Since returning to the White House in January 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump has bullied, scolded, and coerced countries the world over—alienating friends, neighbors, allies, competitors, adversaries, and neutral states alike—with the United States becoming what the scholar Stephen Walt has described in Foreign Affairs as a “predatory hegemon.” Trump’s policies have created a vast global geostrategic vacuum, tailor-made for China to take advantage of by expanding its own presence and influence.
For Chinese strategists and diplomats, however, taking advantage of Washington’s unforced errors has proved easier said than done. China’s opportunities to broaden its global footprint and advance its interests vary by region and by domain, and its track record so far is mixed at best: some advances, some stasis, and some setbacks.
At the moment, all eyes are on the important upcoming summit between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, which will take place in the shadow of the war in Iran. But the future course of the U.S.-Chinese competition will hardly be determined by one meeting. Far more consequential is the fact that for the past year, Trump’s actions and policies have created a golden opportunity for Xi and his government not only to advance their own interests but also to truly tilt the global balance of power.
Yet instead of a strategic windfall for China, what has emerged is something more subtle: all over the world, countries are hedging, seeking to reduce their vulnerability to both China and the United States. This result is a reminder that U.S.-Chinese competition is not zero-sum. One country’s loss is not necessarily the other’s gain. And today, both may be losing global influence at the same time.
CHINA’S LIMITED TOOLKIT
In its geostrategic global competition with the United States, China utilizes a mixture of instruments to expand its footprint and advance its interests. These can be measured in four categories: diplomacy, soft power, military power, and economics.
Diplomatically, China demonstrates an impressive presence and a high level of activity around the world. It has embassies and consulates in 182 countries, and its approximately 5,000 diplomats receive high marks for their knowledge and work. China’s ambassadors normally speak the languages of and give public speeches in the countries where they serve (in contrast with American ambassadors, who rarely do). The overall quantity of bilateral exchanges between China’s senior officials (including the head of state, Xi) and their counterparts is daunting, dwarfing that of the United States. Xi has traveled abroad somewhat less frequently in recent years than earlier in his tenure, but China can also dispatch its premier and four vice premiers, some of its 24 Politburo members, the state councilor for foreign affairs (the veteran diplomat Wang Yi), 26 departmental ministers, and various officials from the International Department of the Chinese Communist Party—all of whom regularly travel the world and receive foreign counterparts in Beijing. The Chinese government is also extremely active in international institutions and multilateral organizations, contrasting sharply with the Trump administration’s unilateral withdrawal from 66 such bodies.
Although China’s diplomatic footprint is broad, it is not necessarily impactful. Beijing is not driving the international diplomatic agenda, and it is not the most influential power in any region of the world. It never gets in the middle of the world’s most troublesome issues or conflicts, and it rarely brokers negotiations between contested parties (as is currently the case with the Iran conflict). Beijing tends to offer anodyne calls for peace and negotiation but rarely forges direct negotiations to truly resolve conflicts. This diplomatic disappearing act is symptomatic of China’s exaggerated sense of its own global power.
All over the world, countries are hedging against both China and the United States.
China’s soft power remains similarly limited, despite Beijing pouring enormous resources (between $10 billion and $20 billion per year) into public diplomacy, global media, and overseas aid programs over the past decade in an effort to improve its poor image abroad. China’s Belt and Road Initiative has been more impactful, yet it too has produced mixed results. Relatively few people pay attention to the public statements of the Chinese government or to the activities of Xi’s many initiatives intended to build China’s influence: the Global Development Initiative, the Global Civilization Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, the Global Governance Initiative, and the Community With a Shared Future for Mankind. Despite such concentrated efforts and expenditures to boost its image, Beijing has received very poor returns on its investments. Over the past decade, according to Pew polls, international views of China have remained predominantly “unfavorable” (54 percent across 24 countries surveyed in 2025). Although pockets of overall “favorable” views exist in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, China’s poll numbers in Europe and the Anglophone world are, in the remaining regions, decidedly mixed at best and distinctly negative at worst.
China’s military power, viewed globally, remains very weak. Despite wielding nuclear weapons, a massive navy, an arsenal of ballistic missiles, cyberweapons, and space capabilities, China lacks the ability to project conventional military power. The People’s Liberation Army, for example, cannot deploy and sustain a brigade (4,500–5,000 soldiers) 1,500 miles outside its borders—much less undertake a multiservice deployment halfway around the world, as the United States is now doing in the Persian Gulf region. The Chinese navy is the largest in the world in terms of surface combatant ships, of which it has 370, in addition to 60 to 70 submarines. But it rarely sails beyond the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean. And whereas the United States possesses 51 formal allies with which it has collective defense treaties and approximately 750 military bases around the world, China has only one treaty ally (North Korea) and maintains just a single military base outside Chinese territory (in Djibouti).
Despite this lack of military strength, China obviously possesses tremendous international economic and commercial power and influence. It has the world’s second-largest GDP ($19.4 trillion in 2025), is the leading trade partner for more than 120 countries, and has amassed a stunning surplus in goods trade of $1.2 trillion in 2025. It has 23 free-trade agreements with 30 countries and regions. China’s overseas direct investment is also increasing rapidly as its multinational corporations have gone global, with 130 appearing on the 2025 Fortune Global 500 list. In 2025, China’s ODI totaled $174 billion, driven by a 17.6 percent surge in investments in countries where it is pursuing infrastructure projects as part of its Belt and Road Initiative.
But even with its impressive economic heft, China’s ability to take advantage of growing animosity to the United States has been limited. What works in some regions does not work as well in others.
CONTINENTAL DRIFT
The limits of China’s influence are perhaps nowhere as apparent as in Europe. Europe today finds itself in the unprecedented position of being caught between three predatory powers—Russia, China, and the United States. The Russian war of aggression against Ukraine has combined with the Trump administration’s generalized antagonism and the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran (which European states do not support), while Europeans have viewed China as a malign economic, ideological, intelligence, and cyberthreat for approximately a decade. As a recent report from the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) put it: “The United States is not only losing credibility in its foreign policy and security guarantees but is increasingly being perceived as a malign actor with behaviors that are distinct from, but occasionally reminiscent of, China’s.”
Even before Trump launched his repeated broadsides against European allies and partners, China was not in a very good position to take advantage. Beijing’s relations with individual European Union member states as well as the European Commission and the European Parliament in Brussels have been tepid at best for several years. Even with non-EU member states in central and southeastern Europe, relations have deteriorated in recent years, and China’s CEEC (China and Central and Eastern European Countries) grouping, launched with fanfare in 2012, has shrunk from 17 to 14 members and is now essentially moribund.
A variety of challenges have made it exceedingly difficult for Beijing to take advantage of the shifting geostrategic landscape in Europe. A major barrier has been China’s close partnership with Russia and its de facto support for Russia’s military aggression; Europeans view Beijing as deeply complicit with Moscow in its war against Ukraine—and possibly in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s predatory designs on the rest of Europe. Beyond this strategic factor, repeated cases of Chinese espionage, cyber-hacking, and influence operations in a number of European countries have further aggravated European views of China.
Added to these irritants is the avalanche of Chinese manufactured goods dumped on European markets, contributing to the hollowing out of a variety of European industries. Deepening deindustrialization has combined with declining sales of European products (primarily German autos) in the Chinese market. In 2025, the EU’s trade deficit with China stood at 359.9 billion euros (around $421 billion). Consequently, a new “China shock” is gripping the continent.
Meanwhile, surreptitious Chinese investments in strategic industrial sectors have set off alarms in Brussels, but absent a binding continent-wide investment screening mechanism, the best the EU has been able to do is offer blandishments about “de-risking.” Meanwhile, the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, agreed in principle in December 2020, has yet to be ratified by the European Parliament, much less implemented. To make matters worse, Europe was flummoxed last year by Beijing’s tactic of cutting off exports of rare-earth minerals and magnets to gain leverage in its trade and tariff war with the Trump administration: losing access to such material could bring some of Europe’s advanced manufacturing (including Airbus and defense industrial firms) to a standstill.
For all of these reasons, China has not been well positioned to take advantage of the Trump administration’s antagonistic attitude and policies toward Europe and NATO. Still, estrangement from Washington has catalyzed a series of European leaders to beat a path to Beijing in search of bilateral trade and investment opportunities and as a hedge against American unpredictability.
SOUTHSIDE OF THE WORLD
China’s six decades of assiduous cultivation of developing countries, combined with Washington’s long-standing relative neglect, has put Beijing in a far better position to take advantage of the Trump administration’s uneven approach to the so-called global South.
Although the Trump administration has prioritized the Western Hemisphere and served notice that it was going to check “non-hemispheric competitors” (read: China), Beijing’s influence is much more significant than Washington realizes. Over the past two decades, China has deeply embedded itself in the economies of the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, becoming Latin America’s second-largest trade partner ($236 billion in 2025). Beyond trade, China has invested an estimated $160 billion in the region since 2010, mainly in mining and energy resources.
China’s best opportunities for supplanting American influence in the developing world during the Trump administration lie in sub-Saharan Africa, where U.S. diplomatic attention has historically been episodic at best, in stark contrast to constant Chinese focus. Beijing has been the region’s largest trading partner for 20 years. Chinese goods dominate most African markets, from cars and machinery to textiles and garments to cellphones and communications equipment.
In the past, Chinese investments in Africa were generally viewed quite positively and seen as providing jobs to locals. But in recent years, a flood of Chinese entrepreneurs, businesspeople, and workers into the continent have displaced African workers and caused growing resentment. There are now around 10,000 Chinese-owned firms operating in Africa, and more than one million Chinese people now reside on the continent. And despite the overall positive impact of long-standing Chinese aid programs, such initiatives have begun to produce skepticism and resentment owing to the influx of Chinese workers and the construction of infrastructure linked to natural resource extraction. As a consequence, a narrative of Chinese neocolonialism has arisen, and African public perceptions of China—for decades the highest in the world—have trended downward in recent years.
CLIENT RELATIONS
In the Middle East, China is hampered by a limited presence and a number of inherited disadvantages. Historically, the conservative, anticommunist monarchies in the region have harbored deep suspicions toward China, and Beijing has maintained shallow ties with almost all of the region’s governments, militaries, and societies (the main exception being Egypt).
Over the past decade, however, China has engaged the region more intensely. One notable success was Beijing’s mediation between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which led to the two countries reestablishing diplomatic relations in March 2023. But the détente between Tehran and Riyadh proved to be hollow; after the United States and Israel launched the war on Iran in February, the Islamic Republic retaliated with strikes on Saudi targets.
China stands to be both a beneficiary and a loser in the current Iran conflict. Once again, Washington has been sucked into hostilities in the Middle East, which means necessarily taking its strategic eye off of China. (A recent Economist cover showed Xi grinning wryly while looking at Trump; “Never Interrupt Your Enemy When He’s Making a Mistake,” the headline read, echoing Napoleon.) This dynamic extends beyond strategic distraction. To fight its latest war in the Middle East, the U.S. military has had to shift substantial forces and munitions from the Northeast Asian theater. Those personnel and materiel were intended to deter China from invading Taiwan—or to use in a war, if deterrence fails.
The downside of the war for China is that its client state, Iran, has been badly battered militarily and economically. Beijing has provided all manner of support for Tehran over the decades. In 2025, China accounted for 22 percent of Iran’s total trade, according to International Monetary Fund data. In 2021, Beijing committed $400 billion in investment to Iran over 25 years. China routinely buys more than 80 percent of Iran’s oil and gas exports, and Beijing has helped Tehran develop its military-industrial complex while evading international sanctions.
Thus, it is no overstatement to say that Beijing has provided the main lifeline for the isolated Iranian regime, military, and society. This dependent relationship will be largely lost for Beijing, even if the regime in Tehran ends up surviving the current conflict. Indeed, if one outcome of the war is an angrier, more self-confident, and more aggressive regime in place in Tehran, that would hardly be conducive to China’s interests in other Gulf states and across the broader Middle East.
THE MASTERS OF HEDGING
Across the vast Indo-Pacific region, Beijing faces various opportunities to capitalize on Trump’s missteps—but as elsewhere, it remains unclear whether China can truly take advantage. India offers the best example. Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs alienated both the Indian government and society, introducing the greatest strains in the relationship in many decades and offering an opportunity to China. But Indian distrust of China runs deep, and Beijing has been unable to capitalize. Meanwhile, other countries in South Asia—Bangladesh, the Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka—have become battlegrounds in the Chinese-Indian regional rivalry, as China has steadily sought to increase its presence and has strengthened its relations with each in recent years.
Farther to the east, Southeast Asia is a region ripe for China to expand its influence at the expense of the United States. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is now China’s largest trading partner (and vice versa), with a stunning $1 trillion in two-way trade in 2025. But as in other parts of the world, Southeast Asia is being flooded with Chinese manufactured goods. Of Beijing’s staggering $1.2 trillion global trade surplus, ASEAN accounts for roughly one-quarter. As the scholars Jessica Liao and Zenel Garcia recently argued in Foreign Affairs, China’s economic behemoth is generating ill will and a potential backlash in the region.
Moreover, China’s Southeast Asian diplomacy is often seen as overbearing and sometimes manipulative, while China’s naval power and its assertive territorial claims to the South China Sea provoke anxiety. Beijing’s covert influence operations in the region’s countries and support for their Chinese diaspora populations also triggers residual suspicions left over from Beijing’s manipulation of these communities during the 1960s and 1970s, when China sought to use them as a fifth column to pressure noncommunist governments.
U.S.-Chinese geostrategic competition is now hardwired into the global system.
Despite these percolating tensions, Beijing is making marginal inroads in ASEAN. An authoritative survey of regional elites conducted earlier this year by the Yusof Ishak Institute of Southeast Asian Studies found that China is now viewed in unprecedentedly positive terms. A strong majority of respondents continue to view China as the most influential economic actor in the region—and for the first time, China edged out the United States when it came to being perceived as the most important political-strategic power in the region.
But Southeast Asian countries and ASEAN have never viewed their relations with the United States and China in binary terms. They are masters at hedging and have always sought to maximize relations with as many powers as possible—a tendency that the veteran Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan has termed “polygamous diplomacy.”
China has also found few opportunities to challenge predominant American influence in Northeast Asia and Australasia. Australia, Japan, and South Korea are strong American allies, and all of them view China with suspicion and have uneasy bilateral relationships with Beijing.
ADVANTAGE CHINA?
If the U.S-Chinese relationship stabilizes as a result of the Trump-Xi summit, many countries would welcome the change, as they have been put in awkward positions and faced pressure to “choose” between Washington and Beijing in recent years. But even though they may find such stabilization reassuring, they will continue to hedge and guard their autonomy because they cannot trust either superpower. Even if the summit produces some stabilization of bilateral ties, the two powers will continue to jostle for influence globally. U.S.-Chinese geostrategic competition is now hardwired into the global system.
If Xi is correct that “the East is rising and the West is declining” and the United States under Trump is losing its previous global primacy, this does not necessarily mean that the international balance of power will decisively shift in China’s favor. China has uneven capacities of power in different categories and in different regions of the world. Moreover, scholars of power—from the sociologist Robert Dahl to the political scientist Joseph Nye—have long argued that the real exercise of power is exercising influence, not necessarily scoring high on metrics of power such as economic and military strength. Nye also argued that power can be exercised through coercion, remuneration, or attraction (soft power).
Even if the United States is in secular global decline and China is rising relatively by comparison, this does not mean that China possesses either the raw power or the influence to overtake Washington. The two countries will remain the world’s dominant nation-states for a long time; no other state (including Russia) or collection of states (such as the EU or ASEAN) will come close to the aggregate strength and influence of the United States and China.
This does not mean, however, that the international system will become bipolar. True bipolarity, as experienced during the Cold War, requires many other states and allies to gravitate toward the predominant powers (for tangible benefits, because of shared values, and for military protection), creating blocs, multilateral alliances, and nonallied alignments. Real powers are like magnets—they attract others toward them.
This remains perhaps China’s greatest weakness: it has no allies, no other countries look to Beijing for military protection, its soft power remains weak and its political system unattractive, its economic prowess is not replicable, and its diplomacy is not very impactful. One can admire China’s many accomplishments, but other countries are not gravitating toward it. China’s many attributes are not seen to be universal (especially its culture and political system), and they do not “travel” well to other societies. Thus, even as American soft power wanes in the Trump era, China remains unable to offer a compelling alternative model to the world.
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