Has Trump Gone Soft on China?
7 min read
During his term in office, President Donald Trump jettisoned four decades of engagement with Beijing in favor of a more confrontational approach. His policy treated China as a strategic and economic competitor—and it stuck, making China policy one of Trump’s lasting legacies and a rare subject on which Democrats and Republicans now agree.
So it’s striking that this year, campaigning for reelection, Trump appears to be softening his stance. He trots out the old rhetoric—accusing the Chinese of stealing American jobs, taking advantage of the United States, and starting the coronavirus pandemic, which he still calls the “China virus,” for example—but he has also sounded a different note, suggesting that the U.S. needs better relations with Beijing to reduce the threat China poses to international security. Exactly how he intends to achieve this without sacrificing core American interests, he has not made clear.
Trump’s foreign policy tended to be transactional, focused on dealmaking and devoid of guiding strategic principles. During his term, he sought “wins” that allowed him to show off his (supposedly) superior negotiating skill to a domestic audience. With China, that approach led him to focus on a trade war that kept him haggling over tariffs, largely to the exclusion of other important issues. He still brags (and dissembles) about the resulting trade agreement, reached in 2020, describing it as “the best trade deal” ever made, even though Beijing never fulfilled its terms.
Ali Wyne, a senior research and advocacy adviser on U.S.-China relations at International Crisis Group, argues that Trump may have believed that the trade pact was a prelude to a larger, more comprehensive agreement with Beijing that would have settled many contentious matters between the two countries. “Trump still holds out some hope that he might be able to execute some kind of grand bargain,” Wyne told me, “and then claim that ‘look, I was able to achieve a breakthrough in stabilizing the world’s most consequential bilateral relationship that none of my predecessors could.’”
A “grand bargain” with China has obvious appeal. The question is what it would cost. A persistent worry in foreign-policy circles is that Trump will make concessions to Beijing on issues that have been historically crucial to the United States, but about which he personally seems to care little—such as the fate of Taiwan—in exchange for promises on matters he clearly considers more important, such as trade.
Last year, Trump proposed a trade policy that he pledged would “completely eliminate U.S. dependence on China,” which he called “the primary beneficiary of Democrats’ globalist agenda.” During his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday, Trump reiterated his plan to increase tariffs substantially on China, as well as other countries.
Trump has also said that he will restrict Chinese ownership in certain industries in the United States, including medical supplies and natural resources. But whether he would really follow through on this is not obvious. Trump’s big-business backers are themselves beneficiaries of a “globalist agenda,” and they are unlikely to support policies that constrain their access to China’s economy.
The Trump promoter and Tesla founder Elon Musk, for example, has substantial investments in China, which is a major market and manufacturing hub for his electric cars. Musk routinely panders to the Chinese Communist Party and advocates pro-China positions on issues such as Taiwan. If Trump invites Musk to join his second administration, as he has suggested he will, the billionaire entrepreneur would probably not support (or perhaps even want to be associated with) policies that could destabilize the U.S. relationship with China and put Tesla’s share price at risk.
Trump has already reversed course on one high-profile business issue: TikTok. As president in 2020, Trump tried to ban the Chinese social-media platform, which he deemed a threat to American national security. Congress eventually followed through on that policy by passing legislation earlier this year that will shut down TikTok in the U.S. if its Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, fails to sell out to non-Chinese investors. In response, Trump abruptly changed his position and opposed the ban because, he said, it would benefit Facebook.
What prompted this flip-flop is not clear. Perhaps Trump is aiming to woo young voters enamored of the video-swapping app. Critics have speculated that he caved to the financial interests of a major Republican donor, Jeff Yass, whose investment firm, Susquehanna International Group, has holdings in ByteDance. A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not respond to queries about his policy toward TikTok.
Trump appears to be altering his position on China in a much broader way. In his first term, he presented himself as the tough guy who would finally bring those job-swindling Chinese to heel. Now he characterizes China as a threat to the U.S. that he, and only he, can defuse—through a friendlier, or what he might characterize as a more pragmatic, approach.
In an interview with Musk in August, Trump wove a narrative of a world brought to the brink of chaos by what he called a “modern-day axis of evil”—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—and the fumbling response of poor American leadership. Referring to the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, Trump said that “numerous places” across the globe “could end up in a World War III right now for no reason whatsoever.” China, he noted, is expanding its nuclear capabilities: Its stockpile of warheads is far smaller than that of the United States, but “they’re going to catch us sooner than people think.” Even more dangerous is China’s partnership with Russia, which, he argued, Washington should have prevented. Joe Biden and other U.S. presidents “forced Russia and China together,” he told Musk. “If you’re a history student, the first thing you learn is you cannot let Russia and China align.”
Have no fear, however, with Trump at the helm. He said that “if you have a smart president, a president that gets it”—presumably, himself—“we are not in danger from those countries, because they need us and they need our help.” Trump went on to suggest that the United States should forge better relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, whom he described as “lovely individuals” during a rally in Montana last month. To Musk, he touted how well he knew these leaders. “Getting along well with them is a good thing,” he said of the world’s autocrats. Speaking at Mar-a-Lago a few days earlier, Trump specifically mentioned that he and Xi “had a very good relationship,” and he thinks this will prove “mutually beneficial.”
Trump hasn’t explained how he intends to “get along” with Xi, and a spokesperson for his campaign did not respond to questions seeking more information about his proposed relationship with the Chinese leader. But he dropped a hint in the conversation with Musk. When Putin amassed his army on the Ukrainian border in early 2022, Trump assumed “he was doing that to negotiate,” he told Musk. But “then Biden started saying such stupid things”—things that Trump implied may have provoked Putin to invade. (The president’s error, Trump said, was expressing support for Ukraine’s membership in NATO, which Putin opposed. In fact, Washington’s position was that Moscow could not dictate which countries were or were not able to become NATO members.) “That war had zero chance of happening if I were there, zero chance,” Trump contended.
The implication is that Trump would have accommodated Putin and his supposed security concerns. To conclude that he’d do the same for Xi in a similar crisis is not a big leap. And there, the likely theater is Taiwan, which Beijing still claims is an integral part of China. In his speech to the Republican National Convention in July, Trump himself said that China is “circling Taiwan” and that a “growing specter of conflict” shadows the island. If Xi positions an invasion force along the Taiwan Strait, similar to what Putin did with Ukraine, would Trump make concessions to Beijing to avert a conflict? He has already signaled as much with his constant criticism of Taiwan, including false accusations that it has stolen the American chip industry and an assertion that its government should pay the United States for its defense.
Trump, as is so often the case, leaves his intentions ambiguous. But even suggesting that he would appease Putin or Xi on the brink of war is dangerous enough: That prospect could encourage Putin, Xi, and other autocrats to spark crises with the intention of extracting concessions from a president who has already signaled that he won’t fight.
Perhaps Trump believes that he can “get along” with Xi because he shares certain elements of the Chinese leader’s worldview. Xi, like Trump, portrays the current world order as descending into chaos, and himself as the man to fix it. But Xi has outlined a vision for reshaping that world order under China’s leadership and based on Chinese illiberal political principles—whereas Trump has elucidated no such broad agenda to reform or strengthen a U.S.-led global system that he obviously loathes.
Trump wants to wheel and deal, but Xi is plotting and planning. The combination is potentially lethal for American global power.
