Divided as we are, the American public nonetheless widely agrees that the Chinese Communist Party is our enemy. Poll after poll has shown that Americans understand the CCP’s hegemonic ambitions are a threat to national security. A unique cross-party coalition has even emerged in Congress to build on this public sentiment and prepare the United States for a serious confrontation with this rising totalitarian power.
President Donald Trump and his new administration, however, are more reluctant about fighting and winning a new Cold War. Take, for instance, the dovish instincts of Trump’s pick for undersecretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby. In contrast to the China hawks of the first Trump administration, Colby believes the ultimate goal for Sino-American relations should be a “balance of power”-style detente rather than real geopolitical victory. And he is only one of several so-called restrainers the Trump White House is appointing to significant policymaking roles.
While many of these appointees have not yet begun implementing major policy changes, the administration is already pursuing one major shift regarding digital competition with the CCP. On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order delaying the enforcement of a law that would divest TikTok from Chinese ownership or ban access to it. Ostensibly he hopes this could be an olive branch to the CCP that he could exchange for concessions in other areas. But the president has also made public statements indicating the move is an attempt to court popularity among the many Americans who use the app, especially young voters.
This TikTok affair reveals two major problems with the Trump administration’s nascent China policy. In the first place, detente with the CCP is nowhere near as popular as the White House seems to believe. But even more fundamentally, the CCP can never be the goodwill partner Trump seems to hope to negotiate with. Over the next four years, Trump would find much more success if he abandoned this overly optimistic attitude and instead rallied the public around a plan to win this competition.
Public sentiment is already anti-CCP
The Trump administration would be making a fatal mistake if it assumed that the public wants a warmer relationship with the Chinese Communist Party. While, of course, no one wants competition to boil over into open warfare, the vast majority of Americans want to check the CCP’s hegemonic ambitions. They understand that the best way to deter conflict is to respond to provocations with strength.
Take, for instance, the public’s reaction to the debate over banning TikTok. Polling conducted by the Vandenberg Coalition, a conservative national security nonprofit group, found that more than 77% of registered voters are “very” or “extremely concerned” about Chinese ownership of the app. The poll even found that many voters who are also TikTok users support an outright ban.
These tea leaves are not difficult to read. “The survey shows that a forced sale or even outright ban are vastly preferred options to anything that enables China to continue to use TikTok as a fifth column,” said Carrie Filipetti, who served in Trump’s first term State Department and is now executive director at the Vandenberg Coalition, in an interview with the New York Post. The public does not want the CCP infiltrating our politics or stealing our data.
Trump believes he can speak directly to voters through social media, but how effective can his style be when an adversary controls the platform? After years of complaining about Big Tech oligarchs manipulating algorithms, Trump, of all people, should understand how dangerous it would be to put so much power in the hands of an enemy. Although TikTok’s algorithm remains somewhat mysterious, a variety of studies have proven that the CCP actively works to promote its propaganda on the app and shadow-ban any critical views of its action.
Republican voters seem to have a better grasp of the stakes of this problem than the leader of their party. According to the Vandenberg Coalition poll, most Republicans support the law Trump is currently blocking. Other recent polling shows that a high percentage of the Republican base views the CCP’s territorial ambitions as a direct threat to American interests. At least when it comes to the American posture toward China, it does not seem that the public is crying out for greater restraint.
Totalitarianism and the true character of the CCP
China is not a “normal” country. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Washington elites declared the “end of history” and thought that opening up economic cooperation with the People’s Republic of China would, over time, liberalize and democratize the political regime. As beautiful as that dream may have been, it quickly proved to be nothing more than a mirage.
The CCP remains just as committed as it has ever been to Marxist-Leninism. Chairman Xi Jinping has consolidated power in recent years by reasserting the regime’s ideological purity. “Xi Jinping Thought,” his new expression of Maoist orthodoxy, is rooted in the notion that the party is the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and that only through its power can the Chinese people hope to fight back against capitalism and the West for the sake of a global utopia. The CCP’s ideology may take on more nationalist tones than it has in the past, but that does not change the fact that its claim to legitimacy rests upon its self-proclaimed status as the vanguard of global revolution. The new totalitarianism is the same as the old.
Communist ideology provides the CCP with a convenient justification for its expansionist ambitions. As the CCP seeks to shore up its position in East Asia and beyond, PRC officials often speak about the “struggle against imperialism and colonialism” in an attempt to appeal to indigenous populations. Xi and his supporters are not simply hardheaded realists hoarding power but also committed ideologues who want to roll back American influence to expand their totalitarian control over more regions around the globe. Revolution is the entire point of CCP policy.
Hong Kong provides perhaps the most chilling example of the kind of revolution the CCP wants to export. After the United Kingdom handed the city-state over to the PRC in 1997, its status as a “special administrative region” meant that its citizens had certain freedoms denied to the Chinese mainland. All that changed with the “national security” law the CCP implemented in 2020. It effectively killed any independence Hong Kong still possessed, allowing the CCP to crack down on critics brutally and begin remaking the city’s entire social order. The most prominent victim of this persecution is the freedom activist Jimmy Lai, whom the CCP is holding in solitary confinement as it conducts a show trial. This is the kind of totalitarianism that awaits any country, from Taiwan to the Philippines, that might fall into the CCP’s clutches.
All this means that, as much as Trump may love to make deals, the CCP is not a legitimate business partner. The regime is not interested in making more money or integrating more seamlessly into the global order — it is only interested in shoring up and expanding its power. Xi has no intentions whatsoever of honoring his end of any bargains that might put him at a disadvantage. Any kind of detente would suit his interests well because it would give the CCP breathing room to build up power while the U.S.’s guard is down.
Maintaining independence
Rather than a shortsighted policy of “restraint,” then, putting America first means developing a policy agenda that will actually deter CCP aggression. One of the principal reasons voters chose not to give Democrats a second term in the White House, after all, was their frustrations with then-President Joe Biden’s weakness in the face of growing global chaos. Restoring American strength after such a long period of paralysis no doubt presents real challenges, but the Trump administration must prove it is up to the task if it wants to send the right message to the Chinese regime and the American public.
First, Trump should work to degrade the CCP’s ability to infect the American body politic. Enforcing the law Congress passed to divest TikTok from Chinese control would be a good first step, but the CCP also has a multitude of other tools to manipulate the public square. Take, for instance, the secret police stations it has established to monitor and censor Chinese nationals living in the U.S. or the Confucius Institutes on college campuses that teach a distorted narrative about China’s role on the global stage. The Trump administration should partner with the U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party to expose the full extent of communist infiltration.
The effort to keep America independent of communist influence has an economic dimension as well. Behind our North American neighbors, China is the U.S.’s largest trading partner. That means the CCP is able to use commerce with America to develop its own strategic economic sectors. Last year, the Vandenberg Coalition released another report detailing how the U.S. government can accelerate the process of decoupling from China’s economy and restore our competitive advantage. From closing trade loopholes to enforcing sanctions against the CCP’s use of slave labor, the Trump administration has a host of policy options to reassert economic independence.
During his campaign, Trump promised to enact many of those policies. Declaring tariffs to be the “greatest thing ever invented,” for instance, he vowed to slap China with rates as high as 60%. Although he implemented tariffs on the PRC shortly after taking office, they have only reached 10% — six times lower than his original promise. And compared with the 25% tariffs Trump is slapping on America’s allies, it seems, if anything, that he is treating the CCP with kid gloves. This kind of pandering to tyrants is the last thing Americans want after four years of capitulation from the Biden administration.
Containing the CCP
Domestic policy changes would, all the same, be toothless without a major effort to increase defense production. For years now, policy experts have been releasing report after report demonstrating all the ways China’s defense industrial base is overtaking the U.S. One alarming statistic is that China’s shipbuilding capacity is 232 times the size of America’s. The worst-kept secret in Washington is that the U.S. is in danger of falling behind its global adversaries in nearly every category of defense.
Despite the urgency of this situation, the Trump administration’s exact position on defense spending is difficult to pin down. Its new officials in the Department of Defense recently proposed cutting total defense spending by 8% in each of the next five years, although some say they only want to tamp down on waste, fraud, and abuse. While making sure the taxpayer gets as much value out of their dollar as possible is certainly laudable, the simple fact of the matter is even if it reprioritizes that money, it will not be nearly enough to bring the military back to fighting shape to deter China. Congress needs to increase the defense budget to $1 trillion or more to outpace the CCP.
Even if Trump and the Republican majority in Congress get defense spending up to acceptable levels, the U.S. cannot deter CCP aggression by itself — a strong system of alliances in the Pacific and around the world is essential. Trump supporters are rightly irate that many of our allies are not spending as much as they should on defense, and this administration is entirely correct to pressure them into doing more. But it makes no logical sense to alienate our friends with reckless provocations or cheap bullying when we need them most.
Western leaders have been drunk on idealism for too long, especially on China, and Trump could choose to be part of the solution. By standing on the world stage and making a deeply realist case for stopping CCP expansionism, he could reorient the America-led coalition of free peoples around our core interests rather than liberal abstractions such as “spreading democracy.” Unfortunately, Trump will struggle to win this kind of support from other Western or Western-aligned countries if he follows through on his foolhardy notion of a state visit to China at this time. America needs to negotiate from a position of genuine strength, and heading to Beijing at this point would be like crying out “uncle” too early in a fight. The U.S. and its allies should extract far more concessions from the CCP before sitting down at any kind of negotiating table to ensure that the outcome favors our interests chiefly.
WHY TRUMP’S HOUTHI POLICY SHOULD AVOID FULL-SCALE WAR
In short, putting America first means rejecting calls for restraint and instead projecting strength. When President Ronald Reagan was asked about his strategy to deal with the USSR at the height of the Cold War, he answered simply, “We win, they lose.” That bravado was accompanied, though, by serious efforts in every policy domain to secure American competitiveness. From the wrongly derided “Star Wars” missile defense program to a major renewal of the armed forces, Reagan aimed to make the U.S. stronger in every domain than our Soviet enemies. It worked, and the wall fell. The lesson of the greatest presidency of the 20th century still resounds today: There is no substitute for victory.
Upon taking up residence once again in the Oval Office, Trump put a portrait of the Gipper in a prominent spot behind the Resolute desk. It was almost as though he was acknowledging that without the support of the GOP’s Reaganite core, there was no chance he would have made his stunning return to that room. Especially when it comes to national security and the new Cold War, he cannot afford to disappoint them. The people want a genuinely anti-communist foreign policy, and Trump should be brave enough to give it to them.
Michael Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, an associate editor of Law & Liberty, and a contributing editor to Providence.