“No administration in history has achieved so dramatic a turnaround in so short a time.”
With those words on the opening page of the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) released earlier this month, President Donald Trump heralded his administration’s success in bringing America and the world “back from the brink of catastrophe and disaster.” The world had indeed grown more dangerous in recent years. President Joe Biden withdrew U.S. forces from Afghanistan haphazardly and carelessly. After failing to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin from undertaking a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Biden then turned to Chinese leader Xi Jinping and implored him to prevail upon Moscow to end the war. Trump has good reason to decry his predecessor’s “weakness … and deadly failures.”
Today, according to Trump, “America is strong and respected again. … In everything we do, we are putting America First.”
Words hold great power. With them, leaders can give voice to fear while instilling courage. They can acknowledge anger and demand justice while calling a nation to its better angels. Words can inspire people, channel thinking, and forge consensus. They cannot, however, change reality by their own sheer force. Platitudes are a feeble substitute for policy, and aphorisms are hollow without action. Believing otherwise is a fatal conceit of politicians, and also happens to be the weakness of the NSS—particularly with respect to U.S. competition with China.
But let us first acknowledge Trump’s accomplishments regarding China, of which there are several. His second administration is forging ahead with establishing alternative supply chains for critical minerals. The Pentagon is investing in a reinvigorated defense industrial base. The president himself is challenging President Xi Jinping to uphold his commercial commitments and, more fundamentally, transition China’s economy away from overreliance on production and toward sustainable consumption. This rebalancing would serve the whole world well and eliminate many of the problems plaguing critical industries like renewable energy, telecommunications, and automobiles.
Most consequentially, Trump took a wrecking ball in his first administration to the naïve belief that Washington could liberalize Beijing with commercialization. The White House’s diagnosis in this year’s NSS is sound:
President Trump single-handedly reversed more than three decades of mistaken American assumptions about China: namely, that by opening our markets to China, encouraging American businesses to invest in China, and outsourcing our manufacturing to China, we would facilitate China’s entry into the so-called “rules-based international order.” This did not happen.
True enough. After the end of the Cold War, American policymakers began to believe deeply misguided things about the world in which they lived. Consider President Bill Clinton’s stunning declaration in the 1994 NSS that “our goals of enhancing our security, bolstering our economic prosperity, and promoting democracy are mutually supportive.” Why? Because “nations with growing economies and strong trade ties are more likely to feel secure and to work toward freedom.” Americans began to believe they were living in a world without trade-offs, where free trade and free societies inevitably went hand in hand. It was the dictators, not democrats, who faced a zero-sum choice: reform, or perish.
Reality, of course, took a different turn. “China,” according to Trump’s NSS, “got rich and powerful, and used its wealth and power to its considerable advantage. American elites — over four successive administrations of both political parties — were either willing enablers of China’s strategy or in denial.” Again, true enough.
But what began as sound strategy during the president’s first term, grounded in a framework of great power competition, has given way to transactional balance-of-power politics. The president has been clear about his belief that “China and the United States can together solve all of the problems of the world.” So, when the NSS heralds the administration’s “turnaround in so short a time,” it is correct—but in an ironic, darker way. What began as a sober approach to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has returned to willful blindness to China’s ideological threat, as I’ve previously argued in The Dispatch.
The NSS suggests the possibility of “a genuinely mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing” rooted in “reciprocity and fairness.” It is from these assumptions that many of the administration’s most peculiar China policies flow: doubling the number of Chinese students without corresponding security protocols, allowing CCP-controlled TikTok to operate in violation of U.S. law, and approving the sale of advanced artificial intelligence chips to Chinese companies with links to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
These policies are no better than the “globalist” China agenda that preceded Trump. They assume zero security downside while maximizing commercial and cultural engagement. It is a contemporary manifestation of the misguided internationalism that led Clinton to establish permanent normal trade relations with China at the turn of the century. One could argue that Trump’s outlook is worse. In the early 2000s, America did not have a 25-year track record of CCP diplomatic deceit, predatory economics, and belligerent statecraft. Today, we have no excuse.
More pressingly, this naïveté endangers Americans. The NSS insists that America must “preserve and advance our advantage in cutting-edge military and dual-use technology, with emphasis on the domains where U.S. advantages are strongest,” to include AI. A week after publishing these words, the administration unilaterally ceded what may turn out to be a significant portion of its notable advantage in AI compute by greenlighting the sale of Nvidia H200 chips to China in exchange for 25 percent of the revenue.
On December 8, hours before the president announced this policy, the Department of Justice arrested two businessmen for allegedly smuggling the advanced chips to Chinese customers. “These chips,” the DOJ warned, “are the building blocks of AI superiority and are integral to modern military applications. The country that controls these chips will control AI technology; the country that controls AI technology will control the future.” The DOJ’s assessment is correct.
Compute capacity is America’s chief advantage in the AI race with China. According to a study from the Institute for Progress, the H200 has roughly 32 percent more processing power and 50 percent more memory bandwidth than China’s best chips today. Huawei isn’t expected to produce a chip that rivals the H200 until the end of 2027. Closing this gap for Beijing supercharges the CCP’s militarized agenda for AI: counter strikes, missile defense ambushes, robo-dog warfighting, drone warfare, and psychological operations. Beijing is preparing to fight American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, and is leveraging AI toward that end. Selling PLA-linked Chinese customers H200s underwrites this agenda.
“Peace through strength” is not an incantation, but a disposition. It is a commitment by elected leaders to properly order competing interests domestically in order to deter foreign conflicts. U.S. presidents failed to do this for decades with China, from Clinton to Barack Obama, in large part because prosperity and trade poll better on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley than cold wars and export controls. The NSS captures what appears to be the Trump administration’s slightly revised Pollyannish belief about China: the idea that Washington can correct its trade terms with Beijing without worrying about the CCP’s political warfare against America and its allies.
The president has time to course-correct, and he has all the inspiration he needs from his first administration. If he doesn’t, however, policymakers in 2050 will look back to this decade—just as we look back to the fateful decision to normalize trade relations with China 25 years ago—as a fateful turning point when America’s leaders talked a big game but yielded to billionaires and lobbyists who are not elected or paid to consider the national interest. They will also look back and know whether “America First” was doctrine or delusion.