President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20 with a pledge to help America “win like never before.” Winning the competition with China will be key to achieving that outcome.
Outcompeting China requires a mixture of creative policymaking, hard-nosed geopolitical posturing, and high-stakes engagement that Trump is uniquely qualified to lead.
His strong mandate and unorthodox style give him a degree of political capital and policy creativity few of his predecessors possessed. By engaging China smartly, he can ensure that, for once, Washington and not Beijing sets the terms of the bilateral relationship.
The president faces a worthy opponent in China’s Xi Jinping. China has spent the past year preparing for Trump’s return.
Xi and his foreign policy team have dealt with the president before and think they know what makes him tick. Their plan involves more than just retaliating against U.S. actions through counter-tariffs and bans of critical mineral exports. They will go all-out to seize the initiative, just as they successfully did with previous administrations.
The task of Trump and his team is to not get outmaneuvered.
When Chinese interlocutors are asked how Beijing plans to handle the Trump administration, they often smirk and say “negotiation.” Indeed, China has perfected the art of tying U.S. administrations down in endless talks for the purpose of slowing or weakening action that complicates Beijing’s objectives on the world stage.
Some in China think Trump will be an easy target for this tactic, given the president’s reputation as a dealmaker, but they will likely be disappointed. The president may be eager to talk with Xi, but he won’t be easily manipulated.
And after China’s failure to comply with the trade deal negotiated during Trump’s first administration, it’s even less likely Beijing can sway him through promises of agricultural purchases or high-profile business deals.
However, China’s strategy is more sophisticated than that.
Beijing’s success at handicapping previous U.S. administrations rested on hypnotizing presidents by promising to cooperate in areas the president viewed as high priorities.
With an agreement seemingly always around the corner, yet never quite final, those administrations went out of their way to avoid antagonizing China for fear of derailing the negotiation process and jeopardizing months or years of hard work.
During the Biden administration, the issue of choice was climate change. While it’s hard to know the reasoning behind some of the administration’s choices, some of its behavior gave the impression that Biden weakened his approach to China in order to ensure climate talks would continue.
With Trump back in the White House, the climate card has lost its luster, but Beijing is already shifting its attention toward issues of great importance to the new president, such as the fentanyl crisis and the war in Ukraine. These are not issues Xi loses much sleep over, but Trump is committed to resolving them, and a resolution will be much easier to achieve with China’s help.
On the Ukraine war, Trump’s efforts to convince Xi to help resolve the conflict represent an opportunity the Chinese leader is unlikely to squander. Xi cannot force Russian President Vladimir Putin to withdraw his troops from Ukraine, but he can offer to work with Trump on giving the Russian president and his Ukrainian counterpart the pressure and assurances needed to bring them to the bargaining table.
From that angle, Beijing cares little whether the war is resolved. As long as peace talks—or the sense of progress toward such talks—continue, Beijing will seek to use its involvement as leverage to soften the administration’s approach to China.
Beijing’s cooperation is even more essential for ending the fentanyl crisis. China has thus far failed to crack down on its outflows of precursor chemicals, likely because it wants to use the possibility of such cooperation as leverage in high-stakes negotiations with the U.S.
China will seek to tie its cooperation on those issues to U.S. concessions in areas such as technology and trade that are important to Beijing. At the very least, it will try to use the promise of assistance on those priority issues to entice the Trump administration to delay or weaken important policy actions that complicates China’s revisionist aims.
The president must learn from the failures of previous administrations and not take the bait.
That isn’t to say Trump shouldn’t talk with China. He just should remember who holds the upper hand. As much leverage as Beijing expects to have due to the fentanyl and Ukraine crises, it can’t keep its economy afloat and its citizens employed without access to America’s technology, markets, and financial system.
To take away such access completely is akin to a nuclear option that shouldn’t be considered lightly. But an administration that understands the extent of its leverage has many tools not only to shield itself from China’s manipulation, but to outfox Beijing.
If Trump plays his hand wisely, China will be the one making concessions to keep the U.S. at the negotiating table.
The president is off to a good start. His plan to tariff Chinese imports in response to Beijing’s failure to curb fentanyl exports shows he understands the power disparity. He just has to stay focused and not succumb to China’s cunning efforts to shake him from the course he’s on.
This article was originally published at www.dailysignal.com
