A string of recent pieces have suggested that America’s friends in Asia have grown used to President Donald Trump’s tough-love approach and that, perhaps counterintuitively, Vice President Joe Biden has a credibility problem in the region. Biden, they intimate, is too closely associated with the policies of the Obama era, which no longer fit today’s security environment. As such, regional nations expect that Biden would mount inadequate resistance to Chinese expansionism and instead introduce an Obama 2.0 Asia policy.
This argument is wrong. It’s Trump, not Biden, who’s destroyed American standing in Asia, needlessly increased the risks of war in the region, and put the United States in a weaker position to defend American interests as a Pacific power.
