Is Trump Forgetting About War With China? w/ Ali Wyne and Dan Grazier

Trip the Beltway Fantastic With Kelley Vlahos and Friends

As the West focuses on and indulges Israel’s wars in the Middle East, U.S. security policy toward China, supposedly the ‘pacing threat’ , seems neglected. Is that such a bad thing?

One of the most interesting threads to come out of the last six months of new Trump foreign policy is that China has not been the focus, other than a tariff war which as of this writing, does not appear to have blown up in the catastrophic ways predicted in the press, at least not yet. While Trump has been perceived as “bullying” other countries into not doing business with Beijing, the U.S. and China last week came to an important trade agreement aimed at deescalating the tensions.

What has been missing is the escalation on the security front. Aside from boilerplate pronouncements by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth that China may be an imminent threat to Taiwan and ongoing efforts to rally allies and partners in the region like the Philippines and Pacific Islands to the cause of playing hedge against Beijing, there seems to be a lagging interest in picking a fight with China on that level today.

One could say the administration has its hands full with Ukraine and the Middle East. The first Trump administration identified China as the “pacing threat” and began to shift all of the resources and energy of the military industrial complex in that direction. Realists now in the administration, like Elbridge Colby, now Undersecretary for Policy Planning at the DoD, have charged that the U.S. must extricate from the Ukraine War to focus on maintaining our interests in the Indo Pacific.

So what happened? And more importantly, have the events of the last several months, including the decision to bomb Iran, changed the dynamics of the U.S. posture in other parts of the world, and, just as importantly, how China views the Trump administration strategically? Much has been written on trying to assess the impact of the Ukraine War on China’s calculations vis–a-vis the U.S. — so what is Xi Jinping thinking today?

We talk to two informed analysts on this topic: Ali Wyne, Senior Research and Advocacy Adviser, U.S.-China, at the International Crisis Group, also author of America’s Great-Power Opportunity, and Dan Grazier, director of the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center.

More from Wyne:

Three Potential Pitfalls of Trump’s Approach to China

Debating Whether China Is Getting Stronger or Weaker Won’t Make U.S. Policy More Sound

More from Grazier:

Taiwan Up Close: Why Geography Complicates Invasion

Why US shipbuilding is the worst and more money won't save it