AEI (American Enterprise Institute) Four Fatal Problems in the New US Approach to China Hal Brands Author Senior Fellow Date February 06, 2026 Publisher Op-Ed | Bloomberg Opinion Category Foreign and Defense Policy

 AEI (American  Enterprise  Institute)

Four Fatal Problems in the New US Approach to China

Hal Brands

Author

Senior Fellow

Date

February 06, 2026

Publisher

Op-Ed | Bloomberg Opinion

Category

Foreign and Defense Policy

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Tumult over Venezuela, Iran and Greenland has captured the headlines in 2026. But the US-China rivalry is still the central challenge for American statecraft and the central cleavage in world affairs.

Wednesday’s phone call between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping marks the start of a year of intense diplomacy between the two leaders, with potential meetings in Beijing, Washington and other locales. The coming months will show whether Trump can hold that dialogue together without letting America’s competitive position come apart.

In 2025, Sino-American relations started with a shootout and ended with a ceasefire. Trump blasted away with his Liberation Day tariffs; Beijing shot back with retaliatory levies and rare-earth export controls. The on-again, off-again trade fight ended with a truce in October, when the two leaders met in South Korea. But not before Trump began rolling back America’s export controls on semiconductors, giving much of the world the impression that Washington, not Beijing, had blinked.

In theory, US strategy in 2026 will blend hard and soft. Administration officials privately argue that Trump will use personal diplomacy to keep the relationship steady, buying time to fortify rare-earth supply chains. US-China decoupling may be coming, but preferably on America’s timeline and terms.

Washington will lower the rhetorical temperature on Taiwan and other Pacific hot spots, while simultaneously securing big increases in military spending by allies, approving record arms deals with Taiwan, and otherwise strengthening the US position.

Selling advanced semiconductors, US officials claim, can enhance America’s leverage by keeping China hooked. Doing so will also reduce the risk that a US tech squeeze provokes a premature military confrontation. Administration insiders argue that the US has been in danger of repeating the mistakes of 1941 — when it sought to strangle Japan economically with an oil embargo before the US fleet was fit to fight.

That strategy has its logic. America has too long overdone the posturing on Taiwan and human rights issues, while Washington and its allies have underdone the military investments needed to ensure their own defense. If the US has entered a moment of relative weakness, because of China’s export controls and relentless military buildup, better to speak softly while building a bigger stick.

Trump’s recent critical minerals initiatives — government investment in mining companies, the creation of a new strategic stockpile, a bevy of partnerships with partners and allies — create a path, albeit a long one, to greater industrial security. And although personal diplomacy won’t transform an antagonistic relationship, it can help ensure that sensitive messages reach a cloistered Xi.

Probe deeper, however, and four potentially fatal liabilities emerge.

First, while Trump’s approach seems cohesive in theory, it has puzzling inconsistencies in practice. If the US is girding for conflict, it is madness to sell advanced Nvidia H200 chips that the Chinese military might use to fight American troops. If those chips help China accelerate its artificial intelligence build-out by breaking competitive bottlenecks, it will undermine an asymmetric US advantage.

This hard-soft strategy may simply reflect different factions of Trump’s court pushing contradictory agendas — while a transactional president focuses on selling high-tech exports and taking the government’s cut.

Second, long-developing dangers won’t be vanquished soon. Trump’s critical minerals deals are promising, but will likely take years to meaningfully reduce dependence on China. Even then, other debilitating dependencies may persist — on Chinese pharmaceutical ingredients, for instance. Beijing won’t just watch while the US builds its muscles. It may threaten to renew the rare-earths chokehold if Trump doesn’t further slash export controls or pause arms sales to Taiwan.

Third, Trump’s approach risks leaving allies and partners in the cold. The administration deserves real credit for raising military ambitions in Taipei, Tokyo and Seoul. But the Pentagon’s intense focus on the D-Day scenario — a full-on invasion of Taiwan — unnerves Taiwanese leaders who worry that creeping, everyday coercion will progressively erode the island’s sovereignty and the population’s will to resist.

Trump’s team has given Japan only tepid public support after its prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, earned Beijing’s ire by doing exactly what the Pentagon had wanted: clarifying Tokyo’s intent to resist Chinese aggression against Taiwan. Looking beyond Asia, Trump’s unilateral, protectionist impulses have hampered the global democratic cooperation needed to confront China’s economic scale.

Finally, it’s unclear whether Trump’s other global crises will strengthen or weaken his position with Beijing. Snatching Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was a body blow to Chinese influence in Latin America; smashing Iran again might cripple Beijing’s strategic partner in the Middle East. Focusing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Arctic security might, one day, help blunt Beijing’s push through the High North.

For now, however, Trump’s threat to appropriate Greenland from Denmark produced a pointless, counterproductive rift in the transatlantic alliance. And the more the Pentagon focuses on rogue states, the less bandwidth there is for great-power rivals: The aircraft carrier strike group that is now menacing Iran was pulled from the South China Sea.

Trump’s foreign policy is tricky to analyze because the public buffoonery sometimes masks more incisive intent. In his first term, Trump originated the US shift toward competition with China. This year will reveal whether he has a strategy for winning that competition, now that it has gotten tough.