Zachary Karabell is a contributing editor at Politico Magazine.

Notwithstanding the mini deal the White House announced late last week, the state of U.S.-China relations remains tense, and there is no reason to expect that they will ease up. The Trump administration, with its fixation on trade balances and its view that the Chinese have ripped off U.S. consumers for decades, clearly initiated the current trade war. But the truth is that American animosity to the rise of China can’t all be attributed to President Donald Trump.

That animosity runs deep in American society and cuts across partisan lines and geography, with politicians across the spectrum regularly asserting Beijing’s status as an adversary and some 60 percent of the American public now holding unfavorable views of China. When it comes to the multiple and many self-inflicted wounds that the current U.S.-China trade war has caused and the many more it will likely cause in the future, Trump may have lit the match, but Americans of all stripes added the kindling for years beforehand.


This matters because the hardening of attitudes toward China across a wide swath of American society seems to be resulting in bad policy: confrontational and punitive strategies that are just hard-core enough to undermine relations, but not nearly sufficient to pressure China into making systemic changes or to help the United States find viable alternatives to the needs China currently fulfills. Unless Americans begin to revise their impression of China, recognizing its limitations and its vast potential and treating it as a partner rather than a foe, China is unlikely to alter course; in fact, it is entirely possible that more and more draconian measures could plunge the United States and China into a deep economic tailspin.

There’s no question that the U.S.-China economic relationship, which had been carefully developed over the past 20 years, is at a new low in the Trump era. The current administration has done its best to disrupt that relationship, from the first set of tariffs imposed in the spring of 2018 to the latest tranche in August, which slapped 25 percent duties on several hundred billion dollars’ worth of imports from China. Beijing has retaliated by slashing purchases of U.S. agricultural goods, leading to Washington’s $25 billion bailout of American farmers. Meanwhile, the United States has restricted the ability of Chinese companies such as Huawei to do business with American companies, and the Chinese government has begun putting pressure on American companies doing business in China. While trade between the two countries has not contracted nearly as much as one might have expected given these moves, most analysts believe that both American and Chinese economic growth has suffered considerably.

But there should be no illusion Trump or his trade advisers invented the idea that China is a U.S. adversary. Such attitudes are widespread in American society, including among many of the president’s detractors, and have been germinating for years. As early as 2004, the Democratic nominee for president, John Kerry, was saying that companies that sourced jobs to China were being led by “Benedict Arnold CEOs.” Or take the more recent imbroglio over the NBA, sparked by a tweet from the Houston Rockets’ general manager expressing support for the Hong Kong protests against Beijing. A remarkable cross-current of people, many of them not even political or partisan, denounced the NBA for giving a lukewarm defense of free speech, seemingly because it fears economic retaliation from China. To many Americans, it seemed absurd that the league would defend a repressive communist regime rather than an American citizen’s exercise of free speech, and the NBA has been portrayed widely as craven and venal, holding economics above morals.

While Trump is driving the specifics of U.S. foreign and economic policy toward China, he represents a broad political consensus that Beijing is a bad actor that has gotten away with too much, has values and interests inimical to our own, and represents a threat to American prosperity—all of which suggest that a much harder stance is merited. Republicans who vociferously used to support free trade have been mostly silent about Trump’s trade war, save to hope that there will soon be a deal that forces China to make changes. Likewise, almost every Democratic candidate, when asked about China policy, has begun with some variant of “of course, China is breaking the rules and needs to be held accountable” before criticizing how the Trump administration is meeting that challenge. “We’ve let China get away with the suppression of pay and labor rights, poor environmental protections, and years of currency manipulation,” Senator Elizabeth Warren said a few months ago. (In fact, China’s record on environmental issues and alternative energy is better than Trump’s, and the charge of currency manipulation belies how the renminbi has traded.)

What’s so troubling about this reflexive consensus is that it entirely ignores not just the depth of U.S.-China economic ties, but the profound advances China has made toward ending internal chaos and violence and improving the lives of the vast majority of its citizens. The regime of President Xi Jinping undoubtedly violates many core tenets of Western liberalism and American democracy, ranging from suppression of ethnic minorities including the Uighurs to draconian responses to political dissent. But the United States for decades has maintained relations with countries whose policies it abhors, without jeopardizing more constructive aspects—for example, obtaining oil from regimes in the Middle East, or security and economic cooperation with Thailand.

When it comes to China, however, America writ large now seems to be taking a more absolutist stance, weaving a narrative that leaves little room for anything but disengagement and confrontation. In the long run, this stance will only hurt the United States. China is still a major source of opportunity for American businesses. And it’s not just corporations that benefit from the hundreds of billions of dollars of commercial engagement. China had been a significant investor in U.S. real estate until purchases plummeted this year. It had been sending 350,000 students to study at American universities annually—all paying tuition; now, that number has begun to contract. And, of course, there were the tens of billions of dollars of U.S. farm exports to China that supported local communities throughout the United States until those exports slowed dramatically last year.

What all of this resembles is the deepening of the Cold War with the Soviet Union in the 1950s—except that China today is far less threatening to the international order than the Soviet Union was back then. The West’s concern about the Soviet Union as the source of spreading communism and a nuclear threat was perfectly rational. But the domestic hysteria and paranoid view of world politics did us considerable harm as well, as the war in Vietnam—based on a specious domino theory about how communism might spread—amply demonstrated.

Unlike the Cold War, however, the United States today is not only exaggerating the danger of China; it is failing to do anything domestically to meet that exaggerated danger. If China really does pose an existential threat, why aren’t we matching Chinese investments in cyber-technology, artificial intelligence, space exploration, education and foreign aid by doubling or tripling down on our own spending and energy in those areas? What we have instead is a rhetorical war combined with pin-prick tariffs and erratic retaliation against Chinese companies. This strategy antagonizes China, hurts American businesses and citizens, and perpetuates a fantasy in which the world’s second largest economy—with 1.5 billion people and a growth rate of more than 6 percent annually—will suddenly fold like a cheap tent just because the United States says mean things and threatens dire consequences. (Make no mistake, the tariffs, as destructive as they are, are not nearly destructive enough to radically break the current system, which is why trade between the U.S. and China has dipped but not imploded—yet.)

The United States is badly fumbling the rise of a new global power. For all the strengths this country has, it has never had to face a competitor that it cannot coerce, cannot invade, cannot humble and cannot contain, except at severe damage to ourselves. The Soviet Union was never an economic threat, which did not make the Cold War easy but also did not prepare the United States for the rise of China. Thankfully, unlike the Soviets, China has modest global ambitions, for now, and its investment in resource-rich Central Asian, African and Latin American countries is primarily focused on China’s domestic economic security and not territorial expansion.

In response, the United States appears to be having a temper tantrum, rather than a cohesive strategy that combines domestic initiatives and foreign diplomacy to work toward realistic goals. Neither party, none of the major presidential candidates and remarkably few prominent voices (other than occasional plaintive business leaders) meaningfully dissent from the thesis that China is a threat, or offer realistic responses that take into account how powerful China is becoming and how powerful the United States is. In this rare instance, Trump is in sync with a broad spectrum of American society, and that makes the current approach a national shame. Unless, the United States starts to approach China more rationally and realistically, Americans will be paying the price for years to come.