Many observers observed a significant change in the way the Trump administration discusses or, more crucially, does not discuss China when it announced its new national security strategy (NSS) last week.
The broad claims made by the Biden administration that China is “America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge” have since been withdrawn. The NSS from President Donald Trump’s first term, which characterized China in 2017 as a challenge to “American power, influence, and interests,” is also largely absent.
Instead, this most recent document which every president submits to Congress outlining their foreign policy vision focused primarily on the US-China economic rivalry, hardly mentioning the authoritarianism or human rights violations that had frequently been mentioned in reports from earlier administrations.
Great-power competition with China is not mentioned. According to David Sacks, a fellow in Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, China is viewed primarily as an economic rival. The statement is a “rebalancing between interests and values,” according to Wen Ti-Sung, a nonresident fellow at the Global China Hub of the Atlantic Council.
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