President Trump came into office sounding as if he were eager to deal with President Xi Jinping of China on the range of issues dividing the world’s two biggest superpowers.
He and his aides signaled that they wanted to resolve trade disputes and lower the temperature on Taiwan, curb fentanyl production and get to a deal on TikTok. Perhaps, over time, they could manage a revived nuclear arms race and competition over artificial intelligence.
Today it is hard to imagine any of that happening, at least for a year.
Mr. Trump’s decision to stake everything on winning a trade war with China threatens to choke off those negotiations before they even begin. And if they do start up, Mr. Trump may be entering them alone, because he has alienated the allies who in recent years had come to a common approach to countering Chinese power.
In conversations over the past 10 days, several administration officials, insisting that they could not speak on the record, described a White House deeply divided on how to handle Beijing. The trade war erupted before the many factions inside the administration even had time to stake out their positions, much less decide which issues mattered most.
The result was strategic incoherence. Some officials have gone on television to declare that Mr. Trump’s tariffs on Beijing were intended to coerce the world’s second-largest economy into a deal. Others insisted that Mr. Trump was trying to create a self-sufficient American economy, no longer dependent on its chief geopolitical competitor, even if that meant decoupling from the $640 billion in two-way trade in goods and services.
“What is the Trump administration’s grand strategy for China?” said Rush Doshi, one of America’s leading China strategists, who is now at the Council of Foreign Relations and Georgetown University. “They don’t have a grand strategy yet. They have a range of disconnected tactics.”
Mr. Doshi says he holds open the hope that Mr. Trump could reach deals with Japan, South Korea, India, Taiwan and the European Union that would allow them to confront Chinese trade practices together, attract allied investment in U.S. industry and increase security ties.
“If you are up against someone big, you need to get bigger scale — and that’s why we need our allies to be with us,” said Mr. Doshi, who in recent days published an article in Foreign Affairs with Kurt M. Campbell, the former deputy secretary of state, arguing for a new approach. “This is an era in which strategic advantage will once again accrue to those who can operate at scale. China possesses scale, and the United States does not — at least not by itself,” they wrote.
Mr. Trump insisted on Monday that his tariffs were working so well that he might place more of them on China, among other nations. Just 48 hours after he carved out a huge exemption for cellphones, computer equipment and many electronic components — nearly a quarter of all trade with China — he said he might soon announce additional tariffs targeting imported computer chips and pharmaceuticals. “The higher the tariff, the faster they come in,” he said of companies investing in the United States to avoid paying the import tax.
So far, the Chinese response has been one of controlled escalation. Beijing has matched every one of Mr. Trump’s tariff hikes, trying to send the message that it can endure the pain longer than the United States can. And in a move that appeared to experts to have been prepared months ago, China announced that it was suspending exports of a range of critical minerals and magnets used by automakers, semiconductor producers and weapons builders — a reminder to Washington that Beijing has many tools to interrupt supply chains.
The result, said R. Nicholas Burns, who left his post in January as the American ambassador to China, is “one of the most serious crises in U.S.-Chinese relations since the resumption of full diplomatic relations in 1979.”
“But Americans should have no sympathy for the Chinese government, which describes itself as the victim in this confrontation,” said Mr. Burns. “They have been the greatest disrupter in the international trade system.” He said the challenge now would be “to restore communications at the highest levels to avoid a decoupling of the two economies.”
So far, neither side wants to be the one to initiate those communications, at least in public, for fear of being perceived as the one that blinked. Mr. Trump often insists he has a “great relationship” with Mr. Xi, but he gave the Chinese leader no direct warning about what was coming — or a pathway to head it off. And Mr. Xi has pointedly avoided joining the ranks of what the White House insists are 75 countries that say they want to strike a deal.
There are flickers of back-channel communications: Cui Tiankai, who served as China’s ambassador to the United States from 2013 to 2021, was in Washington as the tariffs were rolling out, talking to old contacts and clearly looking for a way to defuse the growing confrontation. Though retired, Mr. Cui is still among the Chinese with deep connections in both capitals — he is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and American officials still use him as a conduit to the Chinese leadership.
But recent history suggests that freezes in the U.S.-China relationship can be long-lasting and that relations never quite get back to where they had been before. The August 2022 visit to Taiwan by a congressional delegation led by Representative Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who at the time was still the speaker of the House, led China to send its air and naval forces on military exercises over the “median line” in the Taiwan Strait. Nearly three years later, those exercises have only intensified.
The following winter a high-altitude balloon, which China claimed was a weather balloon and U.S. intelligence officials said was stuffed with intelligence-gathering equipment to geolocate communications transmissions, crossed over the continental United States. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. ultimately ordered it shot down off the South Carolina coast.
Again, it took months to get past the mutual recriminations and set up a summit meeting between Mr. Xi and Mr. Biden. That encounter resulted in some modest agreements on cracking down on fentanyl precursors, along with a joint statement that A.I. technologies should never be used in nuclear command-and-control systems.
But the stakes in those confrontations were not as high as they are in the emerging trade war, which could help push both countries to the brink of recession — and could ultimately spill into the power plays happening each day around Taiwan, in the South China Sea and just offshore of the Philippines.
Among the questions hanging over the administration now is whether it can put together a coherent approach to China at a moment when key members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle are arguing in public about the right strategy. Elon Musk, who relies on China as a key supplier to his companies Tesla and SpaceX, called Peter Navarro, a top White House trade adviser, a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks.” Mr. Navarro shrugged it off during a Sunday appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” saying, “I’ve been called worse.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pushed back Monday on a Chinese commerce official who dismissed the tariffs as a “joke.”
“These are not a joke,” Mr. Bessent said in Argentina, where he is on a visit. But then he added that the tariffs were so big that “no one thinks they’re sustainable.”
But whether they are sustainable is a different question than whether Mr. Trump or Mr. Xi can afford, politically, to be the first to back away from them. And then the administration will have to decide what its priorities are when it comes to China. Will the United States declare that it will defend Taiwan? (Mr. Trump clearly has his hesitations, based on his public statements.) Will it seek to find common projects to work on with Beijing?
It is hardly unusual for an administration to spend months, maybe more than a year, debating how to navigate a relationship as complex as the one with China. President Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger spent years plotting out their approach to what was still called “Red China,” resulting in Mr. Nixon’s historic trip to the country and the yearslong diplomatic opening it triggered. President Bill Clinton entered office having campaigned against the “butchers of Beijing,” a reference to the killings in Tiananmen Square and the crackdowns that followed, and he ended his term ushering China into the World Trade Organization. President George W. Bush courted Chinese leaders to join the battle against terrorism.
Mr. Biden had to get beyond the Covid era before he settled on a strategy of denying Beijing access to critical semiconductors and other technology.
But none was trying to overcome what Mr. Trump faces. He has unleashed an act of economic confrontation so large that it may poison the relationship with a country that is deeply intertwined with the American economy. In the end, Mr. Trump may have to choose between an unhappy marriage or an abrupt divorce.
