Nearly halfway through his second term in office, U.S. President Donald Trump has undercut both the United States’ capacity to protect its interests related to China and its role as a provider of regional security in Asia. His undisciplined approach to dealing with Beijing, in which he has focused on building warm personal ties with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and discounted or ignored longstanding sources of tension between the two countries, has reduced Washington’s leverage to shape the relationship. At the same time, Trump’s sustained attacks on allies and partners have driven them to hedge against the United States and strengthen their ties with China. Beijing, in turn, has successfully cast itself as a steady counterweight to an erratic Washington: in 25 of 36 countries that the Pew Research Center surveyed in the spring of 2026—among them Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and Mexico—more respondents had a favorable view of China than of the United States.
Given the failures of Trump’s second-term strategy, many Democrats and even moderate Republicans may try to strike more hawkish postures on China after the midterm elections and during the 2028 presidential campaign. This temptation is understandable: there is a strong desire to provide a contrast to a flailing approach and correct what Trump has gotten wrong. But succumbing to it would be dangerous. If Congress and future presidential candidates reflexively adopt a more aggressive stance toward China, they could both undercut a future administration’s capacity to preserve vital diplomatic space with Beijing and further disquiet allies and partners that do not want to be trapped in a new twilight struggle. Overcorrecting Trump’s China policy also would be unlikely to help candidates get elected or boost their public profile in the runup to 2028. Recent polling shows that only a small share of Americans in seven battleground states view China as an enemy or consider it to be one of the top threats to U.S. security.
The goal for the next Congress and, eventually, Trump’s successor, should be to prioritize steady competence over performative toughness in dealing with China. Political point scoring and wistful nostalgia for strategies that discount Beijing’s mounting power, and growing domestic support in the United States for great-power calm, would compound Trump’s mistakes rather than mitigate them. A smarter, more coherent China policy—one rooted in disciplined competition with Beijing, patient efforts to build goodwill with anxious allies and partners, and vigorous efforts to refresh the domestic sources of U.S. strength—can make life safer, healthier, and more affordable for Americans.
NEW FRIEND ON THE BLOCK
Trump’s views on China are iconoclastic in Washington, and even at odds with other members of his own administration and party. Whereas most policymakers agree that China is the United States’ foremost strategic competitor, Trump has embraced a narrow conception of competition focused primarily on the size of China’s trade surplus and its export of chemicals used to make fentanyl. He also sees Xi less as a determined geopolitical foe than as a transactional business rival with whom he can negotiate to stabilize bilateral ties.
This judgment—that dealing with China can and should be nonideological and transactional—was also present in Trump’s first term in office. It even survived the COVID-19 pandemic, during which Trump, believing that Xi had exported the virus, empowered senior advisers to implement a hardline approach to China that included challenging the legitimacy of Chinese Communist Party rule and openly calling for political change. But Trump’s core views did not dictate U.S. policy as greatly then as they do now because he had less command over his own administration during his first term and was less dominant over the Republican party writ large.
Trump also has been chastened into a more realistic appreciation of Beijing’s power. China is the only country in the world that stared down Trump’s April 2025 tariff barrage and forced him to retreat. In 2026, Beijing used Washington’s fear of a fresh economic rupture to deter Trump from targeting major Chinese banks as part of his global efforts to squeeze Iran’s economy. Even as the president claims to be ushering in a new era of U.S. dominance, he has had to acknowledge China as a near-peer—a designation that his administration codified in its 2025 National Security Strategy. Similarly, he has touted the prospect of a “G-2” of the United States and China, making allies and partners worry that he is privileging Beijing’s sensitivities over their concerns.
Trump’s mishandling of China policy has opened space for a new strategy.
In some discrete areas, the Trump administration continues to view China through a competitive lens. For example, it is reducing U.S. dependence on Chinese rare-earth exports through initiatives such as Project Vault, an effort to stockpile critical minerals, and pressuring countries to forswear participation in Chinese-led artificial intelligence initiatives. And even as Trump lambastes allies and partners, alleging that they exploit U.S. beneficence, Washington is deepening its security cooperation with treaty allies in Asia, including Australia and the Philippines, and stepping up its training of troops in Taiwan.
Yet on balance, the president has been more conciliatory than competitive toward China. And with his other foreign policy goals—dominating the Western Hemisphere, pushing for regime change in Iran, and ending the war in Ukraine—vying for priority, Trump has devoted far less attention to the world’s most consequential bilateral relationship than many observers had expected when he retook office. His various retreats on China have left the United States worse off: he has undermined Washington’s leverage over Beijing while causing U.S. allies and partners to question whether they should align with a country that prefers a veneer of stability with China to coordinated efforts to address Chinese assertiveness abroad and repression at home.
OVERCORRECTING THE RECORD
Because Trump’s China policy places him at odds with much of the foreign policy bureaucracy and the vast majority of lawmakers, including those within his own party, there will likely be pent-up pressure to resume intense strategic competition with China. Candidates seeking the 2028 presidential nomination, in particular, will be tempted to pledge to take a tougher approach to Beijing, potentially including calls to curtail high-level diplomatic exchanges between U.S. and Chinese officials or adopt more expansive measures to limit China’s technological progress. But attempting to restore or make minor updates to the status quo that existed before Trump’s second term—or to go even further in an effort to project ostensible strength—would be misguided.
Most obvious, the nearly decadelong U.S. effort to slow Chinese innovation through sanctions, tariffs, and export controls is foundering. In AI, for example, Chinese companies are finding workarounds to such efforts and advancing their capabilities alongside those of their U.S. peers. Any sustainable attempt to limit technology access also requires multilateral cooperation; as Washington’s ties with many of its closest allies and partners fray, questions are mounting about whether any coalition can thwart Beijing’s technological strides and would be willing to bear the costs of trying to do so.
At the same time, China is widening its lead in sectors such as electric vehicles, advanced robots, and life sciences. Attempting to construct a technological moat around the United States is unlikely to help it regain its competitiveness. Instead, Washington will need to strike a better balance between mitigating the security risks of Chinese investment and collaboration and securing commercial benefits from Chinese knowledge and industry. The United States could gain from using the same technology transfer practices that China employed against U.S. companies starting in the late 1970s, when Washington led in many cutting-edge technologies. In battery manufacturing, for instance, U.S. firms would benefit from acquiring know-how from their Chinese competitors, and both countries would gain if their laboratories pooled capabilities to accelerate the discovery of cures to diseases such as cancer.
The United States also may not be able to pick up where it left off before Trump retook office because even its well-wishers no longer can treat his foreign policy as an aberration. He won a second term after losing in 2020, and he did so more decisively than in 2016. Although U.S. allies and partners would welcome a more multilateralist administration after Trump, they will find it difficult to overlook the possibility that aggressive unilateralism will periodically shape Washington’s foreign policy. Merely eschewing Trump’s crude bullying will not be enough to rebuild trust; his successor must avoid treating allies and partners as instruments of strategic competition.
Paradoxically, though, Trump’s mishandling of China policy has opened the political space for a new, more durable strategy to emerge. Previously, proponents of sustained high-level diplomacy between the United States and China were often dismissed as shortsighted, Chinese investment in the United States was seen as a Trojan horse, and critiques of zero-sum conceptions of bilateral relations were considered naive. But Trump’s actions have shifted the Overton window of what is possible, creating room for a wider variety of ways to work productively with China.
Both Republican and Democratic members of Congress have gradually resumed bipartisan visits to China. Even Secretary of State Marco Rubio, one of the foremost hawks during his time in the Senate, said in September that it would be “outrageous” for top U.S. and Chinese officials to avoid each other. Respected voices in Washington, including former senior Biden administration officials, are calling for some joint ventures with Chinese companies to help U.S. companies develop. And there is a growing recognition in both Congress and the White House that China’s steady accrual of power necessitates a more focused approach to competition.
There is also public support for a new China policy. Although many policymakers frame relations with Beijing as a competition to be won, most Americans regard it as a reality to be managed. In a July 2025 survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 53 percent of Americans wanted the United States to pursue “friendly cooperation and engagement with China”; it was the first time since 2019 that a majority of respondents had expressed that view. Young people are driving this shift. A January 2026 Pew poll found that only 32 percent of Republicans and ten percent of Democrats between the ages of 18 and 49 called China an enemy, compared with 55 percent and 18 percent, respectively, of those age 50 and older. A March 2026 survey by the Searchlight Institute, a center-left think tank, found that 62 percent of respondents between 18 and 34 wanted the United States to “cooperate with China and improve U.S.-China relations.”
A STEADY HAND
A better China policy will begin by abandoning hollow admonitions to “win” the strategic competition with Beijing. Although China faces numerous internal challenges, including slowing productivity, an aging population, and mounting government debt, it also has powerful advantages, two of which have become undeniable in Trump’s second term: China’s dominance of supply chains that provide vital commodities to Americans and its stranglehold on rare earths that the U.S. automotive industry and defense industrial base need to function.
The next president should neither understate nor exaggerate Beijing’s trajectory; rather, as we have previously argued, Washington should consider it “an enduring yet constrained competitor.” The inescapable reality is that neither country can deliver any knockout blows against the other without doing grievous damage to itself. Both countries will remain interdependent and have to operate with awareness of their vulnerabilities to each other.
If the world’s two foremost powers are fated to compete over the terms of coexistence, they must redouble efforts to avoid a catastrophic confrontation. Washington will have to build trust with rightfully wary allies and partners if it is to shore up deterrence in Asia. It will also have to continue signaling to Beijing a willingness to take reciprocal steps to reduce the risk of incidents that could spiral out of control, such as accidental air or naval collisions. Such signaling will become ever more essential as AI rapidly advances. Protecting the U.S. homeland against AI misuse and misalignment will require Washington to coordinate with Beijing on guardrails for frontier models and reject the argument that such efforts are inimical to securing a decisive strategic advantage over China. The need to work together on AI safety is already shaping U.S.-Chinese relations: at September’s summit between Trump and Xi, the two countries agreed to establish an incident alert system, and many members of Congress have publicly supported broader bilateral efforts with China to reduce the risks of AI-enabled security crises.
Reindustrialization will also be a major project for Trump’s successor. Progress on that front will be essential if the United States is to reduce its vulnerabilities to China and put itself on firmer footing to pursue a favorable coexistence. The next Congress and potential 2028 candidates could outline realistic plans for reducing dependence on China for active pharmaceutical ingredients, rare earths, and potential future chokepoints. They could also prioritize key industries upon which U.S. security depends, such as AI-powered robotics and shipbuilding, and explain how they would deploy funding and talent to those sectors. Elsewhere, with public support for the president’s tariffs sagging, his successor could narrow, place sunset provisions on—or, through executive order, rescind—protectionist policies toward China that lower productivity and increase the costs of inputs for American producers. Such efforts would be broadly politically popular at home and would better position the United States to work with allies and partners to push back on China’s unfair economic practices, including extensive subsidies, undervalued currency, and suppressed domestic demand.
Ultimately, the United States must remember that its external competitiveness will flow from its internal vigor. Leaders in Washington should accordingly embed policy positions on China in a hopeful vision: helping the United States realize its potential as a pluralistic, self-correcting democracy. Framing U.S.-Chinese relations around the United States’ capacity to steer its ties with China in productive directions is more likely to produce a resilient approach than casting Washington as a victim or reasserting a policy framework that no longer meets the moment.
Observers can and should debate specific policy positions vigorously. But another harsh swing in the United States’ approach to China would create more policy instability while also discounting the extent to which Beijing’s rise is transforming the geopolitical balance. Taking advantage of the political space that Trump has generated, however ineptly, the new Congress taking office after the 2026 midterms and presidential aspirants looking to run in 2028 will have an opportunity to present a steadier approach, articulating a clear focus on national renewal and a balanced posture toward Beijing that reflects the mood of the American public. Approaching China’s challenge with this sensibility would not only be more prescriptively sound; it would also be more politically sustainable.
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