The racial and civilisational framing by a senior administration official – who is herself African-American – has fuelled distrust at a time when the trade war between the world’s two largest economies is ratcheting up, roiling markets and endangering global economic growth. And there’s little sign of a truce any time soon.

Earlier this month, US President Donald Trump announced ramped-up tariffs on US$200 billion worth of Chinese goods, prompting Beijing to respond with higher tariffs of its own on US$60 billion worth of US products.

Washington quickly followed with tough new restrictions on Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies.

Skinner’s comments attracted an immediate outcry from US critics who dubbed them “awful”, Australian foreign ministry officials who called them “unhelpful” and the Chinese government, which termed them “absurd”.

Then there was China’s decidedly less diplomatic social media. Racist, dangerous, evoking Hitler, a trick meant to sow trouble, a plot to keep China down were among the thousands of angry reactions.

“Skinner’s words can only harm international cooperation, leading to a lose-lose game,” said one of the more measured comments on Xinghuozk.com. “You give ‘civilisation’ a bad name,” said another on CCTV’s website.

The Skinner comments have also led Beijing to spotlight a competing vision of “civilisation”, adding to the long list of irritants between the two sides that include investment policy, visas, espionage, military prowess, telecoms standards and national corporate champions.

Trump official criticised for calling China a threat that’s ‘not Caucasian’

They also sparked speculation in Washington over whether her comments were cleared by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or Trump and to what extent they reflected official policy. This came after Skinner described her job as turning the president’s “hunches and instincts into hypotheses”.

Skinner and the State Department declined to comment, citing scheduling issues.

But Washington policy experts said they suspect she spoke without vetting her remarks, given this administration’s poor record on agency coordination, her senior position and the latitude officials have to operate on their own.

Or at least until an issue blows up, Trump notices and undercuts them with a tweet, analysts said.

With or without authorisation, her comments dovetail with apparent administration thinking, some said. “Everyone sort of acts like this is new,” said Emma Ashford, a fellow with the conservative Cato Institute.

“But these ideas have been floated around in the Trump administration from day one.”

Trump and senior officials in his administration had repeatedly made comments along thinly veiled racial and civilisational lines about Mexicans, Muslims and immigration, Ashford said.

Fuelling these have been writing and public comments by senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and Michael Flynn, whose brief tenure as national security adviser belied his influential voice during the 2016 campaign. “This fits with the broader trend,” Ashford said.

Even judged on their merits, Skinner’s arguments make limited sense, said policy experts across the political spectrum. The US has faced great-power adversaries before who were not Caucasian, most notably Japan during World War II.

Nor had Washington’s experience with so-called Caucasian adversaries been more “civilisationally” defined than with China, they said, including the US showdown with the Soviet Union during the cold war.

“It is at best inelegant and at worst really, really dumb,” Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, said of Skinner’s comments.

“I do pity other countries trying to negotiate with this administration.”

In her bid to bring a more structured ideological framework to Trump’s hunches, Skinner echoed Samuel Huntington’s landmark 1996 book The Clash of Civilisations, which argues that cultural and religious differences provide fertile ground for conflict in the post-cold war era.

But this was an apparent misreading, foreign policy experts said, particularly given that Huntington called for lowering tension, avoiding fights and not directly challenging rivals, which has not exactly been the administration’s approach.

“It’s almost as though they’ve taken this Huntingtonian framework, this book he wrote, and they haven’t read the theory,” Ashford said.

“It’s a crude framework for understanding the world they’re trying to map onto a whole bunch of problems.”

A series of noted heavyweights have held Skinner’s job, the only foreign policy think tank post within the federal government, including Paul Nitze, Richard Haass and George Kennan, who used the position to develop the US containment strategy and the Marshall Plan at the height of the cold war.

After her Caucasian civilisation comments, even some long-time supporters of Skinner and the Trump administration were shaking their heads.

“This is not a clash of civilisations,” said Steve Bannon, a former White House chief strategist, fierce critic of Chinese policy and self-avowed “huge admirer” of Skinner, adding that he helped bring her into the administration and thinks she is brilliant.

Still, “it’s not Confucianism versus Judeo-Christian values”, he said.

Bannon said he and leading voices in the Trump administration saw the showdown with Beijing rather as one involving competing economic and political visions.

China, he said, was trying to advance its totalitarian one-party and state-led economic system bent on restricting the internet and human rights while the US espoused democratic government rooted in the rule of law that values freedom of expression and a market economy.

What the outcome of these competing visions would be was not up to Trump or Vice-President Mike Pence or some foreign policy argument, but rather the will of the Chinese people, Bannon said.

“This is going to be a long and tough struggle,” he said.

The administration has made little effort to walk back or apologise for Skinner’s comments, despite the potential damage among Chinese citizens who might otherwise quietly welcome US pressure on their government to reform.

Analysts pegged this radio silence in part to the style of an impetuous president who almost never apologises or acknowledges perceived mistakes.

“That’s the way the Trump administration rolls,” said Bannon, who lasted seven months in Trump’s high-turnover White House. “He’s got a house style, that’s just the way it is.”

Past articles and statements by Skinner – a professor of international relations and politics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, before joining the administration – did not dwell much on race, other than comments in 2015 explaining her brief stint as an adviser to Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky’s ill-fated presidential run.

And those were limited to praising Paul’s willingness to address issues of race and rights in the US. Most scholarly work by Skinner, who is also a Hoover Institution fellow, has instead focused on Ronald Reagan, the subject of five books she has co-written.

As the 2016 election approached, Skinner’s writing started to embrace more of Trump’s ideas, including the need to make allies pay a bigger share of defence costs, praise for his “man on the street wisdom” in foreign policy and the need to challenge China economically and militarily.

“Is there any country other than the United States that most Americans would like to see as the organiser of the international system?” she wrote in Forbes in May 2016.

Her views appear to have sharpened after she joined the administration in September 2018. In a radio interview with the conservative Hugh Hewitt Show in December, Skinner contrasted the thinking behind China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” with the Marshall Plan that the US used to help rebuild Europe after World War II.

“The Chinese don’t give a fair deal,” she said. “And they will destroy the international system because they really are not attempting to save peoples, societies and nations.”

Skinner’s recent controversial race comments and Trump’s aggressive “America first” stance come as China touts a competing, more inclusive vision of civilisation in line with efforts to draw Asian and European countries into its orbit with the multibillion-dollar belt and road plan.

As the US-China war of words has spread beyond manufacturing, logistics chains, island-building and economic growth rates, Beijing has spent more to expand its global influence through print, broadcasting, Hollywood tie-ups and, with the proliferation of its controversial Confucius Institutes, cultural and language training.

At this month’s Dialogue of Asian Civilisations conference in Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping warned, without mentioning the US by name, that one civilisation forcing itself on another would be “stupid” and “disastrous”.

“We should hold up equality and respect, abandon pride and prejudice,” he said, “and promote harmonious dialogue and coexistence between civilisations.”

A key battleground as the two sides face off is Southeast Asia, China’s traditional backyard and a focus of the Trump administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy intended to check Beijing and expand the US’ regional influence.

Southeast Asian nations wanted the US to succeed in nudging Beijing to protect intellectual property, play by international rules and live up to its promise of opening its markets, said Lye Liang Fook, senior fellow at Singapore’s ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.

“But the approach is wrong,” he said of the Trump administration’s efforts.

Particularly bothersome was the administration’s focus on forcing countries to choose between Beijing and Washington, Lye said, which undercut their ability to manoeuvre in line with their national interests. “It will affect greatly the credibility of the US among smaller countries,” he said.

China’s more inclusive, generous language on civilisation reflects the confidence of a rising power that knows it can play the long game and that its global influence will only grow, analysts said.

China’s rose-tinted references to a glorified Asian past also tend to airbrush a time when vassal states on its periphery paid homage to the Middle Kingdom – arguably an early vision of “China first”, they said.

China was also adept at using ambiguity to portray differing visions of civilisation depending on its audience, some said.

In referring to the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing tends to speak of “cooperating among civilisations”, which presumably includes the US, Europe and other traditional Western allies.

In contrast, its recent conference focused on “Asian civilisation”, which implicitly excludes the US. And in meetings with leaders of Greece and Armenia, Chinese leaders have referred to “ancient civilisations” involving an even smaller club that includes China, India and Egypt.

“So it’s a mixture,” Lye said. “China is very good at making things very vague.”