LAST OCTOBER I published a short breakdown of four geopolitical ‘schools’ that might shape China strategy under Trump. That piece was a pre-election preview of a much larger report I was writing for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. I published the preview as security: Trump might not win. If so I had better publish something before election day while interest in Trumpworld was guaranteed.
Trump won. Interest in GOP debates did not abate. I continued to work on the report. As of this week the full thing is out. You can read it, in all its twenty-page glory, over at the FPRI website. What follows are some of its key points:
The report draws on tweets, essays, policy reports, speeches and podcast appearances from Republican foreign policy analysts, politicians, and former Trump (45) administration officials. To better understand the assumptions, emotions, and personal relationships involved, I supplemented this public material with private interviews with more than thirty individuals. Interviewed subjects ranged from cabinet officials down to congressional staff. These interviews were conducted between August and December of 2024.
The report was only possible because Republicans have spent much of the last three years engaged in very open debate on how to deal with the problem posed by China. Generally speaking there is more disagreement on the big questions (e.g. “what should the end goal of our policy with China be?”) than on smaller, more tactical ones.
Trump has not intervened in these debates. He purposefully stuck to broad generalities on the campaign trail. His election platform included no China planks. Neither his inaugural nor his first State of the Union address devoted any space to US-China relations. People sometimes accuse the administration of mixed-messages: why does the same administration invite Xi Jinping to the Trump inaugural one month and talk about our “ironclad commitment” to Asian allies on the other? Isn’t this a bit discordant? Yes—and intentionally so. Trump believes America is better off when foreign leaders believe he is “crazy.” He has openly made this point about Xi Jinping specifically. He wants the Chinese leadership to doubt his intentions. He puts a premium in flexibility and sees no advantage in telegraphing to the Chinese his future plans. One of his take-aways from the last administration is that obscurity and fickleness work to his advantage.
Trump’s managerial style further muddies the waters. Trump prefers it when his staff disagree. He prefers to play powerful personalities off each other. Trump’s solution to the principal-agent problem is to have multiple agents who check each other. This style of management has its upsides—it is unlikely to replicate the mad process that led America into Iraq. However, these strengths come at the cost of conceptual coherence and policy consistency.
Trump has hired people from all eight of the ‘schools’ of foreign policy I have identified. While certain schools have been more successful in the first few months of the Trump presidency than others, that might not mean much on the long-run. The defining trait of Trump 45 was personnel churn. Hold close, my friends, to Henry Wotton’s counsel:
*Dazal’d thus with hight of place,
Whilst our hopes our witts beguile,
No man marks the narrow space
’Twixt a prison, & a smile.*
Then since fortunes favours fade,
You that in her armes doe sleep,
Learn to swimm & not to wade;
For, the hearts of Kings are deep.
But, if greatnes be so blind,
As to trust in tow’rs of aire,
Let it be with goodness lin’d
That, at least the fall be faire.
Then, though darkn’d, you shall say,
When friends fail, & Princes frown,
Vertue is the roughest way,
But proves at night a bed of down.
I divide policy debates on China into two large buckets. One is centered on geopolitics, diplomacy, and defense; the other on trade and finance. I was surprised to find that these two dimensions do not map neatly onto each other. Where a man stands on the question of America’s economic relationship with China does not always predict where he falls on questions of military posture.
Let’s start with the economic debate. Everyone involved agrees the United States needs to “win” the economic contest with China. But what does “winning” mean? How is victory best achieved? I think about these arguments as slotting into a 2×2 diagram:
The x-axis is anchored on two opposing views. Those in the right quadrants see U.S. competition with China as a race. Winning the race means being the first to occupy the commanding heights of the future global economy. The country that develops, deploys, and commercializes the next generation of technologies will seize these heights.
Those on the left two quadrants reject this framing. They believe ‘winning’ requires a broader industrial renaissance that revives American manufacturing, restores its industrial capacity, and revitalizes the regions left behind by the tech-driven growth of the last three decades. They argue that orienting industrial policy solely around emerging technologies reinforces the very conditions Trumpism was born in reaction to.
The y -axis marks assessments of the administrative state. At the bottom are skeptics. Those pulled towards this position have no faith in bureaucrats. Many distrust the type of person that staffs our bureaucracy (left leaning, academic, inexperienced, etc); others doubt whether it is possible for any bureaucrat, no matter how skilled, to manage the market—especially when this means picking winners and losers in a domain as uncertain as emerging technology. If Venture Capital cannot pick out winning firms in advance, why think that Congress will do any better?
Those in the upper two quadrants of my diagram have more faith in the administrative state. They are inspired by the developmental states of East Asia and successful defense-industrial programs of the Cold War. They see no reason those successes cannot be replicated in 21st century America. From this viewpoint the key bottleneck is not personnel but political will. They hope Trump will provide that will.
This gives us four quadrants. In the bottom right, we find the Dynamists—technophilic types who think the greatest obstacles to victory are overregulation, DEI mandates, and the weak ties between Silicon Valley and the White House.
Sharing their technophilia are the fellows in the top right quadrant: the Techno-nationalists. These folks often have backgrounds in national security. That experience biases them towards active government involvement—through defense contracts, R&D funding, and procurement—in “strategic” industries (this group also tends to be most eager to apply export controls on Chinese technology purchases).
On the top left sit the Industrialists. They hope to rebuild legacy industries like steel and automotive manufacturing with tools the Techno-Nationalists would reserve for things like semiconductors or UAVs. They are unabashed defenders of full industrial policy suite, from tariffs to strategic planning.
The bottom left quadrant—the Trade Warriors—share the Industrialist goals but reject the bureaucratic apparatus (and spectacular budgets) that full-scale industrial policy would require. Their preferred instrument is the tariff. These appeal to people who would like to reshore manufacturing while simultaneously hacking away at the New Deal. A tariffs-first industrial policy is entirely compatible with a shrinking federal footprint—USTR can run all of American trade policy with less than 200 people.
Such are the camps in the economic debate. I locate the geopolitical debate over China policy in their own four-quadrant diagram:
The x-axis reflects confidence in American power. In the right two quadrants we find Trumpists who emphasize the fiscal, cultural, political, and even physical constraints on American military power. They describe America as a nation in both relative and absolute decline. Like Nixon and Kissinger in the 1970s, they believe that we must face these realities soberly, and adopt a national strategy that frees the United States from diplomatic and military commitments it can no longer sustain.
This logic is rejected by the optimists, located on the lefthand side of the diagram. They balance the constraints America faces with the manifest weaknesses of America’s rivals. They acknowledge the problems identified by the pessimists, but tend to describe these problems as self-inflicted. Inadequate defense budgets are not a law of nature, but a choice—with Trump in command America might choose otherwise.
The y -axis maps onto the ultimate ends and justifications of American foreign policy. At the top are hard-nosed realists. They argue that force is the foundation of international politics. They understand statecraft as the art of accumulating, preserving, and using power.
Those in the bottom quadrants do not find this view sufficient. They trace connections between the way American power is used abroad and political conditions at home. As the international order goes, the domestic order may follow. Individuals in these quadrants tend to believe that the American government should actively commit itself to strengthening specific cultural ideals—and see no reason why this should not be true in the realm of foreign policy.
In the bottom left quadrant are the Crusaders. This group generally describes U.S.-China competition in ideological terms. In this view the two regimes rest on incompatible foundations. In the long run there can be no stable accommodation or compromise between the two powers, as the success of one undermines the stability of the other. As a general rule, Crusaders believe that in a globalized world preserving basic liberties at home means defending them forcefully abroad.
The Culture Warriors in the bottom right quadrant are the Crusaders’ opposites: to them, both the Washington foreign policy establishment and the ‘liberal international order’ are extensions of the liberal domestic order they hope to overthrow. At best, foreign policy interventionism is a distraction from the culture war they want to wage at home; at worst, it erodes the very liberties that Crusaders claim to champion. The top quadrants are more traditional.
The Prioritizers on the top right do not share the Culture Warriors’ ideological objections to the international order, but they do think this order demands more from America than she currently has the capacity to give. They consequently argue that the United States must shed many of its international commitments so that it can concentrate on the problem posed by China.
The Primacists in the top left quadrant share the realpolitik language of the Prioritizers, but believe the Prioritizers do not take the connections between China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran as seriously as they should. They believe that America does have the potential power to manage global commitments—if only we can muster the will to do so. They hope Trump will supply that will.
If you saw the earlier version of this second chart, you’ll notice I’ve updated some labels. I used to call the bottom left quadrant ‘liberal internationalists’ and the bottom right ‘restrainers.’ On reflection these two labels are not accurate. There are some classic restrainer types among the culture warriors, but most of the people in this quadrant are more motivated by the cultural and political consequences of American foreign policy inside America itself. Men like Michael Anton and Darren Beattie did not come to their conclusions through reading Barry Posen.
Likewise, “liberal internationalism” describes Hillary Clinton better than it does Miles Yu. A key idea of the Crusaders is that the Chinese are essentially correct: human rights, democracy promotion, and the rest are weapons pointed directly at the heart of our enemies—and we should consciously use them that way. This is altogether too muscular for most liberal internationalists, who are more concerned with international proceduralism than “victory,” however defined.
That’s the short version of my report. The long version is full of quotations, anecdotes, and reflections on what these dueling positions mean for US-China policy as a whole. I encourage you to head over to FPRI and**read the full thing.**
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For more of my writing on geopolitics, you might also like the posts “Sino-American Competition and the Search for Historical Analogies,” “Against the Kennan Sweepstakes,” “Of Sanctions and Strategic Bombers,” “Fear the First Strike,” “The Lights Wink Out in Asia,” and “Losing Taiwan is Losing Japan.” To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar’s Stage, you can join the Scholar’s Stage Substack mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. Your support makes this blog possible.
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