• United States
• China
• Lili Pike

It was during Trump’s first term that the United States labeled China a “strategic competitor,” establishing it as the core U.S. foreign-policy priority. Coming into his second term, Trump handpicked top officials—including Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy—who have consistently argued that China should remain at the center of U.S. strategy.

The United States needs “allies to step up in big ways so that we can focus on East Asia, which is where our most significant competitor is for the next 20 or 30 years,” Vance said in a New York Times interview last year.

Yet, in the first months of Trump’s new term, other issues, from the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine to immigration and the overhaul of the U.S. federal government, have taken center stage. And when the administration has focused on China, strategy has at times appeared to be an afterthought.

Take the renewed trade war with China, for instance. The president has tasked tariffs with punishing China for its role in the fentanyl trade, bringing manufacturing back to the United States, and raising tax revenue. But these objectives will ultimately be in tension with one another; the more the United States reduces reliance on Chinese imports in favor of U.S.-made products, for instance, the less revenue the country will bring in from tariffs.

The tension between these goals—and the potential fallout from a confrontation with Beijing—didn’t stop Trump from ratcheting tariffs on Chinese imports up to an unprecedented 145 percent over the course of one week in early April. The skirmish yielded no significant economic concessions from China. And it came at a price for the United States: The high tariffs scrambled supply chains, and China invoked its hold over rare-earth elements and magnets. Although it began distributing rare-earth export licenses to U.S. companies again after talks in London in June, the U.S. defense industry will likely remain cut off.

Trump signs an executive order imposing tariffs on imported goods in the Rose Garden of the White House on April 2.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

For Trump, the short-term deal was sufficient to claim victory, though. He swung from calling China the “biggest abuser of them all” in April to proclaiming “OUR DEAL WITH CHINA IS DONE … RELATIONSHIP IS EXCELLENT!” on Truth Social after the London meeting.

“This was not designed by the China policy folks, or perhaps by anyone, to go exactly the way that it did,” said a former Trump official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “You had the president’s interest in what became the Liberation Day tariffs … become the primary thing in trade policy and then escalate quickly in a manner that forced it to the top of the China agenda.”

With his freewheeling, dealmaking style, Trump has always colored outside the lines of established policy. In 2018, he lifted national security restrictions on the Chinese tech company ZTE at the behest of Chinese President Xi Jinping, against the advice of his own staff, to smooth the path to a trade deal. But by and large, in Trump’s first term, his China advisors successfully pushed to make competition with China a central U.S. mandate, which solidified into a bipartisan pursuit under his successor, Joe Biden.

In Trump’s second term, though, shoot-from-the-hip decision-making—from the rapid swings in trade policy to sweeping personnel cuts—has dominated and is complicating the U.S. mission to outcompete China.

“The thing that strikes me as strange is how backwards this seems, that before we’ve laid out a strategy of what our country’s priorities are in competing with the PRC, we’ve taken a lot of the tools we’re likely going to need to implement a strategy away,” said Mark Lambert, who was the State Department’s China coordinator under the Biden administration, using an acronym for the People’s Republic of China.

Matt Pottinger, the senior Asia director on the U.S. National Security Council (right), arrives for the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing on May 14, 2017.Mark Schiefelbein/Getty Images

To ensure China remained a core government priority, the previous two administrations relied on the National Security Council (NSC) as the hub for formulating policy and coordinating its implementation across agencies. In Trump’s first term, Matt Pottinger, who started as a senior Asia advisor and became deputy national security advisor, led the strategic reorientation toward China and expanded the NSC Asia team to support that mission.

This time, Trump has slashed the NSC, including its Asia staff. It started in April, when several NSC staff were fired, reportedly at the direction of far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who deemed them insufficiently loyal to Trump. David Feith, who had previously served as a senior State Department official on East Asia during Trump’s first term and was coordinating technology policy related to China, was among those cut. In May, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was moved to the United Nations. Alex Wong, a top Asia official during Trump’s first term and Waltz’s deputy, was also reportedly reassigned. Then, on a Friday in late May, more than 100 NSC staffers were fired, including over a dozen who worked on China or China-related topics, Politico reported.

“I do fear that it’s a loss. Presidents are generally well served by having good and well-staffed NSCs on these issues, and that’s especially the case given the way that China poses challenges. Frankly, as the first Trump term itself helped demonstrate, our China problems are not neatly siloed into the divisions of authority and responsibility of our bureaucracy,” the former Trump official said.

The administration appears to be backpedaling to some extent now. Rubio, now also the acting national security advisor, has directed the NSC to hire staff again, including some of the people who were previously dismissed, Bloomberg reported in June.

“I think the problem with China is it permeates everything. And so if you don’t have a coordinating structure that isn’t just about China—that actually coordinates—that’s where the problems come in,” a former senior State Department China official said.

In response to a request for comment, a senior administration official told Foreign Policy: “The right-sizing of the NSC and State [Department], as well as Secretary Rubio’s joint roles, allow for more effective collaboration and streamlined information in order to more effectively execute the agenda President Trump was elected to implement.”

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (center) tours the Miraflores locks of the Panama Canal in Panama City on Feb. 2.Mark Schiefelbein/AFP via Getty Images

But as Rubio had noted in his confirmation hearing in January, “There is no American alternative to what the Chinese are offering” to countries like Panama in terms of development lending through the BRI. He said his aim would be to increase U.S. investment abroad to counter China. Yet, instead of building on the more limited foreign investment programs the United States did have in place, Trump’s sweeping review of foreign aid has thrown those initiatives into disarray.

During Trump’s first term, for instance, Congress created a new U.S. development bank, the International Development Finance Corp. (DFC), which was intended to be one of the country’s main tools to counter China’s overseas financing and influence. When Trump took office a second time, though, he placed the bank’s projects under scrutiny.

In response to a request for comment, a DFC official told Foreign Policy that the bank “is undertaking a comprehensive review of its current portfolio and pipeline transactions to ensure alignment with administration priorities and executive orders.” The official added that two new transactions had been approved at the bank’s June board meeting.

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The bank is also facing larger uncertainty: The deadline for Congress to reauthorize the DFC is fast approaching, and it has yet to do so. Republicans have viewed the bank as a more palatable alternative to foreign aid, and the DFC official struck an optimistic note, saying, “We have seen a bipartisan desire to reauthorize DFC expeditiously.”

But other China initiatives run out of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have been lost in the teardown of the agency led by the Trump-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

One such program is the $400 million Countering PRC Influence Fund. USAID co-administered the program with the State Department, providing grants in countries on the front lines of U.S. competition with China. In the Pacific islands, where China and its technology companies have expanded their influence in recent years, for instance, USAID was set to provide $3.8 million in technical assistance to Palau for a new undersea cable. The agency was also pouring development assistance into the Lobito Corridor project in Angola, where the DFC had funded rail infrastructure to get access to cobalt and other critical minerals.

Around 95 percent of the projects supported by USAID under the fund have now been cut, according to a former senior China policy advisor at the agency. Only a few were shifted over to the State Department.

Street vendors walk past the U.S. Agency for International Development office in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, on March 22.Issouf Sangog/AFP via Getty Images

“All the programming that we used to do to counter them has been eliminated, and our colleagues at the State Department working in this field have also not picked up the projects either, and that’s because there’s no strategic direction,” a second former USAID official said.

Former USAID staff told Foreign Policy that a wide range of other eliminated aid programs beyond the fund were also a critical way of bolstering the United States’ overseas presence and complementing infrastructure investment through the DFC.

“USAID is able to do a lot of good in the world that promotes America as a strong and reliable partner and a trustworthy partner and a partner that is not purely transactional or extractive, which is a very strong contrast to the PRC’s foreign policy model, and that has really been undermined, not only by the cuts to U.S. aid, but also the tariffs,” the former USAID China advisor said.

Meanwhile, China is stepping up its foreign aid. In recent months, the Chinese government has helped fill funding gaps left by USAID at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and demining in Cambodia.

“What we see the PRC doing is capitalizing on the vacuum, but they’re not going to fill the void. They don’t spend as much money, but right now they don’t have to spend as much money on foreign assistance to look really good,” the former China advisor said.

In response to a request for comment, a senior State Department official said, “The provision of any foreign assistance will be guided by whether it makes America safer, stronger, and more prosperous.”

Protesters dressed up as workers take part in a demonstration against Foxconn, which manufactures Apple products in mainland China, outside an Apple retail outlet in Hong Kong on May 7, 2011.Antony Dickson/AFP via Getty Images

Many China watchers expected Rubio, who had a strong record of China human rights advocacy in the Senate, to prioritize those issues at the State Department. In his public statements as secretary of state, Rubio has indeed continued to highlight human rights, calling out Thailand for forcibly returning at least 40 Uyghurs to China and, for the June anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, applauding the bravery of the protesters.

But the foreign aid review launched on Trump’s first day in office led to funding cuts for a swath of China human rights programs. In February, DOGE froze funding for the congressionally supported nonprofit National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which meant the tap was cut off for its China grantees as well. NED’s funding was later partially reinstated, but Trump zeroed out the organization’s funding in his 2026 budget request, so its future remains precarious.

The State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) has also been targeted. The bureau has long been the leading governmental funder of China human rights work, with an annual budget of $12 million for China and $5 million for Hong Kong, but after initial rounds of foreign assistance reviews, the State Department terminated hundreds of grants, including in DRL’s China portfolio.

Groups that have been affected by the cuts include Freedom House, a large Washington-based rights organization that had to shut down its China Dissent Monitor, which tracks collective action across China. It was relaunched in June based on individual donations, but the organization warned that the new funding would only last for 60 days. China Digital Times, a website that archives a valuable trove of censored content from the Chinese internet, also had to slim down its operations after losing funding. China Labor Watch, a New York-based organization, lost about 90 percent of its budget overnight. The group has investigated working conditions in Chinese factories, including those supplying Apple, Samsung, and other international brands. The organization was later notified after the review that it would receive funding, but now greater threats loom.

Up to 80 percent of DRL staff are expected to be fired in the State Department’s impending reorganization, Politico reported in May. And the Office of Management and Budget has advised the State Department to slash almost all of its DRL funding, including all but one of the remaining China grants, the Guardian reported last week.

“If these cuts go through, then that will be sort of the nuclear bomb moment in which a lot of people will be out of a job,” said Thomas Kellogg, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Center for Asian Law who studies Chinese civil society.

“It would be absolutely devastating for the community of activists as well as analysts that work on China that are independent of Chinese government control,” said Maya Wang, the associate China director at Human Rights Watch. These groups are uniquely reliant on U.S. government funding because domestic support has dried up due to repression under Xi, and Washington has been one of the only governments willing to back civil society organizations critical of the Chinese Communist Party, she added.

A sign is posted on the entrance to the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington on March 18.Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

DOGE has dismantled government-funded think tanks including the Wilson Center and U.S. Institute of Peace, and with them, China expertise has been lost. Government-funded media outlets Radio Free Asia and Voice of America both saw their funding cut, despite a history of providing deeply sourced reporting on human rights violations in hard-to-access regions such as Xinjiang and Tibet.

The flood has reached universities, too. In just one example, the Defense Department slashed all of its Minerva social science grants, derailing multiyear research projects on U.S.-China deterrence. Foreign Policy spoke with three of the impacted academics.

Renard Sexton, an associate professor at Emory University, was studying the effect of lengthened conscription requirements in Taiwan on resolve to fight in a potential battle against China, before the cuts came down. “This is, in principle, really high-priority research by a scholar that has experience in the national security infrastructure and is seeking to do research that’s super policy relevant,” said Sexton, who previously spent a year on a fellowship at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.

Jack Zhang, an assistant professor at the University of Kansas, lost funding for his research evaluating whether economic interdependence with China is an effective deterrent. “The irony is that the last Cold War was the golden age of area studies in the United States, when a lot of these programs were set up, because I think there was a recognition that it was of strategic importance to try to understand competitors, adversary countries, and read what they put out into the world, and somehow that has been lost,” he said.

Trump attends a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington on April 10.Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Of course, it is still early days for the administration. The past two administrations didn’t release their Indo-Pacific strategies until more than a year into their terms. On trade, Trump is holding tariffs on China at a high average rate of 51 percent, so his negotiators could still notch significant concessions from Beijing in the coming months’ trade talks. And Trump’s team has continued some previous efforts, such as restricting China’s access to U.S. chips and AI technology.

“This is not the President’s first term. His strategy and intent are clear and constantly communicated,” a Trump administration official told Foreign Policy.

But taken together, all of the cuts and hasty policy decisions, from academia to Foggy Bottom, may be leading to significant shifts in how the U.S. government approaches China. For China strategists from both parties in Washington who’ve tried to build a rigorous campaign of competing with Beijing without sparking conflict, the erosion of coherence and urgency around China policy is concerning.

“It’s fair game if an administration wants to change the priorities. But I don’t think we have a clear sense of what their priority is. So how do you judge whether a career bureaucracy is effectively serving a president when the target is constantly shifting?” the former senior China official at the State Department said.