Fear and Loathing Among the China Hawks
Imagine having to defend this administration's foreign policy as tough on China.
Last week I travelled to Washington, DC for a trade policy confab, which was notable for the actual attendance of Trump administration officials. They were certainly entertaining. One high-ranking Trump official repeatedly scolded his European counterparts for demonstrating insufficient zeal in reducing their economic dependence on China. And to be fair the Trump official had half a point. It is certainly true, as the Financial Times’ Alan Beattie has noted, that Europeans have had their issues with segmenting their economy from China.
Of course, so has the United States. It’s worth remembering that during the Great Trade Wars of 2025, the Trump administration backed down super-quick in response to Chinese trade threats. And while European officials in attendance largely (and probably wisely) decided to refrain from pushing back directly at the U.S. official, I felt no such compunction.
I asked why the Trump administration seemed so much more eager to pressure European allies than pressure China when it came to trade. And the Trump official — who had repeatedly stated that he was sticking to facts rather than emotions — got rather emotional and defensive in his response. He insisted that Trump had been really, really tough on China. His primary piece of evidence was that his Chinese counterpart told him he had been a tough negotiator.
Needless to say, it was an unconvincing response.
After the event, a former Trump administration official came up to me and explained the outsized response: for China hawks currently serving the Trump administration, this is a moment of severe cognitive dissonance.
That former Trump official ain’t wrong. Trump’s first term was marked by a dramatic ratcheting up of trade tensions with China. The trade war did not accomplish a whole lot — but one can acknowledge that Trump was onto something in identifying the threat that China’s foreign economic policy posed for the United States and its allies and partners. Of all of Trump’s foreign policy beliefs, his hawkishness towards China might have caused the biggest shift within the U.S, foreign policy community
With Trump’s second term, a lot of China hawks joined, surely convinced that they could articulate and implement a grand strategy that de-emphasized the European and Middle Eastern regions in favor of prioritizing the Pacific Rim. Indeed, this was Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby’s worldview — and his attempt to implement it led some folks to fret that he was exercising too much control over U.S. foreign policy.
That fear turned out to be spectacularly wrong. But it’s worse than that. In 2025 China hawks could semi-plausibly claim that Trump was simply rightsizing U.S. strategic priorities to allow for a greater focus on China. In 2026, that dog won’t hunt. Indeed, ever since he launched the war with Iran, Trump has been noticeably reticent in critiquing the PRC, despite multiple, ongoing reports that China is aiding Iran militarily.
These days — well, let’s just say that the tweet below resonated a whole lot within the U.S. foreign policy community:1
Earlier this month Politico’s Diana Nerozzi and Megan Messerly noted that Trump seemed to be doing everything in his power not to get tough on China:
The Trump administration is filled with China hawks who have spent the first 15 months in office pushing for a harder break with Beijing. But what President Donald Trump wants from his trip to China next month isn’t a confrontation — it’s a win.
It’s a goal so important to the president that administration officials are under orders not to rock the boat with China, especially ahead of the trip. Two officials are enforcing that edict: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, according to a former Trump official and another person familiar with the dynamic, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, according to a China analyst and a person close to the White House, all granted anonymity to discuss the matter candidly….
“The U.S. bureaucracy is very much under orders from the president not to disrupt this truce that they’re in” since Trump met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea in late October, the former Trump official said. “They’re all walking on eggshells. Bessent is effectively the one who has to enforce the truce.”
Bessent has focused on notching economic wins, including offering Beijing a path to a “big deal” if it agreed to rebalance its economy — in contrast to top officials like White House trade adviser Peter Navarro and Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby, who have historically pushed for a more aggressive and urgent posture toward China.
Imagine the difficulty China hawks must be having reconciling their vision of U.S. grand strategy and the clusterfuck that is Trump’s actual grand strategy. Because the latter has been a strategic boondoggle for the People’s Republic of China and a disaster for the United States.
