Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump shake hands at a state banquet at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, May 14, 2026.
While some of President Donald Trump’s supporters and critics are claiming he lost America’s war against Iran, one foreign policy expert says Trump is losing a different consequential geopolitical battle — namely, America’s rivalry with China.
“An uneasy quiescence has come to define U.S.-Chinese relations during U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term,” wrote Jonathan A. Czin of Foreign Affairs on Monday. “Although both governments are calling it ‘constructive strategic stability,’ U.S.-Chinese relations have been so tenuous and shallow, so lacking in ambition or any affirmative vision from either side, that it seems more apt to describe the current moment as a stalemate defined by ‘mutually assured disruption.’ Going forward, the crucial question for both sides will be who is making better use of this interregnum.”
Czin went on to explain that the Chinese government sees the ongoing stalemate as a victory because China has positioned itself as America’s peer on the global stage. He continues that there is a lot of evidence to support this interpretation, even though Trump insists that he actually made America the winner in the bilateral exchange.
“Trump himself seems stuck in history, as he is taking U.S. China policy back to the engagement policy found in the 1990s and early 2000s,” Czin wrote. “He has put commerce in the foreground and security in the background. He seems more concerned about Taiwan destabilizing the cross-strait dynamic than Beijing doing so. And of course, the administration this year has devoted nearly all its bandwidth to yet another war in the Middle East, replicating the distractions of the past quarter century but without the valid excuse of a calamity like 9/11 or the dramatic rise of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) a dozen years later.”
He added, “If every day of this stalemate is ‘strategic,’ the United States is squandering its hard power and dissipating its military strength—rather than enhancing it—while also putting the federal budget on an even more unsustainable trajectory.”
Similar to Czin, the anti-Trump Republican group The Lincoln Project argued in May that Trump sold out ordinary American workers to benefit China.
“China: They've been taking our jobs for decades — millions of jobs lost to unfair trade and cheap labor, crushing American workers,” The Lincoln Project posted on Wednesday. “Elon Musk made $178 billion last year. His largest factory is in China. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, made over $100 million last year. iPhones are made in China with cheap labor. These companies made billions in profits exploiting American workers.”
The post added, “Who's going to speak up for the American worker? Nobody. Donald Trump and the Republicans don't care about us. They're cutting deals with China and laughing at us. More AI to kill our jobs — they love it. They get richer, we get screwed. It's wrong, but until we stop them, it will only get worse.”
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