The Trump Administration's Puzzling Strategic Retreat From East Asia
Someone make this make sense to me.
A running theme of Drezner’s World for the past few weeks has been the mystery of the current administration’s approach towards the Pacific Rim. A little more than a month ago I noted,
For China hawks currently serving the Trump administration, this is a moment of severe cognitive dissonance….
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.
Both during and after the Trump-Xi summit, the president seemed more interested in preserving the Sino-American status quo than anything else. This included arming Taiwan, as Trump explicitly characterized a proposed $14 billion arms sale as a “negotiating chip.”
What is striking over the past week is just how much the current administration has prioritized the bilateral Sino-American economic relationship over everything else. Which is not a terribly hawkish position, like, at all.
On trade, for example, Council on Foreign Relations president Mike Froman recapped his conversation with U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer, which included this tidbit:
The administration is going to focus on negotiating pragmatic arrangements with China—through a Board of Trade—about lowering tariffs on a reciprocal bucket of non-strategic goods, and will no longer emphasize trying to get them to modify their economic strategy, despite the risks associated with their imbalances, which has proven difficult to achieve in the past.
This matches what Politico’s Ari Hawkins finds among U.S. businesses keen to expand their China operations:
K Street lobbyists are growing increasingly optimistic that the administration’s vague proposal for a body to oversee trade with China, an idea first teased by U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer in March, could evolve into a major channel for tariff relief between the world’s two largest economies.
It’s the latest signal the administration is pulling back from its all-out trade war on China that occupied much of Trump’s first year in office. Businesses and their lobbyists are now racing to capitalize on that opening.
“It’s pretty clear in our view that the posture in the administration has changed,” said one official from a major industry group, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about private conversations. “There is no longer that push to fundamentally overhaul China’s … economic modus operandi.”
Needless to say this represents a very different approach than Trump’s first term when the goal was to get China to reform its economic model.
To be fair, Froman is correct: these reform efforts have proven exceedingly difficult. A case can be made for lowering the temperature. Maybe one could argue that this is merely an exercise in economic pragmatism. But if China really is the highest strategic priority, then quantitative purchasing agreements seem like a concession to the Chinese way of conducting trade.1
On security, the strategic retreat is even more obvious. The U.S. paused a $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan this past week, infuriating China hawks. Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao claimed this was due to dwindling munitions from the Iran War, though Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth pushed back on that claim.
Hegseth made news in the region with his speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, in which he reiterated that an America First foreign policy means U.S. allies need to engage in self-help:
President Trump is setting the gold standard. We demand 3.5% from our allies and partners, and we are going well beyond that number. We expect every single ally and partner to match that kind of resolve. For those nations that rise to this challenge that embrace responsibility as true partners, the benefits will be clear. As our strategy states, we will prioritize working with model allies those nations who are most capable, clear-eyed and ready to defend their national interests. For those nations, we are moving them to the front of the line, expedited arms sales, deep industrial base collaboration, expanded intelligence sharing, the list goes on that benefits many.
But for those who believe they can continue to free ride on the generosity of the American taxpayer, hear us now. Those days are over. Allies who refuse to step up and carry their own weight for our collective defense will face a clear shift in how we do business. President Trump believes in helping countries that help themselves, and the United States Department of War feels the exact same way. That is the nature of burden sharing.
All well and good — except this message was also paired with mostly silence on China.2 And according to Politico’s Jack Detsch, Hegseth’s speech didn’t go down terribly well with U.S. allies and partners in the region:
The American retreat from the global stage hit home in Asia this week, as the U.S. increasingly demands that regional allies fend for themselves against China’s surging military power.
The shift toward a Trumpian style of arm-twisting diplomacy was laid bare at this year’s IISS Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, traditionally a forum for the U.S. and its partners to air their grievances with China — and project a unified front against Beijing….
[Hegseth] was largely silent on Beijing, only going as far as to validate the region’s “rightful alarm” with China. So American allies kept quiet, too, as they try to forge their own path ahead — and reckon with a future where they can no longer rely on the U.S. for protection against China’s expanding influence.
“It’s a very delicate dance for us and everyone knows it can’t last forever,” said one regional official, who, like others interviewed for this story, was granted anonymity to provide a candid view of the alliance. “Everyone is still giving voice to platitudes of being confident in the U.S. as an ally, but behind closed doors, contemplation of a post-American region has become more serious.”
America’s so-called hub-and-spoke relationship with a handful of treaty allies in Asia has been messy in the best of times. But as delegates crammed into 80 bilateral meetings, they expressed a sense that the world was “fragmenting,” as Italian Adm. Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, NATO’s most senior European military official put it during a panel discussion.
Some allies were desperate to pull the U.S. back into the fold. Koizumi, the Japanese defense chief, publicly urged Hegseth to signal a more solid U.S. commitment to the region after his remarks.
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World confesses to some bafflement about Trump’s evolution of U.S. foreign policy towards China. Maybe it is an example of forging a G-2 entente. That said, U.S. allies in the region have not exactly been free riders in their own security. So it’s not obvious why the U.S. should not act like, you know, a decent ally. Instead countries like Japan are questioning the U.S. commitment to the region.
An intellectually respectable version of Trump’s grand strategy is easy to articulate: the U.S. should retrench from Europe and the Middle East to husband capabilities and focus more on strategically vital areas like the Pacific Rim and the Western hemisphere. But it is difficult not to look at the administration’s multiple quagmires and see more effort being expended on Iran than on China. And there is no version of American grand strategy in which that prioritization makes any sense.
None of this is worth a moderate amount of soybean exports. And yet it feels like that’s exactly how low the Trump administration is selling its strategic equities right now.
Not to mention China is killing the United States at economic engagement with the rest of the world.
Hegseth did say that, “When we look across the region today, there is rightful alarm regarding China's historic military buildup and the expansion of its military activities in the region and beyond.” But he also bragged that, “Under President Trump's leadership, relations between the United States and China are better than they've been in many years…. he United States and China should build a constructive relationship of strategic stability based on fairness and reciprocity.”
I think it's fairly straightforward, and has to do with Trump being who he is, rather than with any vision of strategy that would benefit the USA.
- Trump likes to think of himself as a King. He has no fundamental interest in the future of the USA.
- He is a bully, so he likes to bully those he can.
- He is a coward, so he sucks up to those he considers to be 'strong man' dictators e.g. Putin, Xi.
- He would like to be a 'strong man' dictator: he admires what he imagines those two leaders have constructed in their own countries and has no principled objection to their dictatorships.
- Being an authoritarian populist, he actively - if erratically - hopes to undermine democratic states which, oddly enough, have generally tended to be US allies.
- He is weak, and believes he and the US are not able to stand up to China.
- He is incredibly lazy, and so is not interested in trying to stand up to China.
- He is stupid and incurious and so surrounds himself with people who tell him what he wants to hear, and sidelines those who tell him uncomfortable truths or suggest courses of action which are hard and require effort and diplomacy.
- He is insatiably greedy, and so is always on the lookout to make money for himself and his family, even at the expense of his country.
what is the bafflement? There are 2 likely rationales.
1. He is nuts and is destroying the American Empire. I used to say the GB 2 going into Iraq was the worst policy decision in 50 years. Well Trump 2 is like those videos of controlled explosions that bring tall buildings down only this time its the USA and its post WW II order
or
2. He is the Manchurian Candidate working for some combo of Putin and Xi
please give me an alternative. He is a little like Gollum in LOTR, who went mad also over the ring of power. He seems to have an increasing feed back loop of narcissism and greed that is Epic. epic like the great tales of Greek, Roman, Norse gods. Nero while Rome burns?