Ý kiến của Fareed Zakaria
In Trump’s recent interactions with Chinese President Xi Jinping, we saw a version of him rarely on display. He was respectful, almost deferential, eager to emphasize their personal rapport. Xi, by contrast, remained formal, disciplined and never especially warm. The asymmetry was revealing.
Trump is obsessed with power. More than ideology or values, he thinks in terms of leverage and dominance. He insults European allies because he understands how dependent they remain on American military protection and access to U.S. markets. Trump senses weakness and exploits it.
But with China, he has come to understand something that much of Washington still struggles to accept emotionally: Beijing has enormous strength of its own — economic, technological, industrial and military — and can wield it effectively. So Trump has evolved from belligerence toward a more complicated mix of rivalry and cooperation. That may be what this relationship requires.
Contrast Trump’s visit with the first meeting between Biden officials and their Chinese counterparts in Anchorage in 2021. The Americans launched into a televised public scolding of China over human rights, cyberattacks and the international order. China’s diplomats respondedangrily in kind. It was less a serious diplomatic exchange than a cable news shouting match.
Many centrist Democrats live in fear of being portrayed as “soft on China.” So they often overcompensate rhetorically, adopting maximalist language and escalating symbolic confrontations. After showing skepticism toward Trump’s China tariffs and promising to remove them, President Joe Biden kept nearly all of them in place. And Biden never visited China as president, nor did he invite Xi to Washington.
The Biden team also endorsed the claim — leveled by the first Trump administration — that China’s actions in the Xinjiang region constituted genocide, a term that evokes industrial-scale extermination campaigns like the Holocaust or the 1994 butchery in Rwanda. China’s prison and reeducation camps in Xinjiang are brutal and horrific, and dozens of scholars have called its actions against the Uyghurs genocide. But as the Economist noted, it is not what most people think of when conjuring up the word.
Trump’s superpower is that he can’t be attacked from the right. He came to power after the 2016 election railing against Beijing, blaming it for lost manufacturing jobs, trade imbalances and the United States’ industrial decline. In a sense, the analogy is not “Nixon going to China” but rather President Ronald Reagan — the uber hawk, to the right of President Richard M. Nixon — going to the Soviet Union. Trump may be capable of a similar pivot precisely because his base will follow wherever he leads. One need only look at how quickly many MAGA figuresreversed themselves on intervention in Iran once Trump signaled support for military action.
Why would a more cooperative approach toward China make sense? Because the truth is that China is not the Soviet Union. According to one measure, the Soviet economy was smaller than Italy’s by the end of the Cold War. China, by contrast, is the world’s second-largest economy, the leading trade partner for more than 120 countries and a technological powerhouse in fields ranging from electric vehicles and batteries to drones, advanced manufacturing and artificial intelligence. It produces more manufacturing output than the U.S., Japan and Germany combined.
Trying to launch a full-scale cold war against such a country would not resemble the struggle against the Soviet Union when the world was already divided. It would mean tearing apart the global economy itself. American consumers would face higher prices and supply shocks. U.S. companies would lose access to one of the world’s largest markets. Universities would lose many top students. The danger would not simply be economic pain. It would be the creation of two hostile technological and geopolitical blocs spiraling toward increasing confrontation.
Of course the U.S. and China are rivals. That is unavoidable in a bipolar world. They will compete economically, militarily and strategically for decades to come. But rivalry need not mean total rupture. In the weeks before he died, Henry Kissinger noted to me that leaders of both countries should keep in mind how in 1914, nationalist competition pursued with no concerns of its consequences led to a world war that upended the entire global order.
In an age of artificial intelligence, cyber warfare and nuclear weapons, maintaining channels of cooperation is more important than ever. The two countries should compete fiercely while still trading, talking and collaborating where possible — on nuclear stability, AI safety, pandemics and financial crises. During the Cold War, Washington and Moscow maintained arms-control talks even at moments of intense hostility because both sides understood that unmanaged rivalry could end in catastrophe.
That remains true today. And if Trump — for reasons rooted less in philosophy than instinct — has come to recognize this basic reality, then on this issue at least, his pragmatism makes sense.
The Washington Post