China and Trump’s Business-first Framework |
Foreign Policy > China
China and Trump’s Business-first Framework
The post-World War II order treated the world as a chessboard of fixed spheres. Trump’s business-first diplomacy treats it as a balance sheet where every aggressive move carries an immediate debit.
Monty Donohew | May 16, 2026
President Trump’s Beijing summit will yield trade wins and corporate commitments. More profoundly, it quietly demonstrates how business-first diplomacy can neutralize the world’s most dangerous flashpoints. Trump is deploying economic interdependence to erect a modern security architecture far more robust than anything the post-World War II order ever delivered.
Consider Taiwan and the contested islands in the East and South China Seas, the Senkakus, Scarborough Shoal, the Spratlys. For decades these have been tinderboxes where geography dictated the rules: lines on a map, naval patrols, and mutual defense treaties meant to contain aggression within defined theaters. Diplomacy yielded words on paper and promises. If history teaches anything, it is that fear and/or self-interest render these words powerless. China’s military buildup and gray-zone tactics have tested these lines relentlessly.
Yet under Trump’s corporate playbook, the same Abraham Accords model scaled for great-power rivalry, these disputes are shifting from zero-sum territorial clashes to calculations of mutual economic pain.
Cooperative nations bound by broad interdependence simply cannot afford reckless unilateral hostility. When American CEOs from Tesla, Nvidia, Boeing, and BlackRock sit across from Chinese counterparts negotiating supply chains, semiconductor frameworks, aircraft orders, rare earth flows, and agricultural purchases, the stakes transcend any single island chain. A Chinese move on Taiwan or escalation around the Senkakus wouldn’t just trigger military responses, it would detonate trillions in intertwined markets, factories, patents, and capital flows. Beijing’s own export machine, tech ambitions, and energy imports would........