Communist China is riding high. President Xi Jinping has been feting some of America’s closest allies, reaching new agreements to boost his economic ties with and influence over these nations.
That’s bad for America. China’s central foreign policy objective is to diminish U.S. influence so it can take advantage of the growing vacuum of power. For Xi, taking advantage means seizing Taiwan, subordinating Pacific Rim nations (and U.S. treaty allies such as South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines) to Chinese hegemony, and engaging in ever-increasing trade dumping, political manipulation, intellectual property theft, and human rights abuses. In return for their acquiescence here, Xi offers a generally predictable trade partner of significant scale.
U.S. President Donald Trump has rightly expressed concern over recent trips by the leaders of Canada and the United Kingdom to Beijing. What Trump leaves out, however, is that he is a primary cause of this troubling development. His recent threats to Denmark to surrender its Greenland territory greatly undermined trust in America as Europe’s partner of choice. His threats to turn Canada into the 51st state have had much the same effect. While Trump has now broadly abandoned those threats, he has slashed the fundamental tenet of America’s post-Second World War order: the principle of respect for democratic sovereignty. Add Trump’s insults to the soldiers of allies who died fighting alongside America in Afghanistan, and the United States increasingly appears unreliable as an ally.
That unreliability has led America’s allies in Europe and beyond to increasingly recalibrate their foreign policies away from former general deference to U.S. security interests. Xi is taking greatest advantage.
Employing a diplomatic nuance and graciousness that has escaped the Chinese Communist Party until now, Xi is throwing out the red carpet. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Canada’s Mark Carney have now joined French President Emmanuel Macron as honored guests of Xi. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz will soon visit Beijing. All these leaders will do so with fewer cards to play than Trump will have in his pocket when he makes his own visit to China in April. And while it’s true that America’s allies have sought increased trade links with China in recent years, the scale and speed of their pursuit of that interest is plainly increasing.
Still, Trump can right the ship of sinking American influence.
The Chinese communists ultimately value power and dominance as the highest virtue. Sensing that they now have the initiative with traditional American allies, Xi will eventually overplay his hand. Likely sooner than later. And when that happens, whether it’s a stunning Chinese theft of intellectual property from the Netherlands, or an aggressive act of political intimidation in the U.K. or Canada, or rampant military espionage in France, or an insistence on increased trade dumping in Germany, Trump must be ready.
IN FOCUS: IRAN REGIME CHANGE WOULD COST BOOTS ON THE GROUND AND CHINA WAR READINESS
At that moment, he can robustly condemn China’s activity, call for coordinate responses to that activity, emphasize how it undergirds a regime fundamentally unconcerned with faithful dealing and the rule of law (Trump is too unpredictable, but the U.S. legal system, including its Constitutional checks and balances, remain the legal gold standard), and mark a departure from his Greenland rhetoric to a new endorsement of cooperative engagement with allies.
The key, then, would be to remind allies that, as much as they might not like dealing with Trump, dealing with America carries far longer-term assured benefit to their interests than getting closer to China.