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Trump’s China policy is nearly the exact opposite of what everyone expected

As Trump heads to China, attention and resources are being shifted from Asia to yet another war in the Middle East.

Donald Trump’s upcoming summit with Xi Jinping is likely to be dominated and somewhat overshadowed by the ongoing conflict in Iran.

In recent months, US attention and military resources have been shifted from Asia to the Middle East, where the war has proven longer and more difficult than anticipated. At the same time, the administration has seemed to go out of its way to avoid offending China.

This is in many ways the opposite of what many expected from this administration, given the president’s frequent criticism of past wars of choice in the Middle East, and the “Asia-first” orientation of many of his top officials.

President Donald Trump has never had a strict foreign policy doctrine, but coming into office, the influential figures around him could be classified into three broad camps. There were the so-called “primacists,” who supported a traditional muscular and assertive US rule in the world; the “restrainers,” who wanted to dial back US commitments abroad and avoid costly military operations whenever possible; and the “prioritizers,” or “Asia-firsters,” who favored scaling back US involvement in the Middle East and support for Ukraine in order to focus on what they saw as the real threat: the growing military strength of the People’s Republic of China.

If you had to put money on one of these camps winning out at the beginning of the second Trump administration, the prioritizers seemed like a logical bet. It was a position that both traditional Republican hawks like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and America Firsters like Vice President JD Vance could get behind. The defense scholar Elbridge Colby, whose 2021 book, The Strategy of Denial, is effectively the prioritizer bible, got an influential strategic planning role as undersecretary of defense for policy. After 20 years of frustrating US military engagement in the Middle East, there was broad consensus among both Democrats and Republicans of various stripes that the country needed to focus on other issues.

What few would have anticipated is an administration that has effectively run the prioritizer playbook in reverse: quick to use military force abroad, engaged in yet another open-ended and costly war in the Middle East, and diverting valuable resources away from the Pacific while taking a remarkably accommodating stance toward China. In Trump’s second term, his foreign policy has been defined by deprioritizing Asian affairs in many ways.

This surprising state of affairs will be highlighted this week as Trump heads to Beijing for a summit meeting with Xi Jinping. The summit was originally scheduled for March, but it was postponed due to the war that the White House no doubt hoped would be over by now. A meeting between the two most powerful men in the world might normally dominate the global conversation for a week, but in this case, there’s a good chance it will be overshadowed by events in the Persian Gulf.

In the lead-up to the meeting, Trump seemed to be doing everything possible to not upset relations with China. As one White House official told Politico last month, the administration is “walking on eggshells” with Beijing in hopes for a breakthrough on trade relations. This approach has continued despite widespread reports of Chinese assistance to the Iranian forces that have fought and killed US troops. “I thought I had an understanding with President Xi, but that’s alright. That’s the way the war goes right?” Trump said, discussing an unspecified “gift” from China to Iran intercepted by the US military in April.

How did we get to the point where the president is taking a more aggressive and hawkish approach to nearly every global issue — except for America’s main global rival?

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