When the Trump administration unveiled its new national security strategy (NSS) 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 in the NSS 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.
Source: Here