In the year since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, China hawks have started to panic. Leading lights on U.S. policy toward Beijing now warn that Trump is “barreling toward a bad bargain” with the Chinese Communist Party. Matthew Pottinger, a key architect of Trump’s China policy in his first term, argues that the president has put Beijing in a “sweet spot” through his “baffling” policy decisions.
Even some congressional Republicans have criticized Trump’s approach, particularly following his decision in December to allow the sale of powerful Nvidia artificial intelligence chips to China. “The CCP will use these highly advanced chips to strengthen its military capabilities and totalitarian surveillance,” argued Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich., who chairs the influential Select Committee on Competition With China.
From this wave of criticism, a mainstream narrative has started to emerge: By pursuing deals with Beijing, Trump is abandoning the bipartisan consensus on China that he ushered in during his first term. The president, in other words, has gone soft on China.
The president is pursuing a realist, if disorganized, approach to Beijing.
But the reality is more complex than this narrative claims. A close examination of Trump’s second-term policies toward China suggests that the president is pursuing a realist, if disorganized, approach to Beijing, according to realist foreign policy analysts who spoke with Responsible Statecraft. This may include some uncomfortable concessions, like reducing restrictions on AI chip sales and softening rhetoric about protecting Taiwan. But it doesn’t mean that Trump is poised to surrender Asia to Beijing’s sphere of influence, as some hawks now fear.
The reasons for this apparent shift are varied. Part of it comes down to Trump’s long-standing preference for making deals, as well as his seeming respect for China’s economic dynamism. But another factor is a genuine change in geopolitical reality. China has amassed significant leverage over the U.S., and the Trump administration has chosen to accept that fact.
By recognizing this reality, Trump has created an opportunity to pursue useful compromises with Beijing — and reduce the chances of a catastrophic conflict. “We’re talking about two nuclear superpowers,” said Lyle Goldstein, the director of the Asia program at the Defense Priorities think tank. “We want more interdependence, not less.”
Hawks off to a rocky start
When Trump started his second term, he seemed ready to double down on a hawkish approach to China. Days after taking office, the president imposed a 10% tariff on Chinese goods, which by April had ballooned to 145%.
But then, something remarkable happened: China called Trump’s bluff. Chinese officials announced that they would restrict the export to the U.S. of rare earth minerals, which are crucial for making most modern technology. Soon, American executives started calling Trump in a panic, warning that the new Chinese restrictions would force them to shut down factories, as Ford and Suzuki soon did.
“That might have been a very powerful lesson for the president,” Goldstein said. Trump seemed to be relying on advisers who believed the U.S. had “all the leverage” in the relationship with China, and that Beijing would fold under pressure. “I have to believe that the president started to have some doubts about the China advice he was getting,” Goldstein told RS.
Soon after, the president began to reshape his foreign policy team. Trump sidelined hawks like former National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and his deputy, Alex Wong. And, as part of his overall restructuring of the national security bureaucracy, he fired career China hands on the National Security Council and at the State Department.
“I have to believe that the president started to have some doubts about the China advice he was getting.”
This recalibration appears to have empowered realist thinkers in Trump’s orbit. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby survived the culling and now argues that the U.S. must avoid “needless confrontation” and pursue a “stable, peaceful relationship” with China. Andy Baker, who is considered an ideological ally of Colby’s, took Wong’s place on the National Security Council. Andrew Byers, who wrote in 2024 that the U.S. should pursue a carefully calibrated “cold peace” with China, has maintained an influential role as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia.
With this restructured team in place, Trump has pursued a less confrontational approach. He announced that he would allow Nvidia to sell high-quality (albeit not top-of-the-line) AI chips to Chinese companies, so long as the U.S. government got a cut of the profits. The White House also slow-rolled a forced sale of TikTok and walked back its threat to cancel visas for Chinese students studying at American universities, which many hawks consider a national security threat. And Trump started hyping the possibility of a “big deal” with Beijing.
China hardliners have interpreted these moves as a willingness to sell out key U.S. interests in East Asia. But their fears are overstated, according to John Mearsheimer, a prominent realist scholar at the University of Chicago. Trump “is bent on containing China,” he told RS. “That means he does not want China to dominate East Asia.”
As evidence of this commitment, Mearsheimer pointed to Trump’s National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, both of which highlight the administration’s desire to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, even if they focus first on U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere. Trump is using “less confrontational rhetoric, which I believe is all for the good,” Mearsheimer added. “But if you look at the actual policy, nothing of any significance has changed.” (As Goldstein noted, Trump has not made any significant changes to America’s military posture in East Asia, which is largely designed to contain Chinese ambitions in the region.)
Still, there is little doubt that Republican hawks are struggling to gain sway with Trump in his second term, said Paul Heer, the former lead U.S. intelligence officer for East Asia. As Heer put it, hardliners “have no idea yet, one year in, how strong their voice is within this administration.”
A not-so-grand bargain
China hawks have framed Trump’s willingness to deal with Beijing as evidence that he is pursuing a sort of grand bargain. In the worst case, they fear that the administration will abandon Taiwan in order to facilitate a broader detente with China. These concerns have only increased in the lead-up to Trump’s expected meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in April.
But there is scant evidence that such a deal is in the offing. As Heer pointed out, a grand bargain would require extraordinary levels of patience and persistence — two qualities that few would ascribe to Trump.
There is scant evidence that such a deal is in the offing.
There is also a genuine divergence in American and Chinese interests in East Asia, which makes any sort of lasting detente unlikely, according to Mearsheimer. “If I were the national security adviser in Beijing, I would urge Xi Jinping to do everything he can to dominate East Asia,” he said.
“Any sort of cooperative agreements that are worked out between Xi and Trump are certainly all for the good,” Mearsheimer continued. “But you always want to remember that any cooperative agreement takes place in the shadow of an intense security competition between these two states.”
Even these limited deals can deliver concrete wins for U.S. interests. Following the Trump-Xi meeting in October of last year, for example, China agreed to crack down on the export of precursor chemicals that Mexican cartels use to make fentanyl. A continued cooling of tensions could open a path to deals that increase trade opportunities for American companies and expand channels for communication during potential crises.
In order to facilitate this cold peace, Goldstein recommended that Trump and Xi should establish a regular series of meetings in which they can discuss key issues. “This summit that’s occurring in April is long overdue,” he said. “We should institutionalize a bilateral summit. This should be a very normal thing.”
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