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Donald Trump is making China great again | Steven Greenhouse

If Donald Trump’s presidency has any theme (beyond self-promotion), it’s that his “America First” agenda will Make America Great Again. Unfortunately for the American people, if Trump’s maneuvers and machinations have made any nation greater, it’s been China, not the United States.

During Trump’s first term, he treated China as a strategic rival and often talked of checking its rise. His administration complained that China was seeking to “challenge American power” and “erode American security and prosperity”. But during his first year back in the White House, Trump – in governing by whim and impulse with little strategic vision - has done lots to Make China Great Again.

His shortsighted policies have enabled China to gain on, and at times move ahead of, the US in numerous ways. That was true when Trump’s benighted crusade against scientific research weakened the US’s competitive position vis-à-vis China. That was also the case when Trump so mucked up his trade war with China that Beijing emerged victorious after it forced Trump to back down. That was true, as well, when Trump ceded long-term leadership to China in several critical industries of the future, including electric cars, wind turbines and batteries.

Trump’s imperialistic designs on Venezuela and Greenland have made it harder to argue against China’s own designs on Taiwan. What’s more, Trump’s nonstop trade war, his threats against Greenland, and his torrent of insults against our European allies have badly undermined the western alliance, and that, too, will weaken the US and strengthen China.

In a newly released survey of 26,000 people in 21 countries, the European Council of Foreign Relations found not only that Trump’s policies are helping make China great, but that the US’s traditional adversaries fear it less, while its allies feel more distant from the US. In a policy brief accompanying that poll, Timothy Garton Ash, an emeritus history professor at Oxford and Guardian columnist, and two co-authors wrote: “Donald Trump did not go into politics to make China great again. But that is what [this new] poll … suggests he has done in the eyes of the world.”

Last July, when Trump’s tariffs were creating havoc worldwide, Pew released a 23-country survey that found for the first time that more people in those countries viewed China as the world’s top economic power than viewed the US as the leading power. According to Pew, a median of 41% of adults surveyed in the 23 countries saw China as the foremost economic power, compared with 39% for the US. In other words, despite Trump’s America First ballyhoo, China has been on the rise, with the US declining.

Trump has so angered Canada, long the US’s closest ally, with his painfully high tariffs and his belittling talk about making it the 51st state that Canada has increasingly looked elsewhere for friends. It just forged a new strategic partnership with China that will help Canada “adapt to new global realities” (namely, Trump’s hostility). “We’re forging new partnerships around the world to transform our economy from one that has been reliant on a single trade partner,” said Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney.

Other longtime US allies are also unhappy about Trump’s unreliability, irascibility and trade tirades, and they, too, are strengthening ties with China. In the first such visit since 2019, South Korea’s president recently visited Beijing and signed more than a dozen agreements on technology and trade. Britain’s prime minster, Keir Starmer, met with China’s president, Xi Jinping, last week to pull the two countries’ relations out of a long “ice age”, while the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, will visit in late February. All this diplomatic reshuffling stems from what Carney called a US-induced “rupture in the world order”.

Joe Biden worked hard to maintain the US’s technological edge over China, especially on the use of artificial intelligence in the military. One major strategy was to prohibit sales of Nvidia’s most sophisticated AI chips to China. But Trump, facing strong pleas from his billionaire friends and donors in Silicon Valley, reversed Biden’s policy and decades of technological restrictions. He defied many national security advisers and gave Nvidia a green light to sell China some of its most sophisticated chips.

“This decision is nuts,” Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, told the New York Times. “China’s main problem is they don’t have enough advanced computing capability. It makes no sense that President Trump is solving their problem for them by selling them powerful American chips. We are literally handing away our advantage.”

Trump no doubt hoped that the stratospherically high tariffs he imposed on China would weaken its powerful role in global trade. But China trumped Trump in that trade showdown by restricting badly needed rare earth exports to the US and barring soybean imports from the US, causing many US farmers to grow angry at the president. Trump soon rolled back his high tariffs on China, enabling the world to see that China had succeeded in bullying the bully. What’s more, while China’s trade volume with the US declined in 2025, China’s worldwide trade surplus soared by 20% to a record $1.2 trillion, showing that China in some ways emerged stronger from its trade confrontation with Trump.

In the new National Security Strategy released late last year, the Trump White House, unlike in its 2017 Security Survey, doesn’t talk of China as a strategic rival even though, as the New York Times’ David Sanger pointed out, China’s nuclear force has more than doubled since 2017, its military conducts exercises all around Taiwan, and its cyber-attacks have penetrated US government and corporations.

But Trump’s National Security Survey ignores all that. Instead, Trump boasts elsewhere about having a “very good relationship” with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and Xi, the world’s two leading autocrats, all while he often belittles Europe’s leaders.

Trump boasts that the US is the hottest country in the world, even though many countries’ views of the US have cooled significantly since he returned to the White House. What’s more, the US tourism industry is hurting because many foreigners now refuse to visit, and universities are hurting because many top foreign students are hesitating to study in the land of Trump. It’s true, though, that the US is the hottest country for some things – for mass deportations, for the scandal-plagued crypto industry and for AI companies; although, there are huge fears that today’s bubble of investments in datacenters will burst and cause a disastrous bust.

There’s no denying that the man who vowed to make America great again has caused the US to lose immense respect around the world. With the most authoritarian president in history in the White House, it’s harder than ever for the US to claim to be the city on the hill, a beacon and protector of freedom and democracy. What’s more, longtime allies have lost trust in the US and grown wary of working with Washington. It goes without saying that when trust wanes and alliances weaken, that makes America less great.

If Trump wants to reverse these sinking trends, he needs to patch up things asap with Canada, Denmark and many other US allies. He needs to end the insults, toss the imperialistic ambitions, reverse the deep cuts in research and begin championing democracy instead of cozying up with authoritarians. That unfortunately is probably asking way too much of Trump, who places spleen over reason and prefers authoritarianism to democracy.

So despite all his swagger, it seems inevitable that Trump will continue to make America less great and grease the skids for China’s continued rise.