Edward Alden, Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow, joins Yahoo Finance's The First Trade with Alexis Christoforous and Brian Sozzi to discuss how former vice president Joe Biden and President Trump have similar, but differentiating views when it comes to foreign relations.

Video Transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: All right, in just a few hours, Joe Biden will officially accept the nomination to be the Democratic presidential candidate. And it's not clear yet just how much he'll talk about an issue that's fallen to the back burner-- President Trump's trade wars with China, Europe, and pretty much everyone else. With us now is Ted Alden, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He studies trade very much in depth.

Ted, we've heard an intelligence agency say China wants Joe Biden to win. Is that, in fact, true?

EDWARD ALDEN: It may be true on some issues, not particularly true on trade. There's not an awful lot of difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden on trade with China. Both think China's been cheating. Both think China has been stealing US intellectual property. Both want to continue a very kind of strong-armed approach towards China. So from a trade perspective, I don't think the Chinese think they're going to be any better off with Joe Biden than they are with Donald Trump.

BRIAN SOZZI: Ted, can you give us one way Joe Biden would be, let's say, tougher on China than Trump or vice versa?

EDWARD ALDEN: The way he'd be tougher on China is he'd figure out how to cooperate with US allies. The weakest part of the Trump campaign against China has been we've alienated all our allies. We're in a trade war with Europe. We've just put new tariffs on aluminum with Canada. There's been ongoing tensions with Mexico. And the president pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was an alliance of Asian trading partners that would have been kind of a counterweight to China.

I think Biden wants to work much more closely with allies. So you'll have a kind of carrot approach as well as a stick approach, that Biden will be working to line up other allies, kind of alternatives and counterweights to China. That's the biggest difference, I think, between the two of them on trade.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: But Ted, is there a feeling that Trump is just tougher on China, can't be pushed around in a way that, perhaps, some perceive Biden might?

EDWARD ALDEN: I mean, a lot of Trump's toughness is posturing of one sort or another. I mean, he will slap tariffs and then he'll back down. He'll threaten sanctions and then back down. So it's not at all clear that the toughness is really played through in terms of the actions.