Trump’s China Trap |
In January, after weeks of threats by U.S. President Donald Trump to annex Canada as the “51st state,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, radiating cordiality toward the leaders of a country he had called Canada’s greatest geopolitical threat less than a year earlier. In a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang, he said that “the progress that we have made in the partnership sets us up well for the new world order.” It was not a great moment for the United States. Yet that scene—a leader anxious about Washington, rushing to Beijing with a newfound urgency—has played out again and again since Trump’s return to the White House.
In 2025, the leaders of Australia, France, Georgia, New Zealand, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, and the European Union all traveled to China. In January, the pace of visits accelerated, with the leaders of Finland, Ireland, South Korea, and the United Kingdom arriving in quick succession, followed in February by Uruguay’s president and Germany’s chancellor. In April, Spain’s prime minister cemented the pattern with his fourth visit in four years. They walked red carpets, shook hands with senior Chinese Communist Party officials, and signed memorandums to shore up relations. The accumulating spectacle—what Chinese state media has called a “wave” of visits—reinforced the CCP’s narrative of a rising China and a declining United States.
Now these and other leaders are likely watching with trepidation as Beijing prepares to receive the president of the United States next week. For Canada and other U.S. allies and partners, the primary impetus for deepening ties with China is Trump himself. Under pressure from a United States behaving like a predatory hegemon, these politicians feel that they have no choice but to hedge. Meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping sends a signal to Trump that they have other options and will not be subordinated into all-or-nothing allegiances or unfair trade agreements. In this way, the growing distance between Washington and its partners is a diplomatic gift for Beijing.
But ahead of Trump’s visit, Carney and other leaders have no guarantee that any deals Trump and Xi strike won’t leave them worse off. They cannot trust Trump to consider their interests, so they have to hope that Chinese officials will remember their concerns about China’s manufacturing overproduction, weaponization of trade, and foreign interference and will grant them economic relief in return for their displays of accommodation. Their vulnerability underscores the problem in their collective action on this front and the need for Carney and other leaders to align their China policies and messages, defend common redlines, and collectively impose costs on Beijing for its coercion.
Although the shattered trust between the United States and its allies cannot be quickly restored, Washington can still aid this effort. It may be too late for the Western alliance to forge a truly unified approach to China, but coordination is not out of reach. For his part, Trump should lead by example, eschew the mistakes of other visiting heads of state, and refuse ephemeral deals that deepen the United States’ dependence on China. Rather than seeking superficial adulation from Beijing, he should use the upcoming visit to strengthen deterrence by coordinating in advance with allies and setting redlines that none will cross, signaling he will impose costs for Chinese coercion that targets any of them, and conditioning any concessions on verifiable follow-through. That would diminish Beijing’s confidence in its strategy of compelling accommodation from individual countries.
Trump and subsequent foreign delegations should use each trip to China as an opportunity to demonstrate firmer alignment on positions and interests. Such an approach would create space for the Western alliance to focus on enduring objectives: preserving advanced industrial capacity and a technological advantage, diversifying critical supply chains to eliminate chokepoints, and constraining Beijing’s global influence.
THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS
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