A containership leaving the Port of New York and New Jersey, the busiest on the East Coast. – Spencer Platt/Getty Images
“America first does not mean America alone.”
Foreign-policy wonks snapped to attention when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said those words in a speech last month.
The phrase was last heard in the early years of Trump’s first term. It served to bridge two camps inside his team: economic nationalists disdainful of traditional allies, and internationalists who wanted those allies’ help containing China and Russia.
His second term has started out with the economic nationalists ascendant as Trump has piled tariffs on allies and China alike, while sparing Russia.
But Bessent’s remarks are one of several hints that internationalism isn’t dead. One came Tuesday when Trump, in a mostly cordial meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, played down talk of making Canada the 51st state.
Trump has lately cooled on Russia and warmed toward Ukraine. The minerals-investment deal the U.S. and Ukraine finally signed last week is a “tacit security guarantee, because of the economic partnership,” Bessent said Monday at a Milken Institute conference. “It’s not one of these rapacious Chinese deals.”
Most intriguing is the possibility that Trump, rather than destroying the world trading system, remakes it into one that unites the West against China.
Bessent hinted at that a month ago when Trump paused tariffs on most countries but increased them on China. “We can probably reach a deal with our allies.… And then we can approach China as a group,” he said.
The administration has since avoided talk of isolating China in hopes of bringing it to the bargaining table. Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer will meet with Chinese officials in Switzerland in coming days, their agencies said Tuesday. “The world has been coming to the U.S., and China has been the missing piece,” Bessent said Tuesday on Fox News. “We don’t want to decouple.”
Bessent has portrayed China as uniquely problematic for not just the U.S. but the world. In his April speech, he affirmed U.S. support for the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, pillars of the international economic system, while singling out China for destabilizing that system with its trade surpluses. “The country knows it needs to change,” he said.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is set to meet China’s top economic official this weekend. – Jacquelyn Martin/AP
Even America Firsters know China is in a category of its own. It has used subsidies, forced technology transfer and a host of other interventions to support national champions and discriminate against foreign companies. It seeks to dominate frontier technologies from artificial intelligence to quantum computing. It runs the world’s biggest trade surpluses.
The U.S. was alone in these concerns during Trump’s first term, but now many allies share them. The European Union calls China a “systemic rival.” The EU “economic security agenda…is very much shared with and aligned with the U.S.,” Spanish Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo said in an interview.
As China’s domestic demand has wilted recently, its flood of cheap manufactured exports has grown. Other countries are already responding with tariffs, and such measures could grow as U.S. tariffs divert Chinese exports.
Just as other countries need U.S. help against China, the reverse is also true. Rush Doshi and Kurt Campbell, who were advisers to President Joe Biden, recently noted that China now accounts for 30% of the world’s manufacturing, double the U.S. share, giving it unmatched scale to dominate strategic industries from semiconductors to shipbuilding. But the U.S. plus allies such as the EU, South Korea, Japan, Canada and Mexico would have half of global manufacturing, they noted.
“This means that Washington needs its allies and partners in ways that it did not in the past. They are not tripwires, distant protectorates, vassals, or markers of status, but providers of capacity needed to achieve great-power scale,” they recently wrote in Foreign Affairs.
In an interview, Doshi said the U.S. and key allies could erect a “shared wall” to create a protected market with the necessary scale in such sectors as robotics, unmanned systems, machine tools, ships and biotech. “The Trump administration doesn’t need deals with 75 countries. Just 10 of them to start. That’s where the mass is with respect to manufacturing, markets, and technology.”
Donald Trump made a campaign stop in 2015 at the Port of Los Angeles. – lucy nicholson/Reuters
Standing in the way of this new trading system is Trump himself. He simply doesn’t make much distinction between China and allies: They’re all “ripping us off.” When Mexico, seeking to end Trump’s 25% tariff, offered to match U.S. tariffs on China, it was rebuffed, The Wall Street Journal has reported. On Tuesday, Trump said nothing Carney could offer would remove the tariffs on Canada.
An anti-China alliance is popular among the “superhawks” in Trump’s orbit such as the first term’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, but not Trump himself, said Michael Pillsbury, an expert on Trump’s China policy. “I’ve never heard Trump lay out a plan for the containment of China.”
Trump’s willingness to hit friendly nations with tariffs, cozy up to Russia and threaten allies like Denmark and Canada has deeply undermined allies’ trust.
With the U.S. closing its market, others are more reluctant than ever to push China away. Spain, for example, is wooing Chinese auto investment. “It’s important to remain engaged with China,” said Spain’s Cuerpo. Chinese officials have warned of countermeasures against any country that makes a deal with the U.S. at its expense.
“We could easily have organized the world [to take] on China, and Donald Trump gave China a get out of jail card and put us behind bars,” said Rahm Emanuel, who was U.S. ambassador to Japan under Biden. “There’s no chance some people are going to line up with us now.”
Nonetheless, current negotiations will likely result in two tracks: high tariffs on China, and a mix of lower tariffs and bespoke deals with others.
The question, said Doshi, is whether the Trump team pursues “the goal of pooling allied scale and building a moat around Chinese excess capacity, or do they do smaller deals without this larger vision that simply address bilateral issues only?”
The odds of this more ambitious outcome “aren’t great,” he acknowledged. “But perhaps the president can be persuaded, and if he can be, it’s achievable.”
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