Is tide turning for US-China ties under Trump?
US president the first to use national security strategy to label China a strategic competitor
When US President Donald Trump branded China a revisionist, rival power this month he breathed new life into a decades-old policy debate in Washington: how to define US-China relations.
It is a conundrum that has confronted every American president since Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, which marked the beginning of the rapprochement between the two cold war foes.
Policymakers, politicians and think tanks in both countries revisit the question every few years, trying to redefine the complex bilateral relationship.
It is not the first time China has been labelled a strategic competitor to the United States, with Washington’s China policy having swung between containment and engagement in the back and forth policy debate since the normalisation of diplomatic relations in 1979.
But Trump became the first US president to spell it out officially in America’s national security strategy, a policy paper required by the US Congress since the mid-1980s.
In his most comprehensive foreign policy statement, delivered nearly a year after he took office, Trump catalogued mounting security and economic threats posed by China and accused Beijing of using its repressive vision of a new world order and economic aggression to undermine American security and “displace the US in the Indo-Pacific region”.
