An uneasy quiescence has come to define U.S.-Chinese relations during U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term. Although both governments are calling it “constructive strategic stability,” U.S.-Chinese relations have been so tenuous and shallow, so lacking in ambition or any affirmative vision from either side, that it seems more apt to describe the current moment as a stalemate defined by “mutually assured disruption.” Going forward, the crucial question for both sides will be who is making better use of this interregnum.

For its part, Beijing sees stalemate as a victory—a sign that China has positioned itself as Washington’s peer—and as a vindication of the policies it put in place after the first Trump administration, which were designed to let it play both offense and defense with the United States. Ever since Trump met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea last November, Beijing’s strategy has been to purchase time, space, and relief from U.S. pressure at the lowest price point possible so that it can fortify itself for the next round. When the two men met again in Beijing in May, for instance, the pageantry and respect Xi orchestrated for Trump, paired with some modest commercial deals, was a small price to pay for that latitude. China’s status as the world’s second superpower is also, paradoxically, abetting its ability to accrue advantages without taking on the responsibilities—and expenses—that have sapped both the U.S. government of materiel and the American population’s appetite for big and bold foreign policy initiatives.

Yet the Trump administration still insists it is best positioned to benefit from this impasse and win the competition. As different as Trump is from his predecessors, he is very much like conventional second-term presidents who have focused on foreign policy instead of domestic issues. As he turns 80, Trump seems preoccupied with his place in world history. But Trump himself seems stuck in history, as he is taking U.S. China policy back to the engagement policy found in the 1990s and early 2000s. He has put commerce in the foreground and security in the background. He seems more concerned about Taiwan destabilizing the cross-strait dynamic than Beijing doing so. And of course, the administration this year has devoted nearly all its bandwidth to yet another war in the Middle East, replicating the distractions of the past quarter century but without the valid excuse of a calamity like 9/11 or the dramatic rise of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) a dozen years later. If every day of this stalemate is “strategic,” the United States is squandering its hard power and dissipating its military strength—rather than enhancing it—while also putting the federal budget on an even more unsustainable trajectory.

A FAMILIAR DISTRACTION

What is most alarming about Trump’s China policy is not how unprecedented it is but how similar it looks to his predecessors’ mistakes. The American preoccupation with the Middle East is a distraction from the more important competition with China—and every U.S. president has acknowledged as much since Barack Obama’s administration famously rolled out its largely unrealized “Pivot to Asia” in 2011. The first Trump administration then put China at the center of its National Security Strategy, and even the second Trump administration nominally recognized the dangers of another intervention in the Middle East when it promulgated its National Security Strategy in December 2025. Yet each White House has nonetheless found itself sucked back into the region. Obama, for instance, prolonged the war in Afghanistan and had to intervene in Iraq to stymie the rise of ISIS. President Joe Biden surged U.S. resources to the Middle East after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. And just 12 weeks after issuing his National Security Strategy, Trump initiated the third Persian Gulf war.

Some administration allies claim that by focusing U.S. metaphorical and actual firepower on Venezuela and Iran, Trump is picking off Beijing’s allies and boxing it in. But China was far more important to Iran and Venezuela than either country was or is to China. At most, Washington has picked off pawns at the margins of the proverbial international chessboard, which irritates Beijing more than it undermines its position.

Indeed, by the time of Trump’s May summit with Xi, it was clear that the Middle East was no longer the locus of great-power competition. Although the war in Iran has demonstrated that the region plays an outsize economic role because of its crucial position in global supply chains, the countries that are best positioned to weather the energy crunch stemming from this conflict are, ironically, the three great powers: China, Russia, and the United States. This is a striking lesson for the U.S. foreign policy elite since it is a departure from the Cold War, when Henry Kissinger famously pursued “shuttle diplomacy” in the Middle East to prevent an oil crisis or, worse, a conflict that pulled in the Soviet Union and the United States. It is also a departure from even a decade ago, when the United States........

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