They are the new class of cold warriors, guns pointed at China.
President-elect Donald J. Trump has chosen cabinet secretaries and a national security adviser who stress the need to confront China across the entire security and economic spectrum: military posture, trade, technology, espionage, human rights and Taiwan.
Those choices could open a new era of conflict with a nuclear-armed nation that has the world’s largest standing army and second-largest economy, and where many top officials see the United States as a superpower in decline.
Mr. Trump’s hawkish advisers so far include Marco Rubio, a Florida senator named as secretary of state; Michael Waltz, a Florida congressman tapped for national security adviser; and Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News television personality designated to be defense secretary. Cabinet secretaries must be confirmed by the Senate, although Mr. Trump has floated the idea of getting around that by using recess appointments.
Those men are more explicitly hostile to China than their counterparts in the Biden administration, though President Biden has taken an aggressive tack with China and continued some of the policies from Mr. Trump’s first term. A consensus has solidified among Democrats and Republicans in Washington that China must be constrained because it is the nation most capable of upending American global dominance.
Yet there are signs that Mr. Trump might consider a more moderate approach on trade, perhaps to avoid upsetting a roaring stock market nurtured by Mr. Biden.
That includes Mr. Trump’s announcement on Tuesday that he plans to appoint Howard Lutnick, chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, as commerce secretary and overseer of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Mr. Trump said Mr. Lutnick will “lead our tariff and trade agenda.” Mr. Lutnick has said he supports more targeted tariffs rather than the universal ones that Mr. Trump and some of his hard-line advisers have mentioned during the campaign. And Mr. Lutnick has asserted that Mr. Trump “wants to make a deal with China.”
Mr. Lutnick told CNBC in September that tariffs are a bargaining tool and should only be imposed on foreign goods that compete with what is made in the United States.
Mr. Trump’s national security appointees typically use much stronger language. They also eschew the rhetoric of Mr. Biden’s aides, who speak of working with China on a few global issues and maintaining stable ties.
“I feel strongly that the Chinese Communist Party has entered into a Cold War with the United States and is explicit in its aim to replace the liberal, Western-led world order that has been in place since World War II,” Mr. Waltz said last year at an event hosted by the Atlantic Council, a research group.
“We’re in a global arms race with an adversary that, unlike any in American history, has the economic and the military capability to truly supplant and replace us,” he added.
Those aides could find themselves contending with counterweights in the administration, including Mr. Lutnick and other colleagues who may not want to smash commercial ties to China.
That also includes their boss. When it comes to China, Mr. Trump is more transactional than ideological, willing to threaten or impose punishing tariffs to try to land deals that he says will benefit the United States. He has rarely expressed support for human rights and talks of autocrats, including Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in glowing terms. And current close advisers of his, notably Elon Musk, the tycoon who owns Tesla, have important business interests in China.
As Mr. Trump prepares to take office, this mix of incentives and ideas is creating significant uncertainty about the direction of one of the world’s most consequential relationships.
China is rapidly building up its military. It makes contentious territorial claims to the entirety of the South China Sea, in which the navies of the United States and Southeast Asian nations operate, and seeks to bring the democratic island of Taiwan under its control. It is giving commercial aid to Russia during its war on Ukraine. It is quickly building out its technological capacity. It has threatened to clamp down on exports of strategic goods, including certain critical minerals.
But the country remains one of America’s top trading partners and an essential supplier and customer for many U.S. businesses. Mr. Biden also says China is a necessary partner on critical global issues, including climate change, infectious diseases, narcotics, nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence.
In the first Trump administration, there was a sharp divergence on China policy among rival aides who sometimes argued in front of him. The main cleavage was between national security and some economic aides who aimed to aggressively confront and contain China, and advisers from the business world who wanted to maintain and even bolster certain commercial ties.
Mr. Rubio and Mr. Waltz, as well as Robert Lighthizer and Peter Navarro, two former trade aides who could enter this administration, embrace the idea of decoupling: They believe the United States is better off drastically cutting commerce and other ties with China. They criticize the more surgical approach — de-risking — advocated by Mr. Biden and some European leaders. That approach seeks to maintain broad commercial relations with China while cutting back specific trade that officials say threatens national security — notably the sale to Chinese companies of advanced semiconductor chips.
Mr. Trump’s national security aides will likely push for a rapid U.S. military buildup in the Asia-Pacific region, with an eye toward a potential war over Taiwan. However, the aides have also talked of confronting Iran, which would divert military resources from Asia.
Other potential appointees, notably Elbridge A. Colby, a former Pentagon official, stress the need to husband those resources in Asia to try to deter China.
It is also unclear whether Mr. Trump’s top aides would support the reinforcement of military alliances in Asia that Mr. Biden undertook, since Mr. Trump has asserted that allies — including Taiwan, Japan and South Korea — take advantage of the United States.
Mr. Trump has talked tough on trade with China. He could support a push by some Republican lawmakers, including Mr. Rubio, to revoke China’s “most favored nation” trading status with the United States, which would result in higher tariffs on the country’s goods. Even outside of that, Mr. Trump says he wants to impose tariffs of up to 60 percent on Chinese imports.
In his first term, Mr. Trump slapped tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of products from the country. Mr. Biden kept those tariffs.
But Mr. Trump also has a history of vacillating on trade policy. At the request of Mr. Xi, he lifted sanctions on ZTE, a Chinese technology firm, and created exceptions for some sales to continue to Huawei, in an effort to reach a trade deal with the country. Both are companies that his former national security advisers considered threats, and Mr. Rubio, the senator, criticized Mr. Trump’s leniency on ZTE at the time.
More recently, Mr. Trump has reversed his position on TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned social media app, about which there are also national security concerns. After trying to ban TikTok from the United States in 2020, Mr. Trump has recently promised to rescue it. That has raised questions about the influence of a billionaire conservative megadonor, Jeff Yass, who is invested in ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.
A large part of how Mr. Trump himself will handle China could depend on Mr. Xi. Like some other leaders, Mr. Xi could turn to flattery and try to engage Mr. Trump in personalized diplomacy. Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, did this in the first Trump administration, to the delight of Mr. Trump.
As president, Mr. Trump welcomed Mr. Xi to Mar-a-Lago in 2017, only to have their budding relationship fall apart over a trade war that Mr. Trump started.
In a meeting on Sunday with Mr. Biden in Peru, Mr. Xi stressed four “red lines” for China in relations with the United States: Taiwan, democracy and human rights, China’s path and system, and China’s right to development, according to Xinhua, China’s state news agency. The message appeared aimed as much at Mr. Trump and his new team as at the Biden administration.
The leading China policy hand among the current appointees is Mr. Rubio, a Cuban American critic of Communist governments. He made China a focus of his legislative efforts over his nearly 14 years as a U.S. senator. None of Mr. Trump’s designated aides have spent as much time as Mr. Rubio examining the many dimensions of U.S.-China competition and trying to enact policy through legislation, across Republican and Democratic administrations.
Mr. Rubio has sponsored bills that have touched on many aspects of U.S.-China relations, from human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong to U.S. stock market listings by Chinese companies and the “wealth and corrupt activities” of Chinese leaders.
In September, Mr. Rubio released a report called “The World China Made” that took a detailed look at China’s efforts to dominate 10 strategic industries. He wrote that his aim was to issue a “wake-up call about how serious the threat we face has become. No longer can we fall back on old dogmas and stale talking points.”
On the economic front, Mr. Trump is still weighing his Treasury secretary pick. That person would work alongside Mr. Lutnick, playing a key role in economic talks with China.
Mr. Lighthizer, who led Mr. Trump’s earlier trade talks with China, could get a senior role, though perhaps not in the cabinet. Mr. Navarro, the author of “Death by China” and “The Coming China Wars,” could also get a position. He visited Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago this month, after having served four months in prison this year for defying a congressional subpoena related to a House investigation into the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The Chinese government has not made official statements on Mr. Trump’s appointees. Tang Shiping, a political scientist at Fudan University in Shanghai, wrote online that Mr. Rubio’s appointment in itself “is difficult enough for China to deal with.”
The selections have also resonated in Taiwan, where the ruling Democratic Progressive Party denounces China’s efforts to bring the island under its control.
Vincent Chao, a politician in Taipei who was President Lai Ching-te’s spokesman during his election campaign earlier this year, said that Mr. Trump’s choices would give allies in the Pacific region confidence that America would continue to stand by them “in terms of supporting their ability to resist coercion and intimidation” by the China.
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