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By Didi Kirsten Tatlow
Senior Correspondent, International Affairs
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Donald Trump’s China policies are contradictory, veering between threats and flattery and, most recently, settling into an uncomfortable kind of détente.
That has been evidenced by razzmatazz summits with Chinese leader Xi Jinping where not much gets discussed. Xi is said to loathe meeting him or even meeting his eye, despite Trump’s avowals of friendship.
In fact, for two years, Trump has flip-flopped; for example, onshoring semiconductor production on national security grounds, then selling national security-sensitive semiconductors hand over fist to China, all at the same time.
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His defenders say that China has the U.S. over a barrel because of its control of the rare earths that drive high-tech industry. They argue that Trump is above all buying time until the U.S. can establish its own supplies of the mining and processing of the minerals—or face losing its industrial power and sovereignty. There’s a lot of truth to that.
China is perhaps America’s single most important, long-term foreign policy challenge, due to its industrial might and ambition. This dwarfs any other country’s—despite the far noisier issue, among the electorate, of the Middle East.
Flush with their midterms victory, where do the Democrats stand on China, and can they work it out before 2028, when they have a serious chance of taking power?
Should they critique Trump’s détente, as evidenced, for example, by his delay in supplying weapons to Taiwan and his rush to supply chips to China? Or should they lean into these policies?
China barely figured in the elections.
That may be a good thing for the Democrats.
The range of opinion in the party is great, from the "left left" Democratic Socialists who are still few, but who exert upward pressure, are strong in the grassroots and among young people, many of whom believe that China is "anti-imperialist" even though it operates assimilationist policies toward millions of its own ethnic minorities and in border regions such as Tibet, Xinjiang where the Uyghurs live, Inner Mongolia and Hong Kong.
Then there are the Democratic centrists, some would say the realists, some of them alums of the former administration of President Joe Biden. They view China as a serious national security challenge, and, when in power, worked for export controls for sensitive national security-connected technologies such as semiconductors that outstripped anything by Trump’s Department of Commerce under Howard Lutnick, but who moved more slowly against endemic espionage by China, apparently more worried about being accused of racism than combating the Communist Party's political warfare.
Positioned opposite the realists is a progressive wing that believes, not so secretly, that China needs to be more or less appeased, or America risks war. For example, over Taiwan. Or that the U.S. needs to import EVs from China to combat climate change, regardless of how this will weaken it industrially.
2028 is still too far off to tell where the pieces of this debate will fall. But key people are likely keen to be part of any future Democratic administration.
People like Rush Doshi, a senior China and Taiwan national security official in the Biden administration, who has been effective and critical of the CCP. Or Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor of China studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS and a former senior adviser to the State Department’s policy planning staff. She is known for advancing arguments that play down possible responses to China's challenges to the U.S., or to the status quo in the Pacific including Taiwan.
Those two stand pretty much opposite each other and the contest between their visions of China policy will likely be decisive.
Capturing much of this, an authoritative essay is making the rounds among China wonks titled The Fight for the Future of Democratic Foreign Policy, published on November 3 in Foreign Affairs magazine.
"The midterm elections mark the beginning of the Democratic Party’s 2028 presidential campaign," writes Thomas Wright. He is a senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and was the senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council during the Biden administration.
"After two years of debate over the lessons of Kamala Harris’ defeat in the 2024 election, it promises to be one of the most open contests about the future of Democratic policies, including foreign policy, in generations. It also promises to be one of the most consequential. The strategic environment in 2029 is on track to be the most difficult and unforgiving since the height of the Cold War," Wright writes.
He has some advice: "Democrats must therefore lay out their ideas early and see how they fare both with voters and against the trajectory of world events."
Failing to work out the "centrist-progressive debate," the Democrats risk being unprepared for the world of 2029, which will be a tougher place, geopolitically-speaking, than ever before, Wright says. That debate takes place roughly on the Doshi-Chen Weiss axis.
Still, before they get to any of that, Democrats have a very long list of challenges they want to confront Trump with; starting with corruption, affordability, aggressive enforcement of immigration policies, his Russia policy, bullying of allies, and the Iran war.
For now, China remains way down the list.
That may be lucky, as they don’t have a consensus on what to do, yet.
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