The US Is Giving Its Enemies What They Want
December 18, 2025
One of the most dangerous pitfalls in foreign policy is losing sight of what a determined adversary seeks. The US is committing that error today. America’s rivals, China and Russia, are aggressively attacking US influence and prosperity. Their ultimate aim is to make today’s sole superpower an isolated, second-tier state.
Donald Trump, in his first term, declared that the US had entered an era of great-power competition. He seems set on obscuring that reality in his second.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine isn’t merely about control of the Donbas region. It is a struggle against the larger Western community that, in Putin’s view, reduced Russia to an imperial has-been after the Cold War.
Accordingly, even as Putin batters Ukraine, he wages hybrid warfare — drone incursions, political subversion, sabotage — against America’s European allies. Russian-backed operatives have reportedly targeted America’s critical infrastructure, including water systems and meat-packing plants, and sought to blow up aircraft headed for the US.
These are potentially deadly attacks, with a deadly serious purpose: Putin’s aim is to weaken and bloody his superpower rival, while undercutting the alliance that gives the US transatlantic reach and strength. As Putin’s diplomatic henchman, Sergei Lavrov, explained nearly a decade ago, Russia seeks a “post-West world order,” one in which US global power is broken and Russia’s imperial greatness is restored.
Xi Jinping, China’s supreme leader, plays for even higher stakes. In 2017, Xi threw off the mask of Chinese restraint by declaring that his country would henceforth “take center stage in the world.” Today, propaganda outlets proudly assert Beijing’s desire to reclaim its place atop the global hierarchy.
China’s challenge is most advanced in the Western Pacific, where a relentless military buildup is designed to make Washington a minor power in the world’s most dynamic region. But Xi’s ambitions don’t stop there.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative is intended to spread infrastructure and Chinese influence across Eurasia. Predatory economic policies threaten to deindustrialize rival powers from the US to Germany, and make them suppliers of raw materials and energy in a system in which Beijing dominates vital industries.
Xi’s ever-expanding array of global initiatives herald an era in which China sets the rules and American influence is eventually relegated to the Western Hemisphere. In the future Xi envisions, the US will ultimately eke out a diminished existence on the margins of a Sino-centric world.
Trump warned us about all this in his first term. His National Security Strategy, released in 2017, stated plainly that “China and Russia want to shape a world antithetical to US values and interests.” That document spurred tougher policies, including nearly a decade of full-spectrum competition with China.
Yet Trump’s transactional instincts always clashed with this turn toward strategic rivalry. Now, in his second term, a less-restrained president — backed by a thoroughly MAGA administration — is pursuing a different agenda.
Trump seems intent on imposing a bad peace on Ukraine, an outcome that would empower both Russia and China, given the extent to which Beijing has backed Moscow. His administration depicts itself as a mediator between Europe and Russia — between an alliance that amplifies American power and a revisionist state that loathes it.
Trump has opted to sell China advanced semiconductors that could help it leap ahead in artificial intelligence. His pursuit of a trade deal with Beijing seems to have dulled his administration’s competitive instincts.
Notably absent from Trump’s second National Security Strategy, released earlier this month, is any clear articulation of the Chinese and Russian threats. America’s real enemies, that document suggests, are European allies and globalist elites.
This intellectual confusion is accompanied by delusion: the belief that commercial ties, rather than robust competitive policies, can ensure the peace. Trump argues that Ukraine’s security is best guaranteed through trade and development projects that give Washington, Moscow and Kyiv a shared stake in stability and prosperity. The administration has revived the notion that technological entanglement with China will bring geopolitical stability and US advantage. It’s an old, discredited idea, which Trump himself once usefully discarded.
In the 18th century, Enlightenment thinkers argued that commerce was eliminating conquest; this was just before the wars of the French Revolution engulfed Europe. In the run-up to World War I, British author Norman Angell famously claimed that what we would now call globalization had made great-power war obsolete. After the Cold War, US officials hoped that economic integration would reconcile Russia and China to American primacy — only to discover that ambitious revisionist powers value geopolitical dominance more than financial gain.
The assumption that interdependence brings harmony had structured US policy for a generation, Trump’s first National Security Strategy observed: “For the most part, this premise turned out to be false.”
Trump ended this earlier era of strategic complacency, which makes it more disappointing that his administration is now downplaying threats that have only intensified since. Second terms are supposed to build on the achievements of first terms. Yet Trump seems poised to destroy the most constructive legacy of his first presidency — the achievement of crucial, invigorating strategic clarity regarding what America’s rivals are fundamentally about.
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