By Thérèse Shaheen
Sunday, January 18, 2026
When it comes to China and President Xi Jinping,
President Trump often acts contrary to how he does in other aspects of his
leadership. The penchant for audacity — his decision to remove Nicolás Maduro
from power in Venezuela, his reshaping of the Middle East through pressure,
diplomacy, and military prowess — is missing in the Indo-Pacific. Trump,
seemingly, is leaving it to China to determine the future of the region.
The reluctance to confront Xi is vexing, because despite
all its bluster, Beijing is awed by the resilience of the U.S. economy and
markets, the capabilities of America’s military forces, and America’s continued
dominance of global culture.
The only counter China has is intimidation. Knowing its
own vulnerabilities, the party’s objective in foreign relations has been to
convince others that resistance to its geopolitical agenda is futile. Trump’s
posture toward China and Xi actually helps them with that strategy of
intimidation. His personal flattery of Xi as a great leader, his overstatement
of the warmth that he says exists between them, his erratic policy swings in
which he backs off from tough stances at the slightest hint of Chinese pushback,
his public disparagement of U.S. allies — all of these behaviors help China
convince the world that it is a superpower on par with the United States, and
thus one to be feared and respected.
The U.S. is further diminished when Trump describes Xi as
“strong” or “brilliant.” Beijing’s state propaganda outlets call Trump “China’s
nation builder” because of the way he builds up China’s worldwide image along
the lines the CCP wants. Presumably, Trump engages in such flattery of Xi
because he feels it will set the stage for some kind of comprehensive “deal” on
trade. But this is an enormous gift to China, which is facing significant
structural challenges that the Trump team seems not to consider in its fixation
on trade imbalances.
In reality, China’s economy is quite imbalanced; the PRC
is experiencing production growth without consumption growth and investment
growth without returns. All of this leads to slowing overall GDP growth and
declining household prosperity. Since Covid, U.S. GDP growth has been about
three times China’s, whose GDP as a percentage of U.S. GDP has declined.
Underlying this relative decline, the World Bank and other reliable data show as much as 80 to 95 percent of China’s population
lives on about $30 per day (in terms of purchasing-power parity).
China’s workforce is shrinking at dramatic rates due to a demographic ticking
time bomb whose roots lay in the CCP’s now-abandoned one-child policy.
Unemployment in cities is 20 percent or higher. Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell
have found that poor diet and health in China’s rural areas lead to delays in cognitive development in up to 40 percent
of children. And as many as 700 million working-age people in China have a
grade school education or less.
By these measures, China’s current socio-economic
circumstances are tenuous and its future bleak. Despite this, Trump acts as
though the PRC is an equal, or perhaps even superior, power to the U.S. In an
October 30 post on Truth Social prior to his meeting with Xi in South Korea,
Trump announced that “the G2 will soon be meeting,” clearly implying that the
U.S. and China are peers of comparable standing.
Yet public rhetoric that either excessively praises Xi or
criticizes longstanding U.S. allies are no substitutes for the leverage that
comes from global confidence in America’s predictability and its military,
economic, and allied superiority.
China has adapted to some extent to Trump’s trade war. It
has redirected exports, has deepened state subsidies, and is attempting to wait
out Washington’s inconsistencies. At the same time, allies who would otherwise
be primed to help coordinate a joint pressure campaign are instead alienated by
their own tariff battles with Trump and by broader diplomatic disdain and
indifference emanating from the administration. The prevailing global
perspective is not that China is weak, but that the U.S. is unreliable. This
assessment is especially true in Asia where governments wonder: Will Washington
change its mind tomorrow?
Even America’s closest allies are hedging their bets:
consider Canadian Prime Minister Carney’s recent visit to Beijing, in which he
stood alongside Xi to announce a “new strategic partnership” between the two nations.
All of this is weakening the U.S. deterrent, which
depends on credibility. As a result, China does not need to win arguments or
persuade other countries to join it. China only needs to create doubt about
U.S. staying power.
Nowhere is this dynamic more dangerous than in Taiwan.
Beijing’s strategy to retake the island depends as much on psychological
isolation as on the prospect of kinetic conflict. The most important thing for
the CCP is to make the Taiwanese people feel that U.S. support is conditional,
fickle, and negotiable.
Trump’s record feeds that narrative. Trump often frames
U.S. security commitments to Taiwan as economic bargaining chips, as though
U.S. support for Taiwan rests solely on the bilateral trade relationship.
China’s goal with Taiwan is to convince the world not to
challenge its claims to the island. The last thing China wants is war with
Taiwan. Yes, the PRC is spending heavily on its military, and its construction
of ships and other military technology has outpaced the U.S. Pentagon spending must be increased; we
need more ships, more missiles, more unmanned vehicles, and much else. Even so,
China does not want to put its own untested forces and inexperienced officer
corps — drawn from the same population facing the limitations described earlier
— against the most capable and battle-hardened military in the world, along
with its allies. Furthermore, and perhaps most obviously, Taiwan is of no use
to China if a devastating war leaves it in ruins.
The success of China’s intimidation efforts is not a sign
of Chinese inevitability but of American abdication. Trump’s approach thus far
to China has stripped U.S. power of its most important elements: credibility,
coalition leadership, and moral authority, while amplifying the very traits
that Beijing exploits.
It remains to be seen how the Trump approach to the PRC
will bear out. But U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific are immediate, not
aspirational. Taiwan produces 90 percent of the advanced semiconductors and
other technologies needed to sustain our high-tech economy. Two-thirds of
global trade goes through the region; about a fifth of global maritime trade
transits the Taiwan strait. And major U.S. allies including Japan, South Korea,
Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand depend on those same shipping lanes.
The recent PRC geo-political/military exercise “Justice
Mission 2025” showed how close China is to wrapping things up without firing a
shot. The large scale, multi-domain operation at the end of December was a
comprehensive dry run for invading Taiwan, and included a mock blockade of
Taiwan’s ports along with simulated footage of drones operating deep inside
Taiwan cities. Beijing clearly intends to demonstrate the futility of
opposition.
But the consequences of Chinese hegemony in the region
would be immense and grave. If bullying and intimidation by the PRC continue to
be met with U.S. indifference, Beijing will inevitably begin calling the shots
in ways that the U.S. cannot tolerate. It is not hard to imagine armed conflict
eventually breaking out, the ironic long-term result of a failure to show
resolve now.
The impact of Trump’s weak-on-China policies, if
unchanged, will long outlast the Trump administration. And Americans won’t
forget whose actions caused such damage to both U.S. strategic interests and
global stability.
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