Foreign Affairs - What Trump Gets Wrong About China Only a Long-Term Strategy Can Counter the Threat From Beijing - Raja Krishnamoorthi - November 28, 2025

 Foreign  Affairs 

What Trump Gets Wrong About China

Only a Long-Term Strategy Can Counter the Threat From Beijing

Raja Krishnamoorthi

November 28, 2025

Footage of the meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump, Shenzhen, China, October 2025

Tingshu Wang / Reuters

RAJA KRISHNAMOORTHI is a Democratic U.S. Representative from Illinois and the Ranking Member of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.

In October, U.S. President Donald Trump met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in South Korea. According to Trump, the meeting with Xi—his first since returning to office in January—was a “great success,” a “12” out of ten. In reality, it was a defeat. Xi made some commitments to the United States, including a promise to help stem the flow of fentanyl from China. But these gains were achieved at the cost of significant U.S. concessions on export controls, trade, and shipbuilding. Even with Beijing’s dispensations, Chinese markets are less accessible to American producers today than they were just ten months ago. The United States, in other words, is in a less competitive position toward China than it was on January 20.

The reason for this failure is simple: Trump misunderstands the Chinese Communist Party’s ambitions and underestimates its ruthless determination. The president’s constant praise of Xi and insistence on personal diplomacy suggests that he thinks China’s leader merely wants to strike a mutually beneficial trade agreement and stabilize ties. Instead, China wants to surpass the United States as the world’s most powerful and influential country. It wants to promote its own system at the expense of Washington’s open economic model and its vision for the world.

If the United States is serious about besting the CCP, it must start focusing on how to prevail in a long-term competition for both the future of the international system and for its own well-being. That means it needs to invest in its manufacturing capacity, spend on its people, shore up its partnerships, and reinvest in its values. Above all else, it needs to understand what winning the competition actually looks like. The United States will have prevailed against China not when the two countries have no trade imbalance, but when Washington and its allies are so prosperous and strong that they are impervious to the CCP’s military threats, economic coercion, and malign activity.

MONEY FOR NOTHING

When Trump took office, his administration announced it would transform U.S.-Chinese relations. According to senior officials, the White House was going to negotiate structural changes to Beijing’s nonmarket, state-dominated economy by persuading it to rely more on domestic consumer demand to support its manufacturing rather than on exports propped up by unfair trade practices. Yet Trump then launched a trade war it was not prepared to win. He hiked tariffs on Chinese goods to 145 percent, but China quickly retaliated by tightening its controls over rare earth mineral supply chains and slashing purchases of U.S. agricultural goods. The White House responded by suing for peace. As a result, going into last month’s meeting with Xi, senior U.S. officials had dramatically watered down their definition of victory. Triumph no longer entailed reworking the Chinese economy. Instead, it simply required pausing the various economic punishments Beijing and Washington had imposed on each other.

The two leaders did broker an economic cease-fire of sorts, and it will offer Americans some relief. China, for example, will now resume purchasing U.S. soybeans. It will keep exporting critical minerals. But Beijing is still set to purchase less than half of what it bought from American soybean farmers in 2024. And in exchange for these modest concessions, Xi secured two bigger victories: a suspension of U.S. port fees for Chinese ships and fewer export controls on American technology. Xi, in other words, got Trump to delay his efforts to revitalize U.S. shipbuilding and ensured that the subsidiaries of blacklisted Chinese firms can keep importing sophisticated technology. These giveaways also come on top of Trump’s summertime decision to allow sales of various high-performance U.S. chips to China in exchange for a cut of the profits, which will improve Beijing’s artificial intelligence capabilities and power China’s military and technological breakthroughs. The president is now contemplating rolling back export controls for Nvidia’s sophisticated Blackwell computing chips, as well. Trump, in other words, has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to put a price tag on American security concerns.

Trump’s concessions extend beyond economics. The administration has not yet abandoned Taiwan—a longstanding American partner, a vibrant democracy, and an economic powerhouse—but the president has seemed willing to do so. Confidence in the United States among Taiwan’s citizens tanked after Trump compared U.S.-Taiwanese relations to a transactional “insurance policy” whereby Taipei pays Washington for protection, and publicly cast doubt on the American military’s ability to defend the island from a Chinese attack. Over the summer, the Trump administration also delayed a major arms shipment to Taiwan and forbade Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te from stopping over in the United States on his way to other countries, all in order to avoid jeopardizing trade talks with Beijing. Trump may well keep reducing support for Taiwan in the coming months in order to hold his fragile trade truce with China together.

Finally, and perhaps most damagingly, Trump’s clear affinity for Xi could make Americans more sympathetic toward Beijing. The president commands great loyalty among his many supporters, who seem to take many of their cues from his decisions and rhetoric. They surely took notice when Trump welcomed Xi in South Korea as a friend and “great leader” and when, toward the end of his first term, he called Xi an “incredible guy” who “controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.” Trump has even made it harder for other parts of the government to criticize the CCP. Since returning to power, the president has gutted the institutions that called out Beijing for its abuses, including Radio Free Asia and the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. As a result, Trump could lead Americans to think that the Chinese government is something other than a brutal authoritarian regime—and weaken support for the policies needed to defend the United States from Beijing.

PLAY TO WIN

Trump has already pledged to meet with Xi next April in China. If past is prologue, he will probably use this get-together to give Beijing even more of what it wants, again in exchange for little. But there is a better way forward. If Trump is serious about advancing U.S. interests, he should use the next meeting to draw a red line: the United States will not consider any more concessions until Beijing greatly scales back China’s industrial overcapacity and dumping of goods into global markets; theft of U.S. intellectual property; military threats toward Taiwan, the Philippines, and other neighbors; support for Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine; buildup of its nuclear arsenal; and human rights abuses. This behavior is at the core of China’s efforts to supplant the United States. If the two countries are going to strike a lasting deal, Beijing must significantly alter its approach.

Beijing will be extremely reluctant to curb any of this activity. But Washington can increase its leverage and outcompete the CCP over the long term by reinvesting in its own strengths and capabilities. The United States should, for example, urgently expand its production capacity in sectors where it cannot afford to rely on China, such as critical minerals, where Beijing currently possesses a near-monopoly. That means Washington should incentivize U.S. firms to mine and refine more critical minerals at home; it should also work with allies to boost production and invest in new technologies that bypass rare earths entirely. The United States must fend off China’s attempts to monopolize other essential economic sectors, as well—including advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, and clean energy—with targeted tariffs and investments. U.S. officials could even pay for the latter with revenue from the former. Washington, for example, might set up a dedicated new fund derived from tariffs on Chinese imports to invest in domestic manufacturing and other critical industries.

Trump has doomed the United States to passively respond to China’s actions.

As it invests in businesses, Washington must likewise invest in the American people. It should expand trade and technical education, including by reauthorizing and enhancing Trade Adjustment Assistance, which paid for laid-off workers to receive job training tailored for other industries. At the same time, the government should promote policies that protect workers’ right to organize, which has historically been key to a strong U.S. industrial base. The United States should also invest more broadly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. There is no future where Washington bests the CCP without focusing on these fields, especially given that Chinese institutions will award almost twice as many STEM Ph.D.’s this year as American universities will. The Trump administration can improve Washington’s position by spending more on STEM instruction and funding both basic and practical scientific research rather than maintaining the drastic cuts it initiated this year. It must also improve, not dismantle, the U.S. legal immigration system to make sure the world’s best talent continues to flock to U.S. shores and then stays here. Otherwise, the next technological breakthroughs won’t occur in San Francisco and Champaign, but in Shenzhen.

These investments will do much to help Washington close its industrial gap with Beijing and maintain its scientific lead. But there is still only so much the United States can achieve by itself in a competition with a country that has four times as many people. That means Washington must take full advantage of its status as what the historian Stephen Kotkin calls an “alliance superpower” unlike any other in history. The United States and its close partners make up seven of the world’s eight largest economies. This gives Washington an extraordinary asymmetric advantage. Yet Trump is treating allied states as if they were economic competitors little different from China, pushing many to rethink their commitment to U.S. leadership. Trump’s broadsides against India, the United States’ hardest-won partner and the world’s largest country by population, have been particularly destructive. To arrest the damage, the administration must cease its attacks and instead remind these states of the shared challenge their democratic market economies face from Beijing. Washington must work with all of them to create supply chains that are safe from Chinese leverage.

Finally, the United States must protect and elevate its own values: democracy, human rights, and fairness. Doing this means aggressively enforcing trade laws it has adopted to ensure rules-based competition and curtail authoritarian behavior, such as by strengthening enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which keeps clothing, consumer electronics, and other goods made with forced labor by China’s ethnic minorities out of domestic markets. Policymakers must also keep Americans’ personal data safe from the CCP by implementing the 2024 law requiring ByteDance to sever its operational relationship with TikTok, which Trump has refused to follow. Finally, Washington must pass legislation to make sure that regardless of the return on investment, Wall Street cannot funnel Americans’ retirement savings into Chinese companies sanctioned for human rights abuses or for their roles in facilitating the CCP’s military buildup.

A VISION OF VICTORY

Americans are natural competitors who have what it takes to prevail against Beijing. But to do so, they need to know what, exactly, victory will mean, and the Trump administration has consistently muddled its messaging. By focusing overwhelmingly on commerce, Trump has failed to tell Americans that Washington is competing with the CCP over opposing economic models, values, and visions for the world—not just over trade deficits. In doing so, the White House has doomed the United States to passively respond to China’s actions, rather than compete proactively. Put simply, Trump has ceded the initiative to the Chinese party leadership, giving it space to achieve its goals at the expense of U.S. security, prosperity, and influence.

Instead, Washington needs a strategy built around revitalizing domestic production, investing in its people, strengthening its partnerships, and elevating its values. It is the best, and indeed only, way to beat back Beijing, and it will do much to help Americans as the competition unfurls. By following this strategy, the United States can rebuild its working and middle classes and attract the world’s best and brightest people. It can promote a more just and peaceful world. It can prove, as it has time and again, that democracy is better than authoritarianism.

Topics & Regions: United States China Geopolitics U.S. Foreign Policy Donald Trump Administration Xi Jinping U.S.-Chinese Relations

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