CHAOS UNDER HEAVEN

Breaking down the messy nature of Donald Trump’s hard-line China policy and how China took advantage of the relationship.

The last four years of the American government’s stance regarding China was largely guided by the realization that the prior 40-year experiment of engagement and accommodation was not working. China simply did not want political liberalization, and growing evidence revealed that the Chinese Communist Party was infiltrating many facets of American society, from universities to Silicon Valley to Wall Street. As Washington Post foreign policy columnist Rogin shows in meticulous, depressing detail, even though candidate Trump’s aggressive approach effectively called out the authoritarian regime, the administration’s “dysfunction and the president’s behavior” led to erratic results. From the beginning, Trump loyalists like Jared Kushner—guided by Steve Mnuchin and other “pro-business players”—and Steve Bannon fashioned themselves as China experts. Regarding Bannon, the author writes, “it takes real nerve to lead a populist, anti-China movement when you started as a Goldman Sachs executive—and when you have already made your money in China before turning against the system that made that possible. After he left Goldman, Bannon worked for…a Hong Kong startup…[that] used cheap labor in China to mine virtual goods inside computer games to sell for real-world money.” On the other hand, Matthew Pottinger, National Security Council senior director for Asia, managed to craft an intelligible policy and was one of the few who stuck it out for all four years of Trump’s presidency. Rogin delineates how, by 2018, hawks like Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence overruled the pro-business faction, leading to the implementation of tariffs and an all-out trade war. The spread of Covid-19, which Trump repeatedly dubbed the “China virus,” as well as the violent suppression in Hong Kong ensured that U.S.–China relations reached a low point by the 2020 election. It doesn’t make for heartening reading, but Rogin covers it comprehensively.

An exhaustive study that leaves open the question of whether the Biden administration can maintain a steadier hand.