President-elect Donald Trump has been talking tough about China for years. He hates China’s enormous trade surplus with the U.S., and who can blame him? There is no doubt China’s President Xi Jinping has done all he can to guarantee China reaps multi-billions in exports to the U.S., producing the goods with cheap labor while violating or circumventing rules and regulations.

All told, these transgressions would seem to justify Trump's threat to impose a 60 percent tariff on imports from China — a quantum leap above the 10 percent jump that Trump proposes on imports from much of the rest of the world. The Chinese will scream, U.S.-Chinese relations will grow ever-more tense, and we will wonder how China will retaliate.

The obvious way would be for China to enhance ties with countries from Africa to the Middle East to South and Central Asia to Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Critical to China’s ever-growing presence is the Belt and Road Initiative that has provided the framework for aggressive Chinese expansionism with military as well as economic implications. Nowhere is the initiative so dramatic as in the construction of a highway across the high Himalayas into Pakistan, winding up at the Arabian Sea port of Gwadar, built and financed by China.

Trump’s incoming foreign policy and defense team, largely untested, might respond with promises to challenge China more or less as the Biden administration has been doing. Optics, however, may be a cover for give and take, for compromise; no one knows for sure. At least one wild card may provide the ultimate evidence of Trump’s determination to thwart China’s exploitation of the........

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