President Donald Trump has never had a strict foreign policy doctrine, but coming into office, the influential figures around him could be classified into three broad camps. There were the so-called “primacists,” who supported a traditional muscular and assertive US rule in the world; the “restrainers,” who wanted to dial back US commitments abroad and avoid costly military operations whenever possible; and the “prioritizers,” or “Asia-firsters,” who favored scaling back US involvement in the Middle East and support for Ukraine in order to focus on what they saw as the real threat: the growing military strength of the People’s Republic of China.
If you had to put money on one of these camps winning out at the beginning of the second Trump administration, the prioritizers seemed like a logical bet. It was a position that both traditional Republican hawks like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and America Firsters like Vice President JD Vance could get behind. The defense scholar Elbridge Colby, whose 2021 book, The Strategy of Denial, is effectively the prioritizer bible, got an influential strategic planning role as undersecretary of defense for policy. After 20 years of frustrating US military engagement in the Middle East, there was broad consensus among both Democrats and Republicans of various stripes that the country needed to focus on other issues.
What few would have anticipated is an administration that has effectively run the prioritizer playbook in reverse: quick to use military force abroad, engaged in yet another open-ended and costly war in the Middle East, and diverting valuable resources away from the Pacific while taking a remarkably accommodating stance toward China. In Trump’s second term, his foreign policy has been defined by deprioritizing Asian affairs in many ways.
This surprising state of affairs will be highlighted this week as Trump heads to Beijing for a summit meeting with Xi Jinping. The summit was originally scheduled for March, but it was postponed due to the war that the White House no doubt hoped would be over by now. A meeting between the two most powerful men in the world might normally dominate the global conversation for a week, but in this case, there’s a good chance it will be overshadowed by events in the Persian Gulf.
In the lead-up to the meeting, Trump seemed to be doing everything possible to not upset relations with China. As one White House official told Politico last month, the administration is “walking on eggshells” with Beijing in hopes for a breakthrough on trade relations. This approach has continued despite widespread reports of Chinese assistance to the Iranian forces that have fought and killed US troops. “I thought I had an understanding with President Xi, but that’s alright. That’s the way the war goes right?” Trump said, discussing an unspecified “gift” from China to Iran intercepted by the US military in April.
How did we get to the point where the president is taking a more aggressive and hawkish approach to nearly every global issue — except for America’s main global rival?
From unconventional hawk to unexpected dove
Trump distinguished himself during his first campaign for president with his inflammatory rhetoric about China “raping” the United States, but he was never a traditional China hawk. His focus has always been squarely on trade and economic competition, rather than geopolitics, military competition, or human rights.
Nevertheless, officials in Trump’s first administration — including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger — pushed a maximally hawkish line on China and promoted a narrative that, while the first two decades of the 21st century had been dominated by the fight against extremist groups, the decades to come would be dominated by Cold War-style “great power competition” with China.
The overwhelming focus on great power competition as the organizing principle for American foreign policy — and, to a large extent, domestic policy, as well — was taken up with gusto by the Biden administration. The imperative to prepare for a potential war with China, likely in the Taiwan Strait, was widely referred to as the “pacing challenge” in the Pentagon and prompted investments in a swathe of new programs and technologies. Over the past decade, the prospect of a real shooting war between the two nuclear armed superpowers has become disturbingly plausible, and military planners are far from comfortably confident the US would prevail in such a conflict.
One might have expected the overwhelming focus on competition with China to continue or even accelerate with Trump returning to office. But ironically, “the second Trump administration has gone out of its way to downplay the notion of great power competition, which is something that the first Trump administration introduced into Washington’s strategic lexicon,” said Patricia Kim, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center.
On the trade front at least, the second Trump administration came into office looking to pick a fight, slapping “emergency” tariffs on China that reached as high as 145 percent, citing unfair trading practices, as well as China’s role in the international fentanyl trade. But when China retaliated with punishing tariffs of its own and sparked market panic by suspending exports of the rare earth metals (essential materials for automobile, electronics, and defense manufacturers) over which China has a near monopoly, the White House backed down on the trade war. That retreat, combined with the February Supreme Court decision that limited the administration’s ability to unilaterally levy tariffs, made it clear the US was not as well positioned for a trade war as the administration had thought.
The simplest explanation for why Trump backed down from his trade war with China may be that China showed that it is able to fight back. “Trump is kind of a bully, and bullies don’t like to have even fights,” said Jeremy Shapiro, research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Colby’s 2021 book warned that America would be unable to counter China’s military rise if the US continued to expand its security commitments throughout the world by pushing for NATO expansion into Eastern Europe for instance and getting bogged down in costly long-term wars in the Middle East. “What is used for the Middle East will not be available for Asia,” he warned starkly.
The second Trump administration has followed the prioritizer playbook by substantially reducing aid to Ukraine — though he hasn’t eliminated intelligence sharing with Ukraine’s military or halted weapons sales paid for by other countries — and completing the withdrawal of US troops from Syria. On the other hand, the US has taken on a swathe of new international commitments, including a militarized new approach to Latin America, and it has actually ramped up ongoing counterterrorism operations in places like Somalia. In contrast to the first Trump administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy, which heralded a new era of Great Power Competition, the document released in 2025 was more focused on the threat posed by woke governments in Europe than authoritarians in Beijing.
“They have probably been more engaged outside of Asia than any administration has been in at least a decade,” said Zack Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies US strategy in China.
Those commitments have been dwarfed by the current war in Iran, which has dramatically drawn down US stocks of precisely the sort of advanced munitions like tomahawk cruise missiles and Patriot interceptors that would be vital in a conflict over Taiwan. The war has also required diverting resources (including THAAD interceptors, an aircraft carrier strike group, and a marine expeditionary unit) from the Indo-Pacific region to the Middle East.
“We have patiently accumulated these capabilities [in the Pacific] over time,” said a former senior US official who spoke with reporters on condition of anonymity last week. “It has now been vacated. It is all back in the Middle East.”
The eternally postponed pivot to Asia
This is hardly the first US administration that sought to redirect US attention to the Pacific, but it hasn’t quite yet. As the Wall Street Journal’s Alex Ward recently joked, “The ‘pivot to Asia’ is the U.S. foreign policy version of ‘infrastructure week.’”
Given the number of pressing global conflicts that come across the president’s desk every day, particularly in the Middle East, “it takes a tremendous amount of discipline in the US government system to ensure you actually can execute an Indo-Pacific strategy,” said the former US official.
Still, one would have thought that the particular distraction that the US recently got involved in — another open-ended and draining Middle East war — would be one that this particular administration would avoid. Trump, after all, distinguished himself from his Republican rivals in 2016 by his willingness to criticize the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his team is stocked with veterans of those wars, including Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who came to see them as strategic blunders.
It’s now clear that the “great power competition” framing of the first term was more the work of Trump’s advisers than the president himself, who has always seen Xi more as a peer with whom he can cut deals than a rival for global dominance whom he must defeat.
“The idea that the administration was going to prioritize Asia was something that was pushed by a number of people, especially on the defense side, who really believe that that would be the better approach from the US,” said the AEI’s Cooper. “The problem ultimately is that the president of the United States doesn’t share that view.”
Shapiro, of the European Council on Foreign Relations, who co-wrote the article that originally laid out the three “tribes” framework — primacists, restrainers, and prioritizers — says all three are present within the administration, but Trump ultimately doesn’t fit neatly within any of them. And in contrast to previous presidents who relied primarily on advice from their own officials and intelligence services, Trump often seems to put more stock in advice from outsiders he considers peers. This can include foreign leaders like Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who effectively made the case for the war with Iran, or business leaders like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who advocated for Trump to ease restrictions on selling his company’s most advanced microchips to China, undermining an export control regime that took shape under the first Trump administration.
In Washington’s China-watching circles, Trump is often described as his own China “desk officer.” His policies are often based on his own intuitions, and he’s far less hemmed in by more conventional advisers than during his first term. So it was always probably a mistake to attempt to glean clues about how he would approach America’s most important geopolitical relationship from the views of those around him. It also makes the outcome of any meeting between these two leaders particularly hard to predict.
Where is the US-China relationship heading?
It’s not quite as if everything is entirely rosy in the US-China relationship. The two countries remain locked in a legal and diplomatic spat over their interests in the Panama Canal, for instance. The White House has accused China of “industrial-scale campaigns” to steal artificial intelligence advances. A potential plan to require government reviews of new AI models is motivated by the imperative of keeping an edge over China, notwithstanding the White House’s recent flip on chip exports.
And while the potential for military conflict may not be front and center when it comes to the White House’s rhetoric these days, the scenario remains at the center of the US military’s planning and doctrine.
“I don’t think the Chinese are counting on the US leaving their sphere of interest,” said Brookings’ Kim. “If anything, I think they see strategic encirclement as increasing.”
Chinese leaders likely know that with the Iran war not going according to plan, Trump may feel he needs a global win — and US allies are nervously watching what he may be willing to concede in order to get one with Xi by striking a deal on trade or another issue. Trump’s comments in February, suggesting that he was discussing potential arms sales to Taiwan with Xi raised alarm bells in Taipei. The White House has also held off on approving about $15 million dollars worth of sales until after the summit to avoid offending Beijing. Xi may hope to get Trump to make an explicit statement in opposition to Taiwanese independence, overturning decades of purposeful US ambiguity on the question. If there is anything even close to that for the US side, it could boost the standing of political factions in Taiwan that want a more accommodating relationship with the mainland. A Taiwan under Chinese control might once have been considered the nightmare scenario for “Asia firsters” in Trump’s orbit. But even Colby now argues that Taiwan is “very important,” but not “essential,” for the overall goal of “denying China regional hegemony over Asia.”
This visit was already postponed once due to the war in Iran and is likely to be a bit more low-key than anticipated when it was first announced. Trump is bringing a few US CEOs along with him but fewer than when he visited in 2017. Unlike that visit, during which Trump was deeply impressed with the pomp and ceremony he was greeted with, this meeting is notably not being described by the Chinese as a “state visit plus.” It’s just a standard summit.
The summit may well result in some investment deals and perhaps some statements on issues like fentanyl and AI governance. The administration has made several calls for China to do more to help resolve the ongoing Strait of Hormuz crisis, but Beijing has shown little interest in getting more deeply involved in Middle East crises.
Low-key or not, the summit will be closely watched by US allies in the region. “Given President Trump’s criticism of wars of choice, and given the Asia-first orientation of some of his advisors, if even this administration is finding itself bogged down in the Middle East and distracted from the Indo-Pacific, I think a lot of allies and partners will conclude that the United States has a propensity for distraction, is fundamentally unreliable, and they’re going to have to make calculations accordingly,” said Ali Wyne, senior researcher on US-China relations at the International Crisis Group.
The summit may ultimately be taken as confirmation that, for all the talk of an Asian century, the US remains perpetually mired in the Middle East. If that’s ever going to change, it’s not likely to happen under this president.
