It’s All About China

Shortly after October 7, 2023, Israeli forces sorting through the remains of the 1,200 people killed during the deadliest attack on Israel since the 1973 Yom Kippur war recovered drones that Hamas and other Iranian proxies had used to target Israeli civilians. Officials found that the unmanned aerial vehicles contained multiple U.S.-origin electronic components, and further investigation showed that these parts had been procured by Chinese firms then transferred to Iranian front companies, which in turn passed them on to Hamas. The Iranians distributed U.S.-made technology bought by the Chinese to other proxies as well, including the Houthi rebels, who used them to target U.S. and allied shipping.

Although people don’t readily make the connection, this episode from the Middle East throws into sharp relief the nature of the U.S.-China power competition. Indeed, though observers like to frame President Donald Trump’s policy on China narrowly as a trade war, tariffs and other economic measures are simply instruments the White House is deploying in a larger war against the China axis. It’s a conflict fought at home and abroad that has ramifications for U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Supplying Ukraine to defend itself against Russia is part of Trump’s campaign against the China axis. Targeting Venezuelan drug cartels, shutting down fentanyl shipments, and supporting allies like Argentina’s President Javier Milei to stand firm against Chinese encroachment into Latin American are as much a part of the campaign as Trump’s China tariffs. Campaigns against China, Russia, Venezuela, Iran and its proxies have dominated the U.S. news cycle the last year because the Trump administration sees the China axis as the most dangerous threat to our national security. It’s all about China.

Sadly, certain cohorts of Americans, including many under 30, can’t perceive this—for a very good reason: The reckless and deracinated foreign policies of the last several administrations have made it impossible for Americans to understand the purpose of foreign policy—including most significantly the nature of our alliance system—because successive White Houses before Trump have subverted the national interest by rewarding our adversaries at the expense not only of our allies but of America itself. In fact, that bug became a feature in the system that Trump is trying to fix.

The confusion goes back much further than Bill Clinton’s blunder in ushering China into the World Trade Organization, George W. Bush’s Middle East failed freedom agenda, and Barack Obama’s destructive Iran deal. Indeed, it starts at the beginning of the U.S.-China relationship, when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger made their historic February 1972 trip to the city then called Peking. Historians of the period and policy experts hail the “opening to China” as a strategic masterstroke, with the two men using the weaker communist power as leverage against the considerably more powerful Soviet Union. Journalists at the time called Nixon and Kissinger’s policy playing the “China card.”

It’s one of the few accomplishments credited to one of America’s most controversial presidents and it made Kissinger postwar America’s most celebrated diplomat. But the opening to China was among the worst bets American statesmen ever made. And yet the furthest that critics of Nixon and Kissinger’s China policy will go is to claim that while bringing China into the international order later proved problematic, the opening move was a brilliant strategic gambit. But that’s a whitewash. And it’s not how Trump sees it.

“The worst thing Nixon did wasn’t Watergate,” the president told me for my book The China Matrix. “It was allowing China to take advantage of this country. He and Kissinger are the ones that opened up China. And it was a terrible mistake. It didn’t have to be this way.”

Trump believes that the U.S. alliance system is crucial to advancing the national interest. Its essential structure was designed 80 years ago for the purpose of fortifying a post-WWII bicoastal superpower, whose interests stretch from Latin America to Europe and Africa to Asia with strategic waterways in between, like the Persian Gulf and the eastern Mediterranean. The best-known aspect of that global security architecture is NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Trump is famously critical of NATO—more critical of the fact that treaty members have become accustomed to not paying their fair share for mutual defense than of its usefulness. Indeed, after years of policy experts wondering whether NATO has outlived its purpose, Trump’s focus on the China axis has made an alliance whose chief purpose is to deter Russian ambitions in Europe more relevant than it has been since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

During the Cold War, it was the other way around and the Soviets were America’s chief threat. China was important to Nixon because two American campaigns in Asia, Korea and Vietnam, to contain communism showed that the continent had become a region vital to U.S. interests. Also, he wanted to get to communist China and sit down with Mao to win acclaim from the media and the coastal elites he despised. Kissinger was the foreign policy impresario, the idea man, and for him China played a central role in his concept of the balance of power, which in his view was the key to global stability.

Kissinger’s source of foreign policy thinking is very different from Trump’s. America’s 47th president is the most realized embodiment of American primacy since Ronald Reagan. Kissinger, on the other hand, was an apostle of global order, and not without reason. Unlike the effete and clammy-pawed Davos set that he inspired, his mind was shaped by the 20th century’s violent displacements: As a German Jewish refugee and a U.S. counterintelligence officer who saw combat during WWII, he witnessed what happens when the world suddenly goes sour. From his perspective, without global order the world goes to war.

It’s hardly surprising then that less than a quarter of a century after WWII’s end, Kissinger wanted to avoid direct confrontation with the Soviets by implementing a policy of détente—that is, an easing of relations with Moscow through engagement on specific issues ostensibly of interest to both parties, like arms control. Still, to Kissinger, a world order dominated by two nuclear-armed rivals was inherently unstable, so he sought a third leg to establish what Barack Obama would later call “geopolitical equilibrium.”

Kissinger’s model for the balance of power was the Congress of Vienna (1814-15) and the agreements struck by European states that kept the peace on the continent after the Napoleonic Wars. This became known as the concert system, a multipolar arrangement in which all powers, according to Kissinger, agreed to pursue their interests in moderation. It was the subject of his Harvard dissertation.

“The order established at the Congress of Vienna was the closest that Europe has come to universal governance since the collapse of Charlemagne’s empire,” he wrote long after his student years. “It produced a consensus that peaceful evolutions within the existing order were preferable to alternatives; that the preservation of the system was more important than any single dispute that might arise within it; that differences should be settled by consultation rather than by war.”

Kissinger believed that this concert system, with the European powers vowing to respect each other’s borders and spheres of influence, ushered in one of history’s golden ages, when the civilized world was united under one order. He regarded the balance of power almost like a mystical concept and envisioned a modern-day concert system as the foundation for a new global order. He and the president he served wanted to exploit the growing rift between the two communist giants. But somewhere along the way they lost focus.

Kissinger himself was confused about what he meant by balance of power. Sometimes he believed that balance of power meant using one rival against another. But at other times he saw it the way Nixon described it to Time. The balance of power, Kissinger wrote, is “an informal commitment by each to pursue its interests with restraint.” So did Kissinger want to impose a balance of power by leveraging China against Russia to enhance American power, wealth, and prestige, or did he mean to include the U.S. in a concert system that would force America as well as its rivals to compete on even playing field?

Kissinger’s confusion issued partly from the fact that he’d mistaken his own historical model. The purpose of the Congress of Vienna was not to build an international order. Rather, the agreements between the 19th century European powers formalized what had already been decided on the battlefield—the continent had fought itself to a stalemate. The concert system expressed not comity but exhaustion and the unwillingness, or inability, to return to armed conflict.

And Kissinger also misread the Soviets and Chinese. He assumed that like the U.S., they were unwilling to risk superpower conflict in the nuclear age. But neither Moscow nor Beijing saw it the way the Nixon White House did. Indeed, after skirmishes on the Sino-Soviet border took a serious turn in March 1969, Soviet diplomats asked their American counterparts how Washington would respond if the USSR waged a nuclear attack on Chinese nuclear facilities or other sites. The Americans were aghast.

According to Kissinger, “a Soviet attack on China could not be ignored by us. It would upset the global balance of power.” But the Chinese were surprised the Americans didn’t see the benefit in it. According to a memo Kissinger later sent Nixon: “Mao even went so far as to suggest that we might like to see the Russians bogged down in an attack on China; after wearing themselves out for a couple of years, we would then ‘poke a finger’ in Moscow’s back. I rejoined that we believe that a war between the two Communist giants was likely to be uncontrollable and have unfortunate consequences for everyone. We therefore wished to prevent such a conflict, not take advantage of it.”

Mao understood clearly what had confused Kissinger: Setting your enemies against each other, or simply not stopping them from fighting, is the essence of power politics. By contrast, entering yourself into a balance of power with rivals means weakening yourself, which benefits your rivals. And no one commits to restraint unilaterally unless they mean to surrender.

Nixon and Kissinger’s China policy is a rarity in the history of statecraft. For in the cold, clear math of geopolitics, by attempting to forge a balance of power arrangement including the country they represented as well as its Chinese and Soviet adversaries, they were hobbling America. Instead of leveraging China against the USSR to force them into a stalemate to the advantage of the U.S., Nixon and Kissinger meant to persuade U.S. rivals by example that seeking dominance in the nuclear age would upset the tenuous global order. In Kissinger’s view, the only path forward was for all to commit to pursue their interests with restraint.

But what if they didn’t? What if, for instance, the Chinese just preyed on America while pretending to comply with Kissinger’s grand strategy for global parity?

And that’s just what they did. And this is the true basis of the U.S.-China relationship: For half a century, Washington has been building up Beijing at the expense of American peace and prosperity.

It was Bill Clinton who pushed for China’s accession to the WTO, but the move was celebrated by Republicans as well, including his predecessor George H.W. Bush and successor George W Bush. China’s WTO membership paved the way for a communist giant to take control of America’s manufacturing sector, eliminate millions of middle-class American jobs, and dominate global trade including strategic industries like pharmaceuticals and rare-earth minerals. Shouldn’t that fiasco have made U.S. presidents adhere more strictly to the national interest? Yes, but instead they only veered further from it. Bush 43 spent thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars in the wake of 9/11 to give Iran control of Iraq, which the terror regime used to launch attacks on U.S. soldiers and diplomats; and then Barack Obama devoted his second term to striking a nuclear deal with Iran that legalized the anti-U.S. regime’s nuclear weapons program.

Indeed, it was Kissinger’s view of the balance of power that acted as the intellectual framework that gave rise to globalism—an order of international cooperation and, relatively, peaceful coexistence in which, like Kissinger’s version of the concert system, all are welcome to satisfy their appetites, in moderation. At least that was the American version of events; Beijing never subscribed to Kissinger’s ahistorical and denatured version of the balance of power. But U.S. presidents did. In fact, aside from Reagan, who ditched détente in favor of an aggressive effort to topple the Soviet Union, all of them did.

The new international order engendered by Kissinger’s concept of the balance of power was a specifically American project designed at a particular historical moment, and yet U.S. elites spoke of it like it was part of God’s creation. “Globalization is akin to a force of nature,” senior George W. Bush administration official Robert Zoellick told a Beijing audience in 2002. “It can sweep aside antiquated and dysfunctional customs, institutions and ways of thinking. It is not something that can be stopped by a leader, or by a nation, without incurring unacceptable costs.”

On December 11, 2001, three months after the World Trade Center attacks, China was granted entry to the World Trade Organization, the global trade regime that was supposed to transform a communist regime into a stakeholder in the liberal international order. The Clinton administration’s willingness to overlook Beijing’s depredations against its own people and its plots against the U.S.—like spying on U.S. nuclear facilities—to support China’s admission to the WTO was twin to the Bush administration’s Middle East freedom agenda. Both ideas issued from the same part of the psyche of the U.S. elite: The belief, held with a quasi-evangelical faith, that securing American peace and prosperity requires us to induce foreigners to act like Americans.

Bush officials believed that the root cause of 9/11 was the lack of democracy in the Middle East and once despotic regimes like Saddam Hussein’s were toppled, the nascent liberal energies of the Arab masses would inexorably transform their society from tyranny to representative government, like ours. In the same way, trade would eventually compel China, ruled by a Communist Party that pushed slave-made products into global markets, to adopt liberal political norms, like ours.

Neither of these ideas served the U.S. national interest directly, both rather were hopes drafted in the conditional mood: If the Arabs adopted democratic processes, they’d exhaust their political energies by contesting each other at home in their parliamentary systems instead of blowing up Americans; if the Chinese abided by international trade regulations, a liberal regime would invariably replace the ruling Communist Party and spare us the cost and panic of another Cold War. Both big ideas were simply bank shots.

But trade policy and war are blunt instruments. Success means advancing the interests of your side. The WTO and the freedom agenda showed that U.S. policymakers instead saw trade and war as means to shape outcomes among foreigners by incentivizing the disposition of repressive regimes whose priorities Washington bureaucrats could not begin to fathom.

Kissinger’s influence was even more pronounced during Obama’s administration, for the 44th president’s key foreign policy initiative was modeled after the opening to China. As Nixon and Kissinger had brought China in from the cold, Obama meant to do the same for the Islamic Republic of Iran. His concept was a concert system for the Middle East, balancing Iran and Israel, the region’s dominant forces, against each other to foster a geopolitical equilibrium. But since Israel is a pillar of U.S. power in the region, forcing Israel into a balance of power with an American adversary meant weakening America’s regional position. That is, as Kissinger imposed a balance of power on America, so too did Obama, via our ally Israel. Despite what Obama and his validators claimed about the Iran deal—how it was meant to stop Iran from ever getting the bomb—the plain fact is that Obama wanted Iran to have the bomb. In Obama’s Kissingerian scheme, Iran needed the bomb to balance the nuclear power that he perceived to be the region’s most disruptive force—Israel.

As Nixon and Kissinger had elevated China for the ostensible purpose of balancing the Soviets, Obama bolstered Iran to deter Israel. American money and patronage empowered China’s revolutionary regime, and with the hundreds of billions of dollars that Obama poured into Iran’s war chest to fuel the revolutionary regime’s ambitions, Obama, like Kissinger, weakened America and unleashed a monster.

It’s through this lens that this past year’s events should be understood. Operation Midnight Hammer, the Trump administration’s strikes in coordination with Israel to obliterate Iranian nuclear facilities in June, was its most public effort to unravel the China axis. Since then, China has helped Iran rebuild its ballistic missile program in exchange for discounted oil. China is the top consumer of Iranian oil, buying more than 90% of its shipped oil, which helps keep its heavily sanctioned energy industry afloat. Iran is vital to China’s anti-U.S. strategy for the Middle East where the goal is to minimize American power in a strategically vital part of the world. When Trump joined Israel to destroy the Iranian regime’s nuclear facilities, he was beating back the China axis and guiding back to reality a U.S. foreign policy that had been wandering in the dark for decades.

A map of the Middle East shows what’s at stake. The Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the Eastern Mediterranean are all important trade routes. Twenty percent of the world’s energy passes through the Gulf and an Iranian choke point there, together with Houthi dominance of the Red Sea, as well as Hezbollah and Hamas control of the eastern Mediterranean coast would make Iran’s patron China the dominant power in a region where the U.S. has exercised hegemony since WWII. It’s with this in mind that the Trump administration added Chinese companies supplying drone technology to Iran to a list of entities involved in activities harmful to U.S. national security and imposed additional export-control requirements. And that’s why fighting China’s allies in the Middle East makes Israel an important Trump ally.

In contrast, other U.S. regional partners are less trustworthy. In 2022, according to a recent Financial Times story, the United Arab Emirates gave Chinese company Huawei technical intelligence that helped extend the range of People’s Liberation Army air-to-air missiles, giving Chinese fighter jets an edge over their U.S. counterparts. The UAE is an important customer for U.S. defense systems—with active contracts worth more than $29 billion—but is a client state that pays America tribute for defending it. And thus, though Abu Dhabi was perhaps weighing its options with the Biden administration’s tepid China policy leaving U.S. allies exposed, the Emiratis betrayed their superpower patron.

This episode helps illuminate the true nature of America’s alliance with Israel, a relationship that many U.S. supporters of the U.S.-Israel relationship as well as its critics misunderstand—America does not exact hundreds of billions of dollars tribute to defend Israel the way it does with the wealthy Middle East clients, like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, but rather pays and arms her to help defend U.S. interests in the region. If it’s hard for many Americans, even Trump supporters, to understand Israel’s role in advancing American interests, that’s partly because of the emotion baked into the U.S.-Israel relationship—many Republicans, especially evangelicals, believe supporting Israel is a sacred duty while a growing, and vocal faction, contends Jerusalem is a curse on Washington.

That debate is now intensified by an aggressive social media campaign, on TikTok, a Chinese influence operation, as well as X, where MAGA-adjacent influencers are financially incentivized to peck away at the U.S.-Israel alliance. That’s good for China, which benefits not only by driving the U.S. and Israel apart to weaken the U.S. position in the Middle East but also by splitting the base of the only American president who has ever stood up to the Chinese Communist Party. Beijing figures that fracturing MAGA will clear the field for the next president—whether that’s a Democrat, or even a Republican—to restore the pro-China status quo, and link the fate of the world’s oldest democracy to a predatory communist regime.