guess I’m just trying to get your reading of what does a China policy from the point because it doesn’t seem like there’s a grand strategy at play here.
JAMES CRABTREE: Yes, I mean, I agree with that. I was in Washington a few months ago, and one of the conversations I had there was about the depth of the anti-China coalition through the first Trump and the Biden years, that one of the things you’d hear people say a lot was that there was this, you know, whatever else was going on in Washington, there was this anti-China coalition. Everybody could agree with the fact that China was a threat to US interests and needed to be countered, and it united Democrats and Republicans.
And the sense I got from talking to some of the China hawks was they were beginning to wonder whether they’d got high on their own supply in the sense that, you know, that anti-China coalition seemed to have gone up in a kind of poof of smoke. And I suppose partly that just tells you the grip that Trump himself has on the Washington establishment, both in terms of his instincts, but also the way that he is sort of within the institutions, that what he really wants is, you know, he wants a big deal with China of one form or another, and he wants an end to damaging foreign conflicts. And therefore, China hawks are seen to be a barrier to both of those things.
They’re not in favor of coming to some arrangement, and they are sort of bellicose, and they’re viewed as warmongers amongst the more restraint-oriented side of the Trump coalition. And I think in the face of that, the anti-China coalition has been much less strong than perhaps many of us thought over the last decade.
ERIC OLANDER: Well, that’s a little bit disconcerting if you’re sitting in Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, or Manila, for example, that all have potentially very serious disputes with China and count on U.S. security guarantees to be there, except Taiwan, of course, but if it came to blows with China. So let’s move our journey over to South Korea and to Japan. What’s your take on the stability of the alliance that’s there?
If you’re a Japanese policymaker, do you have questions as to whether or not it’s a good idea to have all of your security investments made with the United States? Or is it time to start thinking about going at your own?
JAMES CRABTREE: So I think there are grave worries about this across the kind of the core allies and partners. So yes, in one way or another, relations with most of the allies, with Japan, with Australia, to the Republic of Korea, with a lesser extent, and to partners like India and Taiwan are all in the worst state they’ve been in for a number of decades, I would say. Certainly, the Biden era was a time in which the United States invested a lot of energy in developing these relationships, and a lot of them have taken a sharp downturn.
I think the challenge that you have, however, if you’re sitting in Japan or South Korea, is you don’t really have another option. So if you’re sitting in Europe, by analogy, so I’m joining you this morning in London, then the challenges that Europeans have with the United States are considerable, and to some degree, it’s very clear that the U.S. is going to be spending less of its time and attention on Europe. But the Europeans have a sort of, you know, they can go it alone.
You know, the rich continent, Russia is an adversary, is less populous, poorer, less technologically advanced. In theory, it should be possible.
ERIC OLANDER: And they make a lot of weapons themselves. I mean, the Swedes, the French, the British.
JAMES CRABTREE: In theory, it should be possible for Europe to achieve a stable balance of power or an advantageous balance of power with Russia over the medium term. That might not happen, but it should be possible. With Japan, the Republic of Korea, and Australia, that’s not possible.
I mean, if the United States somehow decides to renege on its security guarantees, then there’s no balancing coalition in Asia without the United States, which can balance China, you simply have to face up to a future in which China will be the dominant power in the region. And then you have to adapt to that. So I think it’s a pretty complex picture for these countries.
You know, the main strategy that they’re all following is diversification. So they’re trying to do more with each other, as in, you know, Japan wants to do more with India, with the Republic of Korea, with the Europeans. But in the end, that only gets you so far.
I mean, in another one of my pieces, I made an analogy with the movie Moneyball, which I don’t know if you remember, but this is a baseball movie about the Oakland Athletics and the beginning of the movie. The problem that they have is they had a star outfielder called Johnny Damon, who got sold to another team for a huge amount of money. And they were thinking about how on earth do you replace Johnny Damon?
And that the point of the film was that using some wizard statistics, they were able to replace him not by buying one other star player, but by buying a whole range of lesser players, sort of misfits, and they were able to make up what they lost in the aggregate. The problem is geopolitically, I mean, that that’s a bit like the position that you find yourself in with Japan, but you can’t really make up what you’ve lost with the United States. And so you can try and diversify as much as you can.
And you can try and put a floor under your relationship with China. So things are not so tense, but you simply end up in a position in which your net security position is worse than it used to be. And that’s particularly true, as you said, at the beginning with these core sort of alliance security guarantees over trouble spots with China.
So I was in the Philippines last week. And if you’re worried about Second Thomas Shoal or Scarborough Shoal, you know, in the end, the thing that is protecting this is the alliance guarantees and the sort of threat that the United States could get involved. And so if those begin to be watered down, then that’s a very grave challenge for a number of these countries.
ERIC OLANDER: Well, let’s, we’re going to get to the Philippines, but I want to get to Taiwan first. You were recently in Taiwan, and you had a very funny picture with former President Tsai Ing-wen, whom you met with. You know, Trump has been unambiguous on Taiwan.
I mean, anybody in Taipei who thinks that there’s a possibility of support from Trump just hasn’t been paying attention. Even before he took office, he in Fox News interviews said, you know, I don’t think that Taiwan warrants the protection of the United States the same way that Biden committed to. He accuses Taiwan of stealing America’s semiconductor industry.
It’s another one of his freeloaders. Elbridge Colby has been pressuring Taiwan to increase their defense budget to 10 percent. The Taiwan’s government has said that’s just not possible in the current environment.
What’s the mood in Taipei in terms of the United States? They got hit with much higher level tariffs than they thought. They thought they had a special relationship.
Turns out they don’t. Is there a sense that Taiwan may increasingly be on its own?
JAMES CRABTREE: So I think there is worry. There’s a lot of worry about this, on the surface at least. You know, the argument that Taiwan makes is the same.
You know, we are very important to American security. I mean, they say we’re a democracy. Trump doesn’t care about that.
But so in a sense, they then have two resting points, one of which is technological, that Taiwanese semiconductors are essential to the American economy, which is true. And then the second of which is geostrategic, which is that since 1945, the U.S. has viewed Taiwan’s place within the first island chain, the sort of the geography of that part of East Asia as essential to managing the security of the region, and in this case, containing China. And that’s also true.
And so in a sense, I completely agree with you. I mean, everything that you said about Trump is right. He doesn’t instinctively support Taiwan.
He has a grievance. There is a strong risk, I think, that Taiwan could end up in a sort of Zelensky-style situation. Indeed, I joked with former President Tsai that one of the great advantages that Taiwan has is that because the Taiwanese president never meets the U.S. president, then the risk of an overlock is is at least removed to zero. But on the other hand, I’m not sure I’m not as pessimistic. I mean, I think those two points that the Taiwanese make about semiconductors and the geostrategic position of Taiwan are quite powerful. And so even if Trump instinctively sort of isn’t pro-Taiwan and doesn’t feel in the same way that Biden does that they’re, of course, worth supporting, then there is a logic to those two points.
And I think the point is, it’s simply uncertain. You know, you can look at what happens within the U.S. bureaucracy and, you know, whatever Marco Rubio says about Taiwan and Pete Hegseth. And, you know, but ultimately, we just don’t know which way the administration will go until there’s some kind of issue and then it has to go up to the Oval Office.
And then, you know, you can’t tell. Nobody could really tell whether Trump would bomb Iran or not. In the end, he did.
That wasn’t a sign of a president who believed in restraint and removing foreign commitments. If you look at the way that he’s blown hot and cold on Ukraine, I mean, at various points, it seems like he was ready to throw Ukraine under the bus. But at the moment, we’re in a position in which he’s saying the opposite.
So, you know, I think it’s that these countries simply have to cope with a degree of really sharp uncertainty. And you can kind of read the tea leaves a little bit in terms of those around Trump who are critical of Taiwan and his own instincts in interviews and campaign speeches. But, you know, you can never quite tell what will happen until we get there.
ERIC OLANDER: Yeah. But this also touches on the Philippines as well. Remember, a big part of Trump’s coalition is the fact that this is the, you know, MTG, the Margaret Taylor Greene coalition, who’s this nativist who came to office on a premise of no new wars.
And so Iran was a one-off. Trump likes to do that. Remember, he’s done it in Syria.
He likes the rapid in-and-out type of attacks. But if Taiwan were compromised to the point that its sovereignty required outside intervention to protect it, or if the Philippines activated the 1952 Mutual Defense Security Agreement, I’m not convinced that U.S. politics would support going to World War III with China. And that would not be a one-off strike.
If China put a blockade around Taiwan, that would require the full US fleet to intervene. And I’m just not sure the politics are there. And Trump, if anything else, is brilliant at reading the politics of the moment.
And that’s what gives me pause: the security agreements in place may still be effective, even though the US is a different country than it was even five years ago.
JAMES CRABTREE: Again, I agree with that. I think the political barriers are considerable. But again, I mean, I think there is just a degree of uncertainty about all of this, that, you know, you’re going to get fewer reassurances.
And there are stacked up on the other side of the ledger, plenty of reasons why the US might not act, but you’re never going to know until the test comes. And I think what you will see China doing, as you see Russia doing on Europe’s eastern flank, is just gently testing these alliance commitments and seeing where the US is going to come down. I don’t think they’re going to do it at the moment, because both sides are focused on getting this deal over the line and Trump’s potential visit to Beijing.
So I think there will be orders on both sides of the system to, you know, damp down issues that could cause a discord between the US and China, whether that’s over, you know, Second Thomas Shoal in the Philippines, where you have the rusting ship sitting on the atoll, which could be at the kind of instant, which could trigger an alliance request or some of the more aggressive Chinese moves around Taiwan. Until this deal and the visit are through, I suspect we’ll see less of that.
But over time, it’s in China’s interest to, as it has been doing to sort of gently probe around the edges of some of these commitments and see if it can demonstrate that they are actually not as active as people had assumed. And that would send a signal to all of the other allies as well. So I think that that’s definitely the kind of the future that we’re in, probably more likely to see behavior of that kind than some very dramatic Chinese move against Taiwan, in a sense, if it can gently unpick the alliance commitment, so everybody can see that this is not a US administration that is likely to follow through, then that, in a sense, has a kind of destructive power all of its own.
ERIC OLANDER: Well, the place that’s probably going to see that test most visibly, of course, is the Second Thomas Shoal or Scarborough Shoal or the disputed territories in the South China Sea, where the Philippines are pushing back. And also the Chinese have been much more aggressive with the Philippines than other claimants, including Vietnam. You were just in Manila.
What’s the mood there? Do they have confidence in the security agreement, or do they feel that they are going to have to forge a bamboo-style diplomacy like the Vietnamese, where Marcos has been doing deals with the Japanese, with the Vietnamese, with others to broaden the security network beyond just the United States? But what was the mood in Manila when you were there?
JAMES CRABTREE: I would say so far, at least, that the mood in Manila is not as bad as I had feared. So if you look at, you know, you’ve had both the security and the economic side of this relationship. And on the security side, on the economic side, the Philippines had some cause for being unhappy.
They got a 19% tariff, but it was slightly humiliating as Marcos went all the way to Washington and came away with a reduction of a one percentage point. He came from 20 to 19, which you might as well not have bothered. And on the security side, there hasn’t been as much lavish attention to the Philippines as there had been under the previous administration.
But I would say in general, so far, at least, they were still feeling reasonably okay. I mean, Secretary Hegseth came to the Philippines, and there have been lots of repeated statements by US officials that this alliance is an ironclad commitment. That’s the word that people use endlessly.
So that, you know, it might simply be that the kind of pressure that Trump has been putting on the Japanese or the Australians to spend more money hasn’t come yet. And in various different respects, you know, the Philippines, I think, is quite strategically vulnerable, because really, the Philippines care about what the West Philippine Sea and things like Scarborough Shoal, the as yet the Chinese occupied, but as yet unmilitarized little patch of ocean, which is strategically located not far to the west of Manila Bay and Subic Bay, these two deepwater ports. So I think there are definitely risks there in the kind of medium term, as it were, but so far, I got the sense that things were okay. And that amongst the allies and partners, then clearly India and Taiwan have the ones with the most concern and Japan and Australia also have big challenges.
I think so far, at least the Philippines and the Republic of Korea have got off somewhat more lightly, but that may simply be a matter of sequencing as opposed to a matter of preference.
ERIC OLANDER: Well, when we move to the rest of Southeast Asia, the concerns are less about security, which are still very important concerns to be sure, but certainly more economic in trade. The UN Development Program came out with a report saying that US tariffs on Vietnam, which are quite high, I think they’re at the 20% level, are poised to take $25 billion out of their trade balance. That is a rather sizable chunk.
If you were advising General Secretary Tollam or Prime Minister Chin, they said, James, come and tell us, how do we navigate through this world that we’re in right now? What do you say to the Vietnamese who are stuck now in between China and the US on the frontline of this great power competition?
JAMES CRABTREE: I mean, I don’t think I have very much advice to give the Vietnamese on how you sort of perfectly balance between these two sides, because in a sense, they’re the masters at it. I suppose, as I observed in visits to Hanoi, they were very adept at finding ways of, in a sense, moving forward with both sides, doing a comprehensive strategic partnership with one side and then delicately balancing it with another set on the other while diversifying with other countries around the region. I think the basic point is that if you export a lot to the United States, then as is true for Vietnam, but also Malaysia and a handful of other countries around the region, then the current set of policies is very bad for you and you simply have to cope with that.
Actually, China doesn’t solve many of your problems because the challenge that you have with China is that China doesn’t import finished goods in the way that the US does. So you have to try and export more to other advanced markets, but recognize that that growth engine is going to be less powerful. And then you have the continuing problem that the US no longer plays a role in facilitating trade in a meaningful sense.
In fact, the opposite. And therefore, in a kind of broader regulatory sense, this is challenging. But I think, as I say, whether it’s the Philippines or Vietnam, in fact, everybody, what you’re going to see is an attempt to diversify economic relationships and diversify strategic relationships.
It’s really the only thing that you can do, which is to try and create in a sense of what the Biden administration used to call a lattice work, you know, your own stronger set of relationships with a broader and more diverse range of partners in order to try and replace some of what you have lost with the United States. And that is a sensible strategy, but it only gets you so far. I mean, as you said, I saw a lot of that when I was in Manila last week: the Philippines is trying to do more with Australia, Japan, Korea, some Southeast Asian countries, and the Gulf.
And that’s the most sensible approach. It’s what the Indians would call multi-alignment rather than relying on an alliance relationship.
ERIC OLANDER: Well, it’s interesting because here in Vietnam, we’ve just had the visit of the HMS Richmond battleship from the United Kingdom. We also had Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed from Ethiopia in town. We’ve had trade delegations from Germany.
And so I don’t think all of this necessarily would have happened with the same intensity had Trump not kind of taken the table and just turned it upside down. And so a lot of people are now coming to different parts of the world, Africans coming to Southeast Asia, the British and the French looking to this region more and trying to diversify, especially as they try to move away from reliance on China as well. But you’re at the ECFR; the British and the French also have rather large trade deficits with a country like Vietnam.
So Vietnam exporting more to Europe may not solve a problem, but create new problems. What do you talk to Europeans about when they ask about Southeast Asia?
JAMES CRABTREE: Well, I think in general, there’s a double challenge here for Europeans or rather a balance where two effects are going on at the same time. You know, on the one hand, the changing policy of the United States creates an opportunity because the if you’re looking at either rich export markets or rich, capable, technologically advanced security partners, then outside of the US, then a lot of these countries are, you know, the rest of the G7. So the Japanese, the Koreans, but also Turkey, Germany, France, the United Kingdom.
And so that creates an opportunity that the US is kind of giving up market share. And so as Europeans seek to build stronger relationship with fast growing Asian economies, that creates an opportunity, but it creates a challenge as well, which is that because Europe is so tied up with the concept of the old West, as it were, that if countries in the region take the behavior of the United States to be indicative of the West as a whole, not just its relative decline, but its kind of contradictions and double sidedness, or then then that could harm relations with with European countries as well. So I think it’s a moment in which there is an opportunity for Europe to do more with the Indo-Pacific, albeit at a time in which Europe is very focused on the security challenges on its own domestic eastern flank, and therefore the kind of the high watermark of European countries, you know, pre COVID coming and talking about pivoting to the Indo-Pacific and doing a lot more in this part of the world and being meaningful security players that in the aftermath of Ukraine has died down a little bit. And so there’s more realism, I think about the kind of role that European countries can play in the Indo-Pacific, you know, in the same way that countries in Southeast Asia don’t seek to have a meaningful role in Euro-Atlantic security either.
ERIC OLANDER: Yeah, and that’s a perfect segue to the last stop on our journey into India, where you’ve spent a lot of time in your most recent column for the European Council on Foreign Relations is pivot to Europe, India’s backup plan in Trump’s world. So the tensions between the US and India prompted that really quite remarkable photo that or video that we saw in Tianjin, among Putin, Xi and Modi, you say, hold off, this isn’t going to be the honeymoon that a lot of people are saying it’s going to be the China, India tensions will remain despite the fact that Trump is pushing them together a little bit. Let’s get your take on India, Europe, China, the US, Russia, all of it together.
It all kind of comes together in South Asia.
JAMES CRABTREE: Yeah, so the pictures that came out of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit were remarkable. And I think one shouldn’t underplay that you could see in those pictures, the sort of the Eucharist of a new world order, in which Russia, India and China are crucial components in the West to some degree, is sidelined in a way that wouldn’t be true. And we hadn’t seen anything like that for a while.
Neither President Putin or President Xi went to the BRICS Summit, which happened in Brazil a little bit earlier this year. And therefore, this was the first time when you’d really seen that. And the kind of coalition around China over the course of those few days, however, it was quite noticeable that Modi did not then go to the parade in Beijing, where you had the sort of more of the you had Kim Jong Un and Litvinenko, the Belarusian leader.
And so Modi didn’t go to that. And the bigger point is the one that you make, which is that there are structural challenges in the Sino-Indian relationship that are not going to go away on the border in terms of competition in South Asia. And I think unless China changes its behavior very dramatically from one that over the last few decades has caused threat perceptions in India to rise very markedly and driven India’s embrace of not just the United States, but also, you know, a lot of the rest of the West, Europe, Japan, Australia, the same, the quad countries, as part of a broader strategy of multi alignment, unless China changes its behavior, then in a sense, India, continue on that path, all the albeit, noting that it at the moment has a very problematic relationship with the US, because Trump has hit it with very high tariffs and done a lot of other things that have annoyed policymakers in New Delhi. So I think all I was trying to say in that piece is, yes, there is going to be a kind of modest improvement in India, China relations. And yes, it is very powerful to see these pictures of Modi and Putin and see, and yes, the relationship between India and the US is at a very low ebb.
But just be careful in terms of how far that takes you because a large scale rapprochement between India and China is hard to imagine, given the security challenges that the two sides face. And in the end, India and the US, despite the tension under Trump are likely to maintain, you know, a role as very important mutual partners. I think that’s the most likely outcome, albeit with plenty of rough and tumble at the moment.
ERIC OLANDER: So, very quickly, before we go, so your forecast for the future of the US-led quad security partnership is that it will remain intact as is?
JAMES CRABTREE: I don’t know about that, actually. I mean, that’s slightly different. I was talking about the India-US bilateral relationship.
I mean, Trump is sort of instinctively not a multilateralist. So I’m not suggesting the quad will collapse. But at the moment, it looks like Trump isn’t going to go to the quad summit in India, which was scheduled for the end of October.
Now, he can always change his mind and they might, you know, come up with some initial arrangement that justifies going. But principally, what I’m talking about is the India US bilateral arrangement. I mean, I actually don’t think that the quad is likely to be a kind of way in which the US seeks to achieve a range of its aims around the region in the same way that it did in the Biden administration.
That doesn’t mean it’s going to suddenly collapse in a heap, but I think it will be less dynamic under Trump because he is just less interested in multilateral or mini lateral forums. I think the more important question is, where does the US India bilateral relationship go? And are they able to find a way to sort of strike some kind of trade deal?
A lot of that depends on India, I think, in effect, weaning itself off Russian oil, which at the moment is the sticking point. I think India is probably willing to do that, but it might take a little bit of time. And the kind of the politics around that are complicated.
So I think that’s the more important thing rather than the quad.
ERIC OLANDER: Okay, well, James, thank you so much for that journey across the region. We really appreciate your insights from all of these personal interactions you’ve had with key stakeholders is wonderful. James Crabtree is a distinguished visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and also a visiting fellow at the Asia Society.
And I’ll put links to his sub stack and all of his social media that you can follow in the show notes. James, thanks again for joining us. We really appreciate it.
JAMES CRABTREE: Thanks so much, Eric. That’s terrific.
ERIC OLANDER: And that’ll do it for this edition of the China Global South podcast. Once again, really appreciative to James taking time very early in the morning to join us, but to cover the entire region. There’s not a lot of people who can speak with the depth and breadth that James has.
So that was a real treat. And if this is the kind of coverage that you like to follow, then I really recommend you check out the work that the entire China Global South team is doing over at ChinaGlobalSouth.com. And of course, if you’d like to get a daily news brief that goes out to 25 governments, it goes out to 1000s of subscribers every day, then you can go to ChinaGlobalSouth.com slash subscribe. Don’t forget, if you are a student or a teacher, you can get half off just $10 a month. Email me Eric at ChinaGlobalSouth.com. So we’ll be back again next week with another edition of the China Global South podcast for the entire CGSP team around the world.
