Get audio access with any FP subscription. Subscribe Now ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

Get audio access with any FP subscription.

ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

Ongoing reports and analysis

When future historians look back at U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, the Iran debacle will probably feature as a decisive turning point in his presidency. The conflict exposed the limits of American power. It isolated the United States internationally, added inflationary pressures to the world economy, and drove the president’s domestic approval ratings to unprecedented lows just ahead of midterm elections.

But historians may ultimately deem a different development to be far more consequential: the failure of Trump’s China policy. Over the administration’s first year and a half, the United States let its most formidable geopolitical rival gain ground on nearly every front, from the economy and military balance to science, technology, and geopolitical influence.

When future historians look back at U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, the Iran debacle will probably feature as a decisive turning point in his presidency. The conflict exposed the limits of American power. It isolated the United States internationally, added inflationary pressures to the world economy, and drove the president’s domestic approval ratings to unprecedented lows just ahead of midterm elections.

But historians may ultimately deem a different development to be far more consequential: the failure of Trump’s China policy. Over the administration’s first year and a half, the United States let its most formidable geopolitical rival gain ground on nearly every front, from the economy and military balance to science, technology, and geopolitical influence.

China, contrary to much commentary, has little interest in constructing a “Chinese world order” modeled on the postwar Pax Americana. But it is determined to constrain American power, push the United States out of its dominant position in Asia, blunt its financial leverage, weaken Western-oriented international institutions, and discredit its democratic system. Beijing seeks, in other words, to accelerate the historical trend President Xi Jinping has described as the rise of the East and the decline of the West. In less than two years, the Trump administration has done much to bring that outcome closer.

When Xi comes to Washington on Sept. 24, the summit’s pageantry should not obscure the larger picture: how far and how quickly the balance of power has shifted in Beijing’s favor. China has weathered the trade war, narrowed the technology gap, tightened its leverage over critical supply chains, increased pressure on Taiwan, and deepened ties with Russia and much of the global south. It is better positioned relative to the United States than it was when Trump returned to office.

If China has not yet been recognized as Trump’s gravest foreign-policy failure, it likely stems from two main factors: the administration’s lack of clearly articulated goals against which its record can be measured and the long-term nature of the damage incurred. Unlike with Iran, Trump and his administration never articulated a stable hierarchy of objectives toward China. Indeed, the administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy did not identify China as America’s paramount geopolitical competitor. Instead, it framed the China challenge primarily in economic terms, even as other parts of the administration continued to see Beijing as a major military, technological, and security threat. The damage is also harder to grasp because, rather than unfolding in a single, highly visible crisis like Iran, the costs of a failed China policy only emerge over time.

Trump speaks during a campaign stop to address Pennsylvanians concerned about the threat of China to U.S. agriculture at a farm in Smithton, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 23, 2024.Win McNamee/Getty Images

Some failures of the White House’s economic policies toward China are already apparent: The administration has not reduced the trade deficit, it has not significantly lowered U.S. economic vulnerabilities, and it has not prevented Beijing from narrowing the gap in AI competition.

Exhibit one is the trade deficit. Despite long being Trump’s bête noire, the balance of payment has hardly improved. The administration may well claim that “America First Trade Policy is working” and that “China is no longer the trading partner with which the United States has its largest trade deficit.” But, as a recent Peterson Institute study demonstrates, the trade war’s net effect was simply to reroute Chinese exports through third countries, chiefly Vietnam, Taiwan, and Mexico. Weighed against the substantial costs that tariff volatility has imposed on American manufacturers and consumers, Trump’s tariff policy has been a net negative for the U.S. economy.

Second, and more critically, the Trump administration failed to meaningfully reduce the U.S. economy’s supply-chain dependencies on China. This is for rare earths and magnets, the so-called chokepoints that the administration inexplicably failed to anticipate Beijing would use as leverage against Washington’s punitive tariffs. More broadly, though, it is also true for vast swaths of industrial inputs critical to U.S. manufacturing. After threatening to hike up tariffs, for example, the White House was quickly reminded that U.S. farmers’ revenues were to a large extent hostage to Chinese purchases of soy and animal products. As a result, when Beijing retaliated, Trump was forced to reach a truce.

The bigger implications for U.S. economic security are equally significant. Much........

© Foreign Policy