Rush Doshi
Predicting the incoming Trump administration’s China policy—and China’s likely response—is a guessing game. In his first term, President Donald Trump’s transactional approach often differed from his team’s competitive approach. Those contrasting impulses will define his second term. But despite the uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration’s approach, the central challenge it faces is clear: positioning the United States to outcompete China as a critical window in the competition begins to close.
Early in the Biden administration, senior officials gathered together, read the intelligence, and concluded that the 2020s would be the decisive decade in U.S. competition with China. Without corrective action, the United States faced a growing risk of being surpassed by China technologically, dependent on it economically, and defeated militarily in the South China Sea or Taiwan Strait.
The new Trump team will take the United States through the second half of the decisive decade. There is much to be done. Trump’s national security picks, particularly Mike Waltz as national security adviser, Marco Rubio as secretary of state, and Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the United Nations, understand the task ahead and have views consistent with a growing bipartisan consensus on the need to outcompete China. Their most significant obstacle in carrying out a competitive approach may be Trump’s own penchant for deal-making, transactionalism, and flattery toward President Xi Jinping, which sometimes undercut his staff’s more hard-line approaches, including the expansion of export controls and a vocal defense of human rights, among other measures, the first time around.
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