(WSJ) – The White House’s new national-security strategy signals a softer approach to competition with Beijing, playing down ideological differences between the two superpowers and marking a break from years in which China was singled out as posing the U.S.’s greatest challenge.
On Friday, the Trump administration released a much-anticipated, 30-page document that sets out Washington’s foreignpolicy priorities. The paper harshly criticizes the U.S.’s traditional allies in Europe, while emphasizing the overriding importance of the Americas in the White House’s “America First” approach.
Under the Biden administration, China was explicitly named as the U.S.’s primary foreign-policy challenge. That administration was especially vocal in its support for Taiwan, the self-ruling island that Beijing has pledged to take by force, if necessary.
The new national-security strategy maintains the language of “strategic competition” when discussing Taiwan’s status and calls for working more closely with partners and allies in the Pacific to deter any attempt to seize Taiwan.
But the document also plays down ideological differences between the U.S. and China, instead placing economics andtrade front and center in the relationship.
It names China only a handful of times—almost exclusively in terms of the economic relationship. It makes other indirect references to the country, for instance mentioning unnamed competitors to the U.S. from outside the Western Hemisphere.
Most notably for Beijing, the White House document drops the Biden administration’s declaration that the U.S. does “not support Taiwan independence.” And while it signals general continuity with Biden’s opposition to “unilateral changes to the status quo from either side,” it softens that language somewhat to a statement that it “does not sup-port any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.”
Taken together, the new document represents what Beijing’s leaders are likely to see as “a relatively favorable turn in U.S. grand strategy,” said Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor of China studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
Weiss pointed in particular to the fact that the strategy document doesn’t name China as the U.S.’s greatest challenge, as the Biden White House did in 2022.
“Beijing treats every written American commitment as a negotiating floor,” said Ryan Fedasiuk, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. The national-security strategy, he said, “establishes the baseline from which Beijing negotiates, and the baseline just moved.”
Fedasiuk said that what he regards as a tempering of the U.S. stance—from one that “opposes” unilateral changes to the status quo over Taiwan during the Biden years to one in which the U.S. merely “does not support” any unilateral change in the new Trump document—will be cheered in Beijing.
“Beijing will pocket this concession and use it as the starting point for the next negotiation and ask for even greater flexibility,” said Fedasiuk.
The new strategy document eschews Biden’s favored language of maintaining a “rulesbased” international order—a term that appeared no fewer than eight times in the 2022 paper. The phrase appears just once this time, with a tone of derision, to slam what the Trump White House calls the failures of Biden-era policies.
