The Free and Open Indo-Pacific Beyond 2020: Similarities and Differences between the Trump Administration and a Democrat White House

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Towards the end of the previous decade, the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS) became part of common parlance in American opinion pages. For supporters of Donald Trump, the term refers to a tendency by progressive elites and media organizations to view everything the President does as destructive to American leadership and institutions because these elites and organizations have never come to terms with the victory of Donald Trump over Hilary Clinton in the 2017 presidential elections. For detractors of the President, TDS represents an outrageous coinage by Trump's supporters to deflect what are legitimate and serious charges against the President's exercise of his powers.

The temptation to treat the Trump's administration's policies as being irretrievably tied to the character and whims of America's historically most unconventional commander-in-chief is strong, the embedded implication being that a different President in the White House will lead to a very different suite of external policies.

However, allowing TDS to define what American approaches to regional policy might look like over the next four years—with or in the absence of a change of administration—would be a mistake. To be sure, every President has their own idiosyncrasies, the current one more than others, while every administration has their own approach. But overemphasis on the uniqueness of Trump is the wrong place to begin. Some aspects of his presidency might well be an aberration but many more are not, either because the current administration represents an evolution or synthesis in pre-existing thinking or else because Trump has deeply changed the policy dial on many issues. Getting the balance of factors and mindsets right is crucial when it comes to understanding the future of frameworks such as the Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) and the grouping of the United States, Japan, India and Australia known as the Quad.

This article does not attempt to predict specific policies that a secondterm Trump administration or a first-term Democrat one will pursue. Specific policies are mostly shaped by empirical events and by the responses of senior individuals in the administration. Especially in the case of a possible Democrat White House, it is impossible to know these factors ahead of time.