Republican Hopefuls Flock to Asia to Burnish Anti-China Creds

For Republican presidential hopefuls, the road to the White House in 2024 goes through Iowa, New Hampshire, and, apparently, the Asia-Pacific.

In the past week, three likely presidential candidates—Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, and former National Security Advisor John Bolton—jetted off to Asia for separate trips that are widely seen as a bid to burnish their foreign-policy credentials and hard-line tack on China ahead of the 2024 election season. 

For China watchers and politicos alike, the trips reflect a new reality in American politics: To get to the top of the pack, you have to be tough on China. It’s a rare bout of concern over foreign-policy issues in political primaries that are nearly always dominated by domestic concerns.

“I think China will play a significant role in 2024, and I think many candidates will be trying to out-hawk each other,” said Carrie Filipetti, executive director of the Vandenberg Coalition, a conservative organization that works with elected officials and political candidates on foreign-policy issues. 

If (most) Democrats and Republicans in Washington agree on one thing these days, it’s that the United States has to take a harder posture on China, boost support for the independently governed island of Taiwan, and prepare for a new era of competition with its top geopolitical competitor in Beijing.

“In part because the American public is so concerned about China, there’s almost a competition underway—at least in Congress—for who can be tougher on China,” said Bonnie Glaser, an expert on the Indo-Pacific region at the German Marshall Fund think tank. “Nobody wants to be seen as soft on China, and so Taiwan is a big part of that.”

That stance is seeping its way into campaign season, with Youngkin’s and Bolton’s separate visits to Taiwan this week and DeSantis’s visit to South Korea and Japan—two of Washington’s most important allies in the Asia-Pacific. Bolton, seen as a long-shot contender for the presidential ticket compared with the front-runners, former President Donald Trump and DeSantis, spent most of his career in the national security space. But DeSantis’s and Youngkin’s jobs as governors are by nature focused much closer to home, giving these trips more political weight if they formally decide to run for president.

Both Republican governors used their visits to deepen ties with Washington’s Asian allies and demonstrate their support for Taiwan, with Youngkin establishing a new Virginia-Taiwan trade office and DeSantis discussing new international trade partnerships for Florida with South Korean and Japanese officials. DeSantis in Tokyo took a hard-line stance on China and underscored the importance of U.S. commitments to Taiwan. 

“[Chinese President] Xi Jinping clearly wants to take Taiwan at some point. He’s got a certain time horizon,” DeSantis told Nikkei Asia, before adding: “Ultimately, what China respects is strength.”

In elections past, presidential front-runners sought to showcase their foreign-policy bona fides with foreign trips but primarily focused on Europe, namely with Barack Obama’s 2008 visit to Germany and Mitt Romney visiting the United Kingdom in 2012. So far, no Republican presidential hopeful has visited Europe in the same context, even with the war raging in Ukraine—perhaps reflecting how Ukraine policy is more controversial among parts of the Republican Party than China.

DeSantis and Youngkin have joined a slew of politicians across the country pushing legislation and executive actions at the state level to counter China’s influence and economic leverage. This includes policies to ban the popular social media app TikTok from state devices, block Chinese companies from buying farmland in their states, and halt joint business ventures between U.S. and Chinese companies. 

“It’s underreported how much governors are responsible for policies that can help improve national security by countering China at the state level,” Filipetti said.

Bolton, meanwhile, is slated to meet with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and address the annual meeting of the World Taiwanese Congress during his weeklong trip to the region.

Taiwanese officials publicly say they welcome the increased attention from Washington. “We respect all kinds of proposals from our friends to increase the defense capability of Taiwan,” Tsai Ming-yen, the director of Taiwan’s top intelligence agency, told Taiwanese lawmakers ahead of Bolton’s visit. 

But the slew of high-profile visits has incensed Beijing and ratcheted up military tensions in the Taiwan Strait, a fact that at times puts Taiwan in a precarious and diplomatically awkward position. In its latest pressure campaign, Beijing deployed dozens of fighter jets and navy vessels by the island early on Friday. In March, a former Trump national security advisor, Robert O’Brien, said during his own visit to Taiwan that arming Taiwanese citizens with AK-47s could help serve as a deterrent.

“I think that Taiwan did not see that as helpful,” said Glaser, who noted that the island has some of the world’s strictest gun laws. “There is a bit of a problem with people who go to Taiwan who really aren’t well prepared. They want to be helpful, but they are not always.”

Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi won rare plaudits from her rival Republican lawmakers last year when she became the second House speaker to visit the self-governed island since 1997. Current House Speaker Kevin McCarthy met Tsai in California earlier this month, as a separate bipartisan delegation of U.S. lawmakers simultaneously visited Taiwan to showcase U.S. support for the island. The United States adheres to the so-called One China policy of maintaining formal diplomatic relations exclusively with Beijing, which views independently governed Taiwan as its own territory. But Democratic and Republican administrations alike have sought to boost U.S. military and political support for Taiwan in recent years, despite lacking formal diplomatic relations. A small number of progressive U.S. lawmakers have voiced fears that this wave of support for Taiwan and increased military support could serve to undermine the One China policy and increase the risk of a war with China over Taiwan. 

Still, the slew of visits to the Asia-Pacific by presidential hopefuls shows that Washington’s increasingly hawkish stance on China is likely here to stay, even with the roiling tensions in the Taiwan Strait and irrespective of who wins the presidency in the 2024 election. 

DeSantis’s and Youngkin’s Asia tours come as American public opinion takes a sharp turn against China. Just 15 percent of Americans hold a favorable opinion of China, according to Gallup, marking the lowest percentage that the polling organization has recorded since it began tracking this opinion in 1979. Americans have also grown increasingly concerned about the security of Taiwan, with the Pew Research Center estimating that almost half of U.S. adults now view China-Taiwan tensions as a “very serious problem.”