A gap appears to be emerging between Washington’s foreign policy elites and the broader American public on how the United States should respond to China’s rise. From my vantage working at a think tank in Washington, DC, and through regular travel around the United States, I increasingly experience two distinct discussions. This divergence — between America’s elite hawkishness and public caution — may become one of the least appreciated and most consequential external factors influencing Taiwan’s security environment in the years ahead.
Within the American policy community, the dominant view of China has grown unmistakably tough. Many members of Congress, as well as current and former officials across Democratic and Republican administrations, perceive China as determined to displace the United States from its global leadership role. China is widely regarded as the only country with both the ambition and the capability to overtake the United States. The animating question in Washington is how America can prevent China from dominating Asia and dictating global rules on emerging technologies to its advantage.
This elite consensus is not limited to one political party. Many senior figures who previously served under leaders as varied as George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump view China primarily through the lens of rivalry: strategic, technological, ideological, and military. But there is one important exception at the center of America’s politics: Donald Trump himself.
Trump does not speak about China as America’s foremost adversary. Instead, he regularly attempts to reassure the American public that he has a strong relationship with Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) and that the two of them can make deals and manage problems. Trump often cites an “understanding” that he has with Xi that China will refrain from taking military action against Taiwan during his presidency. Trump’s willingness to quickly change his mind, as he did recently in launching strikes against Iran while US-Iran negotiations were ongoing, must keep Beijing on edge. Nevertheless, from China’s perspective, Trump’s willingness to buck “great power competition” as the organizing principle of American policy is welcome.
Trump has not paid an appreciable political price at home for taking a more conciliatory approach toward China. Take TikTok, for example. Prior to Trump’s return to power, there was near unanimous bipartisan support in Washington for banning the Chinese social media application. Trump felt differently. Despite Congress’s passage of a law banning TikTok and the Supreme Court’s affirmation of the law’s legality, Trump reversed the decision. Nowadays, TikTok is widely used across the United States and Congress is virtually silent on the matter.
Part of the reason Trump enjoys so much latitude in charting his own course on China is that his approach aligns more closely with what Americans outside Washington want to hear: reassurance that things with China are under control and that there will not be a US-China conflict. For a public already strained by wars in Ukraine and Iran and anxious about inflation, immigration, and jobs, the appetite for great power confrontation is very low. Surveys consistently show that Americans’ top priority in relation to China is to avoid war.
Polling reinforces what I often hear in conversations around America. According to a recent national survey by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “nearly two-thirds of respondents said China currently matches or exceeds the United States in power and influence globally… Even larger numbers of Americans envision China overtaking the United States in the future.”
Strikingly, a solid majority of respondents — 62 percent — said their lives would not get worse if China gained more power than the United States. In other words, the very outcome that experts in Washington fear would be strategically catastrophic for the United States does not seem to evoke the same sense of alarm among the American public.
During a recent trip to Seattle, these dynamics were impossible for me to miss. I met with scholars, students, civic leaders, business executives, family, and friends. In nearly every conversation about China, the question was the same: “Are we going to have to fight a war with China?” People I spoke with were much more focused on how China directly impacts their lives than they were on any net assessment of US-China power. Their concerns ranged from China’s impacts on their jobs, to cyber-attacks, the flow of fentanyl precursors, and the possibility their children would have to fight in a war in the Pacific.
This growing divergence between elite and public views is poised to shape political debates leading up to the 2028 US presidential election. For Republicans, it likely will be difficult to distance themselves from Trump’s record on China during the campaign. But if a Republican wins the presidency, a shift toward a harder line on China is probable. Trump’s confidence in his personalistic approach to China is uniquely his.
For Democrats, the debate will be more openly contested. The natural instinct for candidates will be to argue that Trump has been too soft on China and that the United States must adopt a more competitive posture to safeguard its leadership role in the world. Others may try to align more closely with public sentiment, emphasizing the need to manage tensions and avoid unnecessary confrontation with China. If public trust in America’s foreign policy elite declines further — particularly if misadventures in Iran or elsewhere diminish their credibility in the eyes of the public — this latter approach could gain traction.
These internal American debates will have significant implications for Taiwan. If foreign policy remains driven largely by elite preferences, and if a more traditional US leader follows Trump, Washington could return to a policy on China anchored in strategic competition. Alternatively, if a more populist leader succeeds Trump, the United States could further its transition toward managing China’s rise rather than contesting it.
For Taiwan, a takeaway is that the range of potential American policy directions probably is wider now than at any point in recent decades. Given this, there will be a premium for Taiwan on strengthening bipartisan relationships, not just in Washington, but also across the country. Taiwan also will benefit by acting in ways that are viewed as geopolitically stabilizing and by building an image as an indispensable partner in America’s efforts to build an artificial intelligence-driven future.
Ryan Hass is a senior fellow, the Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies, and the Director of the China Center at the Brookings Institution.
