
China’s relative rise or decline during the Second Trump administration will not have much to do with Trump’s policies toward China.
Yes, the incoming administration is loaded with so-called “China Hawks,” such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. We can certainly expect tariffs, export controls, and other methods of economic warfare intended to weaken China in one way or another.
But those policies stem from a deeper Trumpian conviction that all transactions are zero-sum—that another country’s gain is America’s loss. China may be the biggest, baddest foe, but the same impulse that drives Trump’s policies toward China also informs his broader worldview, which treats every country as a competitor and potential adversary. The goal of U.S. foreign policy becomes forcing other countries to submit and accept American dominance, friend and foe alike. International agreements and bilateral arrangements with allies needlessly tie America’s hands.
We saw this on display this weekend, when Trump threatened sanctions and tariffs on Colombia, by far America’s staunchest ally in Latin America, for refusing landing rights to a US military plane of Colombians being deported from the United States. Trump’s response was swift and furious: he threatened individual sanctions against President Gustavo Petro and huge tarifs on Colombian exports. Petro fired back with a lengthy statement laden with his own threats of counter-tariffs. But in the end, Petro relented. The deportation flights to Colombia are resuming.
Trump opted to use the full weight of America’s current economic might to bully a weaker ally, and it worked. We can probably expect similar threats against Panama and Denmark as part of his quixotic (but genuine) attempts to control the Panama Canal and Greenland. And he is doing this all while pulling out of multilateral organizations like the World Health Organization and the internationally popular Paris Agreement.
We’ve seen this movie before. And we know how it ends.
Twenty-five years ago, George W. Bush came to office deeply skeptical of the kind of internationalism practiced by the Clinton administration. When crisis hit, the Bush administration eschewed America’s commitments to multilateralism and treated longstanding American allies with contempt at best—or as potential adversaries at worst.
Though he is very different in tone and style from George W. Bush, Trump shares Bush’s fundamentally misguided worldview: the belief that America is powerful enough to go it alone. This inflated perception of American power set the geopolitical conditions for China’s remarkable ascent in the first decade of the new century. And in the coming years, the same mindset will serve to accelerate China’s position as a global powerhouse capable of challenging the United States across a variety of domains.
The Bush-Era Roots of China’s Rise
Trump has somewhat skewed how we remember George W. Bush, who, despite being an affable fellow, was arguably the worst foreign policy president of the post-war era. He squandered an unprecedented amount of global goodwill for the United States in the wake of the September 11 attacks with the callous and incompetent invasion and occupation of Iraq—which he justified with the giant lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that they just might give to Al Qaeda. (Not only did Iraq not have WMDs, but the idea that they would give them to a group bent on the destruction of Middle Eastern regimes like that of Saddam Hussein was utter nonsense.) Still, a pliable and scared American public went along. Disaster ensued.
George W. Bush and his coterie of hawkish neo-conservative advisers were very, very bad at foreign policy. Iraq is the fiasco that history will remember. But there were many other lowlights. North Korea, for example, became a breakout nuclear power after the Bush administration unilaterally withdrew from the “Six-Party” talks aimed at containing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. The administration also unilaterally withdrew from the (highly successful) anti-ballistic missile treaty. This, predictably, led to a new buildup of Russian ballistic nuclear missile capabilities and is now also influencing China’s rapid nuclear development.
Bush’s foreign policy decisions reflected a go-it-alone approach in which American alliances, international law, and international institutions were treated as an afterthought. This reflected the widespread view among neo-conservatives that, since American might was unrivaled, the U.S. could do whatever it wanted—create its own reality. It was, they believed, America’s moment as an unrivaled superpower. Why not take advantage of it?
The bungled American invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the chaos it unleashed, showed the world that America was not a capable superpower. As Steve Clemons liked to say at the time, the Iraq fiasco “punctured the mystique of American power.” Other global players, including China, realized that America was not the superpower it was cracked up to be.
Then came the 2008 global financial crisis, borne from Wall Street and accelerated by an incompetent Bush administration.
The Global Financial Crisis and China’s Rise
In the two years preceding the 2008 financial crisis, China amassed an enormous trade surplus, equaling 7% of its Gross Domestic Product. It’s worth emphasizing just how huge this surplus is: most economists would agree that a surplus of 2 or 3% is considered “destabilizing” to a country’s economy. But up to and including 2008, China’s huge trade surplus led to the accumulation of massive amounts of official reserves. When the global financial crisis hit, China did what economists would agree is the smart move: Beijing drew down the reserves and undertook a massive domestic stimulus program.
China fared comparatively well during the financial crisis as America languished. That, combined with the fact that unregulated financial shenanigans in New York caused this global crisis led many in Beijing, and the world, to reconsider certain assumptions about American power.
“The global crisis also changed China’s perception of itself and its place in the world economy,” writes economist Barry Naughton in China and the World. “The [global financial crisis] had been created by regulatory and policy failures in the United States—thus greatly impairing the appeal of the US model of the financialized market economy. Moreover, China’s decisive stimulus program was seen to have contributed to managing the fallout from the crisis. Should this not signify that China should and could be bolder in using its newfound strength to achieve both political and economic objectives at home and abroad?”
The answer was a decisive “Yes.” Meanwhile, domestically, this reasoning had the effect of sidelining market-oriented liberals within the party elite, leading to the unquestioned dominance of hardliners like Xi Jinping, who espouse a “socialism with Chinese characteristics” that dominates decision-making today.
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