With the U.S. elections in the spotlight, the international community is examining the foreign policy scenarios that the U.S. will follow the next day. GeoTrends spoke with geopolitical strategist John Sitilides. Principal at Trilogy Advisors in Washington D.C. explains that if Kamala Harris is elected her administration may follow the same foreign policy path as her predecessor Joe Biden, while if Donald Trump takes office, he will likely adopt a more aggressive stance, using tariffs as a negotiating tool, but selectively targeting industries linked to U.S. national security and economic interests. Mr. Sitilides stresses that Trump will focus on protecting US industries from China’s trade practices.
Turning to Europe and focusing on the issue of energy and material independence, Sitilides stresses that Europe has paid a heavy price with its energy dependence on Russia’s authoritarian regime, and even with the transition to green energy that Europe is currently focusing on, Sitilides explains that China produces most of the infrastructure components and this “Gordian knot” will be a challenge that Europe will have to face in the coming years.
– Mr. Sitilides, how do you think the outcome of the upcoming elections will affect the development of U.S.-China relations?
We do not really detect a major foreign policy deviation by the Kamala Harris campaign from what has been the Joe Biden foreign policy of almost four years. So, if we go simply by what she has said or what’s on her website, the sense is that will largely see a continuation of Joe Biden’s policies in that regard. In the topic of U.S.-China relations, under President Trump, we have both his four-year record as president to look at as a precedent and also what he has been quite explicit about in the last several years.
Therefore, on the one hand, under a Kamala Harris administration, we will see a continuity, but if we have a Trump administration, probably we will see a ramping up of tariffs, maybe not necessarily across the board. A lot of Trump’s rhetoric is ultimately to be deployed for negotiating purposes, so he may say he is going to impose tariffs across the board, but I am not sure if there’s a pronounced American economic interest in tariffs on Chinese t-shirts or eating utensils or blankets and furniture.
However, I do believe when they are involving industries that are of national security concern to the United States or of health-related regarding the well-being of the American people, and also major industries like steel, and automotive, where they directly affect manufacturing jobs in the United States, yes I think there will be a serious turn towards protecting American industry from Chinese violations of the World Trade Organization subsidies, dumping intellectual property theft, coerced technology transfers, all of the measures that the Chinese Communist Party has used to grow its economy by an astonishing 1,000% over the last 20 years.
– The war in Ukraine forced Europe to partial energy independence from Russia, do you think the same should happen with Iran and later with China, where on the one hand Iran supplies energy to certain countries and on the other hand China is the main producer of cheap products? Essentially a complete disconnection from countries that are not part of the Western bloc?
Both of these fields are going to involve a much more sophisticated measure of planning for economic integration and, for that matter, disintegration in the future as it pertains to Europe. First of all, I would like to believe that European leaders starting in Berlin, London, and other countries in Western Europe, have understood how utterly foolish it is to pursue these overly ambitious utopian net zero goals by 2035 and 2050.
The laws of physics and the laws of economics do not care one bit about politicians’ dreams, and the idea that a country like Germany would unwittingly but deliberately de-industrialize what used to be the economic powerhouse of the European Union and move away from oil and gas and nuclear power to weather dependent, unreliable wind and solar, to the degree where now it has to excavate from beneath an entire German village to extract lignite, the dirtiest form of coal, to provide energy baseload for what used to be the most powerful economy in the EU.
I should say, that Europe’s deindustrialization demonstrates the foolishness of becoming energy-dependent for its economy on a hostile authoritarian regime, and that is Russia. Now the German people are paying for it. And probably you will have the same development take place in the United Kingdom, which sits on top of vast gas shale gas reserves, and instead is banning the extraction of those gas reserves and building wind turbines in the North Sea. So now the British people are paying skyrocketing electricity prices, and you have European leaders who are impoverishing their citizens in pursuit of foolish net zero ambitions.
Again, energy realism requires being as energy-independent and resilient as possible or securing your energy supplies from allies and reliable partners. That is going to be the essence of Europe’s independent future
Now a country like Iran, most of its oil and gas exports go to countries like China, India, and Turkey and China and India will probably show very little interest in abiding by American or European wishes that they reduce the purchase of Iranian oil and gas. As a matter of fact, the reason Iran has been able to enrich its national budget by 80 to $100 billion over the last three and a half years is that China has been willing to purchase oil at significant discount prices from Iran, and the US has refused to sanction China because the sanctions are not on Iran, but they are on the purchasers of Iranian oil and gas.
Speaking of renewable power, now American and European wind and solar panel infrastructure builders have to buy all of their components, or most of them from China. That is something we have to think very hard about because to what degree do, we want to see Europe and America becoming dependent on a hostile authoritarian regime, like the Communist Party of China?
Additionally, we see that the European Union has imposed significant tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles because there is no European company that can compete with $15,000 or €20,000 electric vehicles built with extreme subsidies by the Chinese government. So, in some areas, you will have a reorganization of supply chains linking Europe to China, while in other areas, I think you will have a relatively freer market where those consumer products and electronic products provide substantial savings for everyday EU citizens.
– Moving away from the trade war and the energy competition to the technological competition. Should the United States and Europe focus on decoupling from China in these areas while investing more in smart machine-learning technologies?
My sense is they will probably have no choice but to do so to the best of their ability. This will not just involve the EU and the US, but also our key East Asian allies at the cutting edge of technology, for example, Taiwan for the world’s most advanced semiconductors, at least for as long as Taiwan can be independent of China, Japan, South Korea, and the Southeast Asian tiger countries.
However, you should keep in mind that two major initiatives were launched in Beijing by XI Jinping, the first in 2015 called “Made in China 2025,” where the Chinese Communist Party openly declared its intention to become a major global player and believed would dominate the 21st-century global economy. And so now we are looking at artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, synthetic biology, aerospace, renewable energy, and electric vehicles, where they are about to become the world’s leading manufacturer and exporter.
The second initiative is called “China Standards 2035,” under which China seeks to have Chinese norms, values, platforms, and standards dominate the global interoperability of these hardware and software systems. And the reason this is important, beyond sort of efficiency and profitability, is really because we have to think about what kind of a world we will be living in 2045 and 2050.
– With the war in Israel and Ukraine, what role do you think Europe and other allies like Greece play in the U.S. security doctrine? For example, we see Greece expanding its activity on the northern border with its base in Alexandroupolis and the movement of U.S. forces through it to the north.
Greece has proven to be one of the most valuable allies in the entire NATO alliance. The same applies to the United States and its relationship with Greece, especially with the establishment of the strategic dialogue between the US and Greece that was begun under the Trump administration and carried forward under the Biden administration. And we are very confident we will move forward to even greater heights under either a Kamala Harris or Donald Trump administration. And along the same parallel lines, we envision a similar situation for Cyprus, given the strategic dialogue that has just been initiated.
I must say that with the opening of Alexandroupolis as a key energy, transport, military, and logistics hub, connecting the Aegean Sea deep into the Balkans and up into Central and Eastern Europe we have now created a fortification of a NATO frontier with Russia and Belarus that anchors Greece all the way up to Poland and the Baltic countries and the Baltic Sea in ways that very few of us would have imagined as recently as a half-decade ago.
Now we see a tremendous opportunity for Greece in a northerly direction to become the anchor for security, energy infrastructure, transportation, and logistics. But I would say also from a maritime perspective because that really is the strategic strength that Greece brings to the NATO alliance.
Moreover, we have Greece’s potential to serve as an energy hub, given its connections to Israel and Cyprus, not only in terms of electricity interconnectors, but potentially if the exclusive economic zones can ever be established, to be able to extract natural gas, either in the Ionian Sea south of Crete in the Cretan Sea, or even in this disputed area with Turkey south of Kastellorizo and also potentially to see a renewal of private sector interest in the Israel-Cyprus-Greece gas corridor, which unfortunately the Biden administration in 2022 withdrew official Washington support from which I think was a grave error.
My view is, to let the private sector decide whether or not this is a project that, technologically and from an engineering and gas volume perspective, deserves to be built. But the government should not be getting in the way of these types of vital new infrastructure projects, especially if it is in Europe’s long-term interest to continue to be weaned from dependence on Russian gas. And then lastly, I would say that Greece is a dominant NATO maritime power in the Eastern Mediterranean and should be working closely with both Israel and Egypt to provide more secure shipping lanes, to protect shipping against terrorism and piracy. So, Greece has multiple opportunities to further anchor itself as a strategic partner of the United States, the European Union, Gulf Arab countries, Israel, and India in so many ways. Therefore, I think the future is extraordinarily bright and promising with wise and visionary leadership in Athens and beyond.