Trump Can’t Lead America to Compete with China
Surrender and isolationism are not strategies for great-power competition.
IF TRUMPIAN FOREIGN POLICY ever had a core insight, it was its focus on America’s geopolitical rivalry with China, which has since gone mainstream. From the Center for American Progress to the Heritage Foundation, much of Washington now shares concerns about Beijing’s expansionism, aggressive posture, and willingness to weaponize economic interdependencies to its own advantage.
The problem, should former president Trump return to the White House, is that his own instincts and policies all but guarantee that China will emerge emboldened, not weakened, in the era of great power competition.
Some of the latest evidence of Trump’s gelatinous determination to confront China is his take on banning TikTok: Doing so is a bad idea, he thinks, if it strengthens domestic platforms that he dislikes. (His particular distaste for Instagram, owned by Facebook parent company Meta, is likely because it temporarily banned him after he attempted a coup.)
Trump’s opposition to immigration is a more enduring sign of his unseriousness regarding China. America’s ability to attract international talent is key to keeping our intellectual, economic, and technological competitive edge. Denials of petitions for high-skilled H-1B visas skyrocketed under Trump’s presidency, and mobile, highly educated workers started looking elsewhere for opportunities.
Even more worryingly, Trump’s trade policies, promising an across-the-board, 10 percent tariff, imposed presumably on economies without an explicit free trade agreement with the United States, would set in motion a trade war with America’s European allies—the very countries with which we most need to cooperate to respond to China’s economic and trade practices.
Moreover, allowing Vladimir Putin to dismember Ukraine by ending U.S. assistance—as Viktor Orbán reports Trump is committed to do—would signal indifference to Europe’s security (as if that signal needed any more amplification), which Europeans would have no choice but to reciprocate.
The European Union is a $24-trillion economy triangulating uncomfortably between America’s technological domination and its dependence on China both for manufacturing and as a market for its own exports. It took a significant effort to peel Italy away from the Belt and Road Initiative; it could still rejoin. Without trade and investment links with China, Germany’s economic model faces an uncertain future. Returning Trump’s pugilism and his disdain for Europe to the White House will make it politically impossible for Europeans to work with Washington even in areas where such cooperation is eminently in their own interest.
If America abandons Europe, Europeans won’t bother participating in an international coalition to deter China’s takeover of Taiwan. Our staying power is already being questioned as it is—from Afghanistan to Ukraine, we have an excess of “fatigue” and a dearth of determination to stick with our strategic goals.
It’s been hard enough for Europe and the United States to sustain the current sanctions against Russia, with consumer goods and dual-use technologies flowing to Russia through Kazakhstan, Armenia, and the United Arab Emirates, just to name a few routes. A Trump administration would be completely powerless to impose similar restrictions against China in the face of a reluctant, distrustful EU.
It is no coincidence that the European countries most eager to cultivate their transatlantic bond—Lithuania and the Czech Republic, most notably—are also the leading China hawks on the continent. That is an asset for any U.S. administration seeking to incentivize Europeans to reduce their economic and technological ties to Russia and China.
For all the talk about shared values, decisions made in Vilnius and Prague do not primarily reflect some metaphysical bond with Taipei or empathy with the suffering of the people of Xinjiang. Rather, they are products of a rational calculus that sees Washington as the guarantor of Eastern Europe’s security. Take that guarantee away, and much of the eagerness to confront China disappears.
“America First,” Trump famously said in Davos in 2018, “does not mean America alone.” Yet the consistent application of a Trumpian foreign policy, treating alliances and partnerships as purely instrumental and transactional, reveals that Trump’s distinction lacks a difference. In practice, Trump’s foreign policy has been a boon to America’s enemies and adversaries and a terror to our allies. It squanders America’s central geopolitical advantage in its struggle against China’s rise to global dominance: our ability to turn foes into friends. Far from placing the rivalry with China center stage, Trump’s return to the White House would risk obviating the issue in the decisive, final way that only surrender can.
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