Trump’s security strategy is making a hard pivot on China. Why now?

When the Trump administration unveiled its new national security strategy last week, many experts noticed one major shift: how it talks – or more importantly, doesn’t talk – about China.

Gone are the sweeping declarations about China being “America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge,” as articulated by the Biden administration. Nor does it include much of the stronger language of President Donald Trump’s first term, describing China in 2017 as challenging “American power, influence and interests.”

Instead, this latest document, one that every president submits to Congress outlining their foreign policy vision, emphasized the US-China economic rivalry above all – barely mentioning the concerns of authoritarianism or human rights abuses that had consistently peppered previous administrations’ reports.

“There isn’t a single mention of great power competition with China. China is seen much more as an economic competitor,” said David Sacks, a fellow for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Wen Ti-Sung, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank’s Global China Hub, described the document as a “rebalancing between interests and values.”

Instead of the US portraying itself as the “shining city upon a hill” – the President Ronald Reagan model of a nation acting as a beacon of freedom for the world – Trump’s new NSS is “about America first, it’s about focusing on developing America itself, and talking about commerce, almost first and foremost,” Wen added.

Another clue to how Trump views China on his list of security priorities lies in just how little it’s mentioned at all – only for the first time on page 19 of a 33-page document, and occupying just one section in a report that also covers Europe, Africa, the Middle East and other regions. By comparison, the Biden NSS from 2022 discusses China repeatedly throughout its 48 pages.

This change in tone and narrow economic focus appear to have been well received in Beijing. When asked about the NSS at a news conference on Monday, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Guo Jiakun emphasized the benefits of “mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation.”

“China is willing to work with the US to promote the continued stable development of China-US relations, while firmly safeguarding its own sovereignty, security, and development interests,” he said.

While Guo reiterated China’s position on sensitive topics such as Taiwan – a self-ruling island democracy that Beijing claims as its own territory – his statement was otherwise cautiously neutral, lacking the vitriol that often characterizes Chinese responses to US policy.