Why Trump is China’s most valuable asset

BEIJING has spent decades hunting for Western technology, funding Confucius Institutes and building Belt and Road Initiative projects. Yet, it turns out that none of that has done as much to weaken the West’s urgent need for a coordinated strategic response to the competitive onslaught by China as one man in the Oval Office.

China’s leaders are pursuing a hyper-strategic agenda in advanced manufacturing, green technology and more. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute reported in March 2026 that China is leading research in 69 of 74 critical technologies. The country also practises a one-sided approach to trade policy.

These two developments combined should provide enough of a wake-up call in Washington and every Western capital.

Policy experts have not been idle. In February 2026, the Washington-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation released a serious blueprint with more than 100 recommendations to slow China’s advance and rebuild Western strength.

Their report calls for a new export control regime, tighter limits on Chinese access to Western labs and universities, coordinated strategies against Chinese firms in third markets, and restrictions on China’s access to Western capital.

There is just one problem: that strategy assumes a United States that actually wants to lead these efforts.

That used to be a reasonable assumption. For decades, America’s credibility and predictability gave it enough political gravity to keep like-minded democracies in its orbit. Under US President Donald Trump, that concept has vanished.

Instead of building a coalition to manage China’s rise, Trump is busying himself with wrecking the very idea of Western partnership – unless, of course, it takes the form of outright submission to Washington.

Trump’s trade policy hits US allies across the world hard, while letting China and Russia, the two primary strategic rivals, off the hook.

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During his most recent presidential campaign, Trump talked about how he wanted to use a very tough tariff policy on China to force it to become much more cooperative. Soon after taking office, he changed course.

Meanwhile, the trade policy community in Washington points to the game-theory concept of the “prisoner’s dilemma” – which illustrates the paradox that two rational individuals (or, in this case, nations), each acting in their own self-interest, may choose not to cooperate even though it is in their best interest to do so.

Using this to explain the West’s lack of cohesion on China, while not irrelevant, is a complete cop-out. The split in the West has a name: Donald Trump.

The damage done by Trump on the China-Western competitiveness issue does not stop at the trade front.

At the very moment when competition with China demands more public investment in science and technology, Trump is taking a wrecking ball to the vast public funds which the US federal government has traditionally provided to underpin America’s research base.

Slashed grants, demonised universities, shuttered lab programmes, foreign scientists turned away – each one of these Trumpian policy steps is a strategic gift to Beijing.

Why is Trump acting in this manner? A loner and outsider in his business career, Trump instinctively treats alliances as something to be avoided, not a strategic asset.

Unsurprisingly, countries such as Canada, Germany, France and the United Kingdom are testing hedging strategies towards China. That is less an act of cowardice than a rational response to a US president who has signalled that he does not care whether his country’s long-time partners sink or swim.

The uncomfortable truth about Washington’s trade and tech policy scene today is that very few dare speak truth to power any longer.

Trump’s hyper-imperialist posture makes China’s job easy. Beijing does not have to “divide the West”. The US president is doing it for them, in full view of the world.

Any serious China strategy requires the opposite of Trumpism: coalition-building, respect for multilateral commitments, sustained investment in research, as well as alliances treated as critical national infrastructure, not expendable props.

What is especially galling is the presumed “adults in the room”, first and foremost Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, know all of this. And yet, they remain silent, preferring to turn into cowards, if not sycophants.

Until the US can recover that kind of leadership, Trump will remain the Chinese Communist Party’s single most valuable foreign asset – more useful to Beijing, in strategic terms, than he is to his bosom buddy Vladimir Putin, another loner in high office.

The writer is publisher and editor-in-chief of The Globalist, and director of Global Ideas Center, a Berlin-based think tank