On the menu today: Audrey Fahlberg here, National Review’s political reporter filling in for Jim Geraghty today. He’ll be back in your inboxes on Friday.
Let’s chat China.
The Missing Piece
If you tuned in to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, you probably noticed there was no shortage of references to his administration’s approach to foreign conflicts.
The president touted his administration’s success in brokering peace agreements and cease-fires overseas: “In my first ten months, I ended eight wars.” He referenced the success of the U.S. military’s Operation Midnight Hammer taking out Iranian nuclear sites last year and issued a warning to Tehran about the threat of more U.S. action if the Iranians do not make a deal involving their nuclear program: “They want to make a deal. But we haven’t heard those secret words: We will never have a nuclear weapon.” And he praised the U.S. military’s success in capturing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, honoring U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer and helicopter pilot Eric Slover with a Medal of Honor for his service in carrying out the operation: “Eric steered the Chinook under the cover of night and descended swiftly upon Maduro’s heavily protected military fortress.”
Left directly unmentioned in his speech was China, save for a passing reference to the country’s military technology alliance with Venezuela. “This was a major military installation protected by thousands of soldiers and guarded by Russian and Chinese military technology,” Trump said.
Trump’s decision to avoid a direct reference to U.S.–China relations in his record-long address is another bookmark in his second-term approach to China, which has been much more conciliatory than many expected and has alarmed China hawks on Capitol Hill.
Remember that Trump is planning to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in late March through early April, which will mark the first trip by a U.S. president to China since 2017. China hawks are curious about whether the president will mention Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Yeaw’s recent testimony that China conducted an underground nuclear test in 2020, a claim that the Chinese officials have denied.
Trade is expected to be the major focus of the summit. As the Financial Times’ China correspondent Demetri Sevastopulo sees it, “The question now is whether Trump is using a tactical détente to help the US cut its reliance on China for rare earths or whether this is the start of a different approach where the US puts greater focus on trade and economic issues ahead of more traditional national security.”
Chinese officials are already scheming how to negotiate with Trump after the Supreme Court struck down his International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs, according to the Wall Street Journal:
While the Ministry of Commerce in Beijing maintains a cautious public stance — stating Monday that it is “closely monitoring” the administration’s pivot to alternative trade tools — Chinese officials privately see an opportunity to push for important concessions during Trump’s coming trip to China, scheduled for March 31 to April 2, according to people who consult with Chinese officials.
Beijing is considering ways to strike back against any tariffs reimposed under new legal authority — a situation that could bring an abrupt end to a fragile China-U.S. detente.
Beijing’s primary objective for the summit has been to extend a one-year truce it negotiated with Trump last autumn at a summit in South Korea. It wants a rollback of existing tariffs as well as a reprieve from export controls on U.S. technology that have throttled the Chinese tech sector.
I’ll leave you with this: Tucked into a long CNN piece about chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine yesterday is an interesting aside about how he views the national defense strategy’s approach to Beijing:
One example officials point to came in September, when Caine hand-delivered memos to Hegseth and the Pentagon’s policy chief Elbridge Colby outlining his disagreements over the new National Defense Strategy that Colby’s office had drafted, one of the sources said. Among Caine’s concerns with the document, which prioritizes homeland defense and the western hemisphere, was that it underplayed the threat posed by China and the US military’s need to prepare for a potential future conflict in the Indo-Pacific, sources said.
ADDENDUM: Speaking of China . . . make sure to read National Review reporter James Lynch’s latest piece about how a Chinese law enforcement official “used Open AI’s ChatGPT to help plan an operation to undermine Japan’s pro-Taiwan prime minister as part of the broader operation against potential threats to the Chinese Communist Party.”