The worst-case scenarios didn't materialize. But the shifting US-China power balance that was on stark display in Beijing confronts Europe with tough choices.
Insightful post; let's not follow the Pedro Sánchez line of an EU-China relationship 'based on trust dialogue and stability'. It's not a dialogue when one side isn't listening
Noah's concern points to Europe’s real dilemma: what Europe should fear most is not a formal G2 order, but an informal G2 reality.
The U.S. and China will not jointly govern the world, but their bilateral bargains, crisis management, tariff adjustments, technology controls, Taiwan signals, and critical-mineral leverage increasingly reshape Europe’s external environment.
This is what “the G2 world has arrived, but the G2 order has not” means for Europe. For Washington and Beijing, it creates room for strategic stabilization and transactional bargaining. For Europe, it means navigating a world of G2 bargaining without stable rules.
Europe’s answer should not be simply to “stand with America” or “stabilize with China.” It needs an autonomous China strategy inside a G2 world.
That means recognizing the structural reality of U.S.-China centrality without outsourcing Europe’s strategic thinking to Washington. It means restoring high-level dialogue with China, because without dialogue there is no crisis management or business expectation management. It also means embedding trade-defense tools inside a real industrial strategy.
Europe’s concerns about Chinese EVs, solar, wind, chemicals, machinery, medical equipment, and security-screening technology are not just product-level disputes. They reflect a deeper structural competition between China’s production system and Europe’s industrial system.
FSR, IAA, CSA, and safeguards cannot solve this alone. Europe also needs lower energy costs, deeper capital markets, defense-industrial investment, AI and semiconductor ecosystems, critical-mineral supply chains, manufacturing automation, and a unified industrial policy.
Europe’s greatest asset is not becoming a third military superpower. It is becoming a rules-and-market node that global companies cannot bypass. But regulatory power only matters if it is tied to industrial capability. Regulation without industry, standards without investment, and values without energy or manufacturing capacity will leave Europe increasingly passive in a G2 world.
I suggest that you listen to Trump’s interview with Fox News. His statements about Taiwan, including using arms sales as a negotiating chip, are quite worrisome. Xi clearly influenced his thinking in worrisome ways.
I understand the Taiwan concern, but I think it slightly misses the point of the Europe discussion.
Trump’s comments on Taiwan are not necessarily evidence that Xi has “captured” his thinking. They can also be read as a warning to Taiwan independence forces not to push the situation too far. In substance, Trump still seems to be trying to preserve the status quo: no unilateral move toward independence by Taiwan, no military escalation by China, and no automatic blank check from Washington.
That is not necessarily bad for stability. In fact, it may be one early sign of a new U.S.-China conflict-management framework taking shape. Taiwan remains the most dangerous issue in the relationship, and both Beijing and Washington have an interest in preventing it from becoming an uncontrolled trigger.
This connects directly to the broader G2 argument. The G2 world has arrived, but the G2 order has not. What may be emerging is not joint governance of the world, but a pragmatic framework for managing the most dangerous points of escalation.
For Europe, the lesson is straightforward. Do not build your China strategy on the assumption that America will always protect European interests or maintain a permanently hard line for Europe’s benefit. Europe needs strategic autonomy, not strategic outsourcing.
The real issue for Europe is whether Europe can stop waiting for Washington and build its own coherent China strategy inside a G2 world.
Noah, I agree with your conclusions but I think it's worth considering another reason for Europe to feel anxious about the results of the US-China summit, which is the opposite of what you have laid out: That the US actually showed what it can get from China by negotiating hard. I think the results will follow in the coming weeks as the Boards of Trade and Investment debate more ambitious goals than had previously been on the table. Leaks will be inevitable in the runup to Xi's return visit to Washington shortly ahead of the Midterms. Moreover, I also think the opposite of apparent consensus that Trump got nothing from Xi on Hormuz. Xi put on public record that he wanted Hormuz open, and didn't want Iran to get a nuke. That is substantial for a Chinese leader, and I think it is no coincidence that Pakistan's army chief is brokering the Hormuz deal this weekend while the country's prime minister is in Beijing. You are absolutely right to highlight the idiots who think agreeing to a Li Qiang summit would be the smart thing to do.
Brussels keeps saying it wants "strategic autonomy" but the Commission just renewed the bilateral investment treaty freeze last month. Xi isn't waiting.
With great respect, I’m not sure about some of your framing.
For all the sound and fury with rare earths, the “shifting balance of power” managed to get US tariffs down to just shy of 50% - enough to drop bilateral trade 30% in a year, but not enough to cause all the dire economic predictions to come true. Meanwhile, according to McKinsey, the effort to reroute that trade and still grow volumes meant Chinese manufacturers cutting prices 8%. Margin they didn’t have to give after years of undercutting other countries to gain market share.
And the rare earth retaliation didn’t send US policymakers into “panic mode”. It sent them into investment mode.
Moreover, while you reference China’s confrontational stance, you overlook perhaps the US’s confrontational stance. To wit, Panama and Venezuela. In the case of the former, China has tried -unsuccessfully I might add - to retaliate against Panama. The Panamanian president said publicly they wouldn’t be threatened. Citations below.
Given that China is facing a very similar economic and demographic cocktail that led to Japan’s flatlining of growth for 30 straight years (asset bubble + bad balance sheets + deflation + shrinking population), the Chinese economy - dependent utterly on export growth - cannot abide structurally higher input prices from further damage to Gulf infrastructure or a protracted loss of demand due to global recession. The U.S. doesn’t need to beg for help with Iran. It’s in China’s own interests to do so. In much the same way that the EU cannot escape the reality that standing up to China is in its own interests. It’s not about preferences. It’s about need.
All told, the narrative that the U.S. is somehow cowering in fear at China doesn’t hold up. The U.S. is actively pushing back on China and is having substantive success doing so.
For many years Xi spoke of “win-win cooperation” while doing things that were plainly undermining the interests of others. I see an American president (one I didn’t vote for and despise deeply) saying similarly nice things about partnership and deescalation while consistently doing the exact opposite.
As you acknowledge in your opening, none of the worries of summit surrender came to pass. And yet the same sort of framing is applied to US trade policy.
It was the US courts that lowered tariffs, not China’s retaliatory strength. Decisions that are being appealed and worked around as we speak.
Panama gets little coverage, but it deserves it. Decades of Chinese effort undone overnight. Even a small country like Panama has pulled out of BRI and kicked China out of strategic assets. Venezuela gone too. Finland says no EU trade deal on account of China’s support for Russia.
Not everybody is intimidated. Least of all, I’d argue, the United States. And I expect more of this kind of thing moving forward, not less.
Thanks for your comments Harrison. You make good points - including on Panama. I do think the rare earth leverage caused a degree of panic. Otherwise it’s difficult to explain the concessions the US made in Busan - and the sudden scramble to work with partners on this. What the administration does on the 301s and the Taiwan arms package in the coming weeks will be telling. It’s Trump vs Greer/Rubio/Bessent on this I imagine. The desire to avoid more disruption in the runup to the midterms will be an important factor. I do believe Trump went into this summit in a hobbled state vis á vis China - bescause of Iran, the CRM leverage and the administration’s alienation of allies. What Beijing fears most is collective pushback. We are very far from that at the moment and it’s hard to see that changing under Trump. Appreciate the feedback. Best Noah
Thanks, Noah. If I may, I think there are a few crucial assumptions that go in to concluding panic and I don’t see any of them:
1) The actual intention was to keep tariffs at a level that would’ve resulted in an effective trade embargo. I see no logical reason why that would’ve been advantageous or desirable.
2) The rare earth restrictions weren’t anticipated as plausible or likely. I find this hard to believe given that the threat was raised by China during Trump 1.0 and every single member of the national security and trade teams were well aware of the vulnerability.
3) The idea that crisis itself is necessarily evidence of a mistake. In point of fact, crises are often useful and indeed the only way to break longstanding complacency and inaction in government. As Rahm Emmanuel once advised a President Obama when serving as his COS: “Never let a good crisis go to waste”.
What I saw was that after the concessions, tariffs ended up at a sufficiently high level to achieve the intended effect. A fairly aggressive export control regime stayed in place. But more to the point, over a decade worth of admiring the rare earth problem ended overnight and suddenly the entire world was racing to fix the vulnerability. It was only a matter of weeks, in fact, before DPA authority was utilized and Ursula von der Leyen was bringing a rare earth magnet as a prop to the G-7 meeting. Deal after deal has followed in the year since. More coming seemingly every week. Why all of a sudden? This was far from a new problem.
As I’m sure you know very well, China had already used REE export restrictions against Japan a decade earlier and yet nothing substantive was done outside of Japan to correct this (utterly existential) vulnerability. What made this concerted action possible was in fact the crisis. The mere existence of a well-known vulnerability had proved repeatedly insufficient over multiple administrations - despite the pivot to Asia and the steadily rising tensions.
And to that very point, when there is plausible reason to think that a military confrontation may occur within a few years and any solution to such a grave vulnerability will unavoidably take years to address, I’d argue they were already in an acute crisis. It just didn’t feel like it to the public.
As it turned out, the dire economic predictions of the tariffs - which were a consensus assessment due to the obvious ramifications - didn’t end up occurring. That was in no small part due to the fact those concessions were made.
Instead of the dire economic catastrophe, the rare earths were shut off just long enough to spur action and then the crisis ended - no lasting damage done. A risky gambit, perhaps, but one that arguably served US vital interests in the end.
Concessions were made, in other words, but seemingly none that were game changing from a strategic standpoint. Fixing rare earths on the other hand… that is game changing, in my view.
Finally, I’d note that the stock market that had been declining all year heading in to April actually began to rally again on the “TACO” narrative - despite global tariffs remaining at 17% for the long haul. Had the administration simply come out and announced those same levels and left them there, would that have been cause for “risk-on”? I’m dubious.
All told, in an effort to get the tariffs reduced (to a still-high level) China had to deploy a strategic card - perhaps their single most powerful economic weapon - in a way that effectively gained them nothing (except perhaps the admiration of western editorial pages).
But crucially, having now deployed it, that weapon is being steadily neutralized. There is a genuine strategic cost to that, in my view. That weapon may well be unavailable now in the event of a war over Taiwan - when controlling an adversary’s entire weapons supply chain would’ve been truly crippling.
Thus what many observers perceive as a blunder and a panic on the part of the U.S. looks very much like a panic and an induced blunder to me on the part of China.
We tend to gloss over just how vulnerable the Chinese economy was (and still is). The use of rare earths wasn’t just about optics or a demonstration of leverage, in other words. It was perhaps critically necessary to get those tariffs down and down quickly because they represented an actual threat.
As to your final point, I very much agree. The coalition is a problem, but I’d argue a temporary one. This is a genuine weakness of Trump’s and it shouldnt be glossed over either.
It was apparent right from the get-go that Trump was trying to use the leverage of the tariffs to get other countries to raise their own barriers on China. When China threatened to retaliate if anybody gave in to that pressure (which the MOF did the very first week), there was no American carrot ready on offer to go along with the American stick. This is a fundamental flaw of Mr. Trump, in my view, and it undermines his own objectives regularly.
But in the final analysis for me, I see NATO spending increases as a durable change (also a product of chaos after decades of presidents asking nicely failed to produce the results).
I see critical mineral diversification also as a durable change.
I see China continuing to aggravate pre-existing trade tensions across Europe (and elsewhere) with the increased dumping from rerouted American exports - another thing that was curiously seen as a strategic win for Beijing. And when coupled with Xi’s ongoing support for Russia (and Iran), the U.S. may well be seen in the short term as an unreliable ally against existential threats, but it’s an inescapable realization in many capitals that China *is* the existential threat (or at best complicit in supporting the destabilization efforts of Putin & IRGC). Those realities won’t go away, but Trump will. He’ll be gone in two and a half years.
The strategic gains, by contrast, are perhaps permanent.
I can’t stand the guy personally. Have never supported him and could never support him. But I also try to leave him out of my analysis as much as possible. A worthwhile thought exercise, in my view, is to imagine one’s favorite (far more eloquent and respectable) president taking the same basic steps and producing the same basic results. Would it feel different to me? I strongly suspect it would. I cannot help but struggle to see how China is better off strategically in the long run for having deployed rare earths here. They gained little if anything. Instead, it seems they only managed to lose less.
By contrast, I can see what the U.S. gained (and in turn what it cost China strategically). As the oft-repeated bit of wisdom goes, “never interrupt your enemy when in the middle of making a mistake”. Complacency on rare earth dependence was truly an existential and deeply strategic mistake - one that all evidence suggests we all would’ve kept right on making.
In closing, while I have doubts about much of the policymaking apparatus in this White House, I don’t think the relevant geoeconomic team are a bunch of halfwits. And you named the three I’d hang my own strategic hat on with confidence: Bessent, Greer, and Rubio are no dummies. With a still-brilliant set of professionals from CIA to Treasury backing them up, I don’t have a particularly hard time imagining that the United States government has perhaps put a bit more thought into all this than is commonly assumed. It’s not “4D chess”, in my view, as it’s derisively dismissed. This is just basic chess one would expect of a superpower. Either way, the actual results suggest to me that even if the United States indeed has no clue what it’s doing, it’s managing to rack up a lot of strategically consequential wins in spite of itself.
Crisis / chaos can indeed be a useful tool (and one might well consider it’s the essentially the only one Trump has ever had in his tool kit).
In any event, thanks again for indulging me. Your opinion counts and I sincerely appreciate it.
Insightful post; let's not follow the Pedro Sánchez line of an EU-China relationship 'based on trust dialogue and stability'. It's not a dialogue when one side isn't listening
Noah's concern points to Europe’s real dilemma: what Europe should fear most is not a formal G2 order, but an informal G2 reality.
The U.S. and China will not jointly govern the world, but their bilateral bargains, crisis management, tariff adjustments, technology controls, Taiwan signals, and critical-mineral leverage increasingly reshape Europe’s external environment.
This is what “the G2 world has arrived, but the G2 order has not” means for Europe. For Washington and Beijing, it creates room for strategic stabilization and transactional bargaining. For Europe, it means navigating a world of G2 bargaining without stable rules.
Europe’s answer should not be simply to “stand with America” or “stabilize with China.” It needs an autonomous China strategy inside a G2 world.
That means recognizing the structural reality of U.S.-China centrality without outsourcing Europe’s strategic thinking to Washington. It means restoring high-level dialogue with China, because without dialogue there is no crisis management or business expectation management. It also means embedding trade-defense tools inside a real industrial strategy.
Europe’s concerns about Chinese EVs, solar, wind, chemicals, machinery, medical equipment, and security-screening technology are not just product-level disputes. They reflect a deeper structural competition between China’s production system and Europe’s industrial system.
FSR, IAA, CSA, and safeguards cannot solve this alone. Europe also needs lower energy costs, deeper capital markets, defense-industrial investment, AI and semiconductor ecosystems, critical-mineral supply chains, manufacturing automation, and a unified industrial policy.
Europe’s greatest asset is not becoming a third military superpower. It is becoming a rules-and-market node that global companies cannot bypass. But regulatory power only matters if it is tied to industrial capability. Regulation without industry, standards without investment, and values without energy or manufacturing capacity will leave Europe increasingly passive in a G2 world.
I suggest that you listen to Trump’s interview with Fox News. His statements about Taiwan, including using arms sales as a negotiating chip, are quite worrisome. Xi clearly influenced his thinking in worrisome ways.
Europe cannot build a China policy on the assumption that Washington’s China policy will remain stable, coherent, or aligned with European interests.
I understand the Taiwan concern, but I think it slightly misses the point of the Europe discussion.
Trump’s comments on Taiwan are not necessarily evidence that Xi has “captured” his thinking. They can also be read as a warning to Taiwan independence forces not to push the situation too far. In substance, Trump still seems to be trying to preserve the status quo: no unilateral move toward independence by Taiwan, no military escalation by China, and no automatic blank check from Washington.
That is not necessarily bad for stability. In fact, it may be one early sign of a new U.S.-China conflict-management framework taking shape. Taiwan remains the most dangerous issue in the relationship, and both Beijing and Washington have an interest in preventing it from becoming an uncontrolled trigger.
This connects directly to the broader G2 argument. The G2 world has arrived, but the G2 order has not. What may be emerging is not joint governance of the world, but a pragmatic framework for managing the most dangerous points of escalation.
For Europe, the lesson is straightforward. Do not build your China strategy on the assumption that America will always protect European interests or maintain a permanently hard line for Europe’s benefit. Europe needs strategic autonomy, not strategic outsourcing.
The real issue for Europe is whether Europe can stop waiting for Washington and build its own coherent China strategy inside a G2 world.
The Trump admin officials i talk to aren’t planning on a G2 world.
Yes. China the same.
That’s exactly what I argued in my newsletter this week: The G2 world has arrived, but the G2 order has not (https://leonliao.substack.com/p/the-trumpxi-summit-the-g2-world-has?r=731anr&utm_medium=ios)
Noah, I agree with your conclusions but I think it's worth considering another reason for Europe to feel anxious about the results of the US-China summit, which is the opposite of what you have laid out: That the US actually showed what it can get from China by negotiating hard. I think the results will follow in the coming weeks as the Boards of Trade and Investment debate more ambitious goals than had previously been on the table. Leaks will be inevitable in the runup to Xi's return visit to Washington shortly ahead of the Midterms. Moreover, I also think the opposite of apparent consensus that Trump got nothing from Xi on Hormuz. Xi put on public record that he wanted Hormuz open, and didn't want Iran to get a nuke. That is substantial for a Chinese leader, and I think it is no coincidence that Pakistan's army chief is brokering the Hormuz deal this weekend while the country's prime minister is in Beijing. You are absolutely right to highlight the idiots who think agreeing to a Li Qiang summit would be the smart thing to do.
Brussels keeps saying it wants "strategic autonomy" but the Commission just renewed the bilateral investment treaty freeze last month. Xi isn't waiting.
This is excelllent analysis.
With great respect, I’m not sure about some of your framing.
For all the sound and fury with rare earths, the “shifting balance of power” managed to get US tariffs down to just shy of 50% - enough to drop bilateral trade 30% in a year, but not enough to cause all the dire economic predictions to come true. Meanwhile, according to McKinsey, the effort to reroute that trade and still grow volumes meant Chinese manufacturers cutting prices 8%. Margin they didn’t have to give after years of undercutting other countries to gain market share.
And the rare earth retaliation didn’t send US policymakers into “panic mode”. It sent them into investment mode.
Moreover, while you reference China’s confrontational stance, you overlook perhaps the US’s confrontational stance. To wit, Panama and Venezuela. In the case of the former, China has tried -unsuccessfully I might add - to retaliate against Panama. The Panamanian president said publicly they wouldn’t be threatened. Citations below.
Given that China is facing a very similar economic and demographic cocktail that led to Japan’s flatlining of growth for 30 straight years (asset bubble + bad balance sheets + deflation + shrinking population), the Chinese economy - dependent utterly on export growth - cannot abide structurally higher input prices from further damage to Gulf infrastructure or a protracted loss of demand due to global recession. The U.S. doesn’t need to beg for help with Iran. It’s in China’s own interests to do so. In much the same way that the EU cannot escape the reality that standing up to China is in its own interests. It’s not about preferences. It’s about need.
All told, the narrative that the U.S. is somehow cowering in fear at China doesn’t hold up. The U.S. is actively pushing back on China and is having substantive success doing so.
For many years Xi spoke of “win-win cooperation” while doing things that were plainly undermining the interests of others. I see an American president (one I didn’t vote for and despise deeply) saying similarly nice things about partnership and deescalation while consistently doing the exact opposite.
As you acknowledge in your opening, none of the worries of summit surrender came to pass. And yet the same sort of framing is applied to US trade policy.
It was the US courts that lowered tariffs, not China’s retaliatory strength. Decisions that are being appealed and worked around as we speak.
Panama gets little coverage, but it deserves it. Decades of Chinese effort undone overnight. Even a small country like Panama has pulled out of BRI and kicked China out of strategic assets. Venezuela gone too. Finland says no EU trade deal on account of China’s support for Russia.
Not everybody is intimidated. Least of all, I’d argue, the United States. And I expect more of this kind of thing moving forward, not less.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/29/us-latin-america-countries-criticise-chinas-retaliation-over-panama-canal
https://apnews.com/article/panama-canal-hong-kong-china-united-states-fcb61b581e95064c110db5acd1c6bb07
Thanks for your comments Harrison. You make good points - including on Panama. I do think the rare earth leverage caused a degree of panic. Otherwise it’s difficult to explain the concessions the US made in Busan - and the sudden scramble to work with partners on this. What the administration does on the 301s and the Taiwan arms package in the coming weeks will be telling. It’s Trump vs Greer/Rubio/Bessent on this I imagine. The desire to avoid more disruption in the runup to the midterms will be an important factor. I do believe Trump went into this summit in a hobbled state vis á vis China - bescause of Iran, the CRM leverage and the administration’s alienation of allies. What Beijing fears most is collective pushback. We are very far from that at the moment and it’s hard to see that changing under Trump. Appreciate the feedback. Best Noah
Thanks, Noah. If I may, I think there are a few crucial assumptions that go in to concluding panic and I don’t see any of them:
1) The actual intention was to keep tariffs at a level that would’ve resulted in an effective trade embargo. I see no logical reason why that would’ve been advantageous or desirable.
2) The rare earth restrictions weren’t anticipated as plausible or likely. I find this hard to believe given that the threat was raised by China during Trump 1.0 and every single member of the national security and trade teams were well aware of the vulnerability.
3) The idea that crisis itself is necessarily evidence of a mistake. In point of fact, crises are often useful and indeed the only way to break longstanding complacency and inaction in government. As Rahm Emmanuel once advised a President Obama when serving as his COS: “Never let a good crisis go to waste”.
What I saw was that after the concessions, tariffs ended up at a sufficiently high level to achieve the intended effect. A fairly aggressive export control regime stayed in place. But more to the point, over a decade worth of admiring the rare earth problem ended overnight and suddenly the entire world was racing to fix the vulnerability. It was only a matter of weeks, in fact, before DPA authority was utilized and Ursula von der Leyen was bringing a rare earth magnet as a prop to the G-7 meeting. Deal after deal has followed in the year since. More coming seemingly every week. Why all of a sudden? This was far from a new problem.
As I’m sure you know very well, China had already used REE export restrictions against Japan a decade earlier and yet nothing substantive was done outside of Japan to correct this (utterly existential) vulnerability. What made this concerted action possible was in fact the crisis. The mere existence of a well-known vulnerability had proved repeatedly insufficient over multiple administrations - despite the pivot to Asia and the steadily rising tensions.
And to that very point, when there is plausible reason to think that a military confrontation may occur within a few years and any solution to such a grave vulnerability will unavoidably take years to address, I’d argue they were already in an acute crisis. It just didn’t feel like it to the public.
As it turned out, the dire economic predictions of the tariffs - which were a consensus assessment due to the obvious ramifications - didn’t end up occurring. That was in no small part due to the fact those concessions were made.
Instead of the dire economic catastrophe, the rare earths were shut off just long enough to spur action and then the crisis ended - no lasting damage done. A risky gambit, perhaps, but one that arguably served US vital interests in the end.
Concessions were made, in other words, but seemingly none that were game changing from a strategic standpoint. Fixing rare earths on the other hand… that is game changing, in my view.
Finally, I’d note that the stock market that had been declining all year heading in to April actually began to rally again on the “TACO” narrative - despite global tariffs remaining at 17% for the long haul. Had the administration simply come out and announced those same levels and left them there, would that have been cause for “risk-on”? I’m dubious.
All told, in an effort to get the tariffs reduced (to a still-high level) China had to deploy a strategic card - perhaps their single most powerful economic weapon - in a way that effectively gained them nothing (except perhaps the admiration of western editorial pages).
But crucially, having now deployed it, that weapon is being steadily neutralized. There is a genuine strategic cost to that, in my view. That weapon may well be unavailable now in the event of a war over Taiwan - when controlling an adversary’s entire weapons supply chain would’ve been truly crippling.
Thus what many observers perceive as a blunder and a panic on the part of the U.S. looks very much like a panic and an induced blunder to me on the part of China.
We tend to gloss over just how vulnerable the Chinese economy was (and still is). The use of rare earths wasn’t just about optics or a demonstration of leverage, in other words. It was perhaps critically necessary to get those tariffs down and down quickly because they represented an actual threat.
As to your final point, I very much agree. The coalition is a problem, but I’d argue a temporary one. This is a genuine weakness of Trump’s and it shouldnt be glossed over either.
It was apparent right from the get-go that Trump was trying to use the leverage of the tariffs to get other countries to raise their own barriers on China. When China threatened to retaliate if anybody gave in to that pressure (which the MOF did the very first week), there was no American carrot ready on offer to go along with the American stick. This is a fundamental flaw of Mr. Trump, in my view, and it undermines his own objectives regularly.
But in the final analysis for me, I see NATO spending increases as a durable change (also a product of chaos after decades of presidents asking nicely failed to produce the results).
I see critical mineral diversification also as a durable change.
I see China continuing to aggravate pre-existing trade tensions across Europe (and elsewhere) with the increased dumping from rerouted American exports - another thing that was curiously seen as a strategic win for Beijing. And when coupled with Xi’s ongoing support for Russia (and Iran), the U.S. may well be seen in the short term as an unreliable ally against existential threats, but it’s an inescapable realization in many capitals that China *is* the existential threat (or at best complicit in supporting the destabilization efforts of Putin & IRGC). Those realities won’t go away, but Trump will. He’ll be gone in two and a half years.
The strategic gains, by contrast, are perhaps permanent.
I can’t stand the guy personally. Have never supported him and could never support him. But I also try to leave him out of my analysis as much as possible. A worthwhile thought exercise, in my view, is to imagine one’s favorite (far more eloquent and respectable) president taking the same basic steps and producing the same basic results. Would it feel different to me? I strongly suspect it would. I cannot help but struggle to see how China is better off strategically in the long run for having deployed rare earths here. They gained little if anything. Instead, it seems they only managed to lose less.
By contrast, I can see what the U.S. gained (and in turn what it cost China strategically). As the oft-repeated bit of wisdom goes, “never interrupt your enemy when in the middle of making a mistake”. Complacency on rare earth dependence was truly an existential and deeply strategic mistake - one that all evidence suggests we all would’ve kept right on making.
In closing, while I have doubts about much of the policymaking apparatus in this White House, I don’t think the relevant geoeconomic team are a bunch of halfwits. And you named the three I’d hang my own strategic hat on with confidence: Bessent, Greer, and Rubio are no dummies. With a still-brilliant set of professionals from CIA to Treasury backing them up, I don’t have a particularly hard time imagining that the United States government has perhaps put a bit more thought into all this than is commonly assumed. It’s not “4D chess”, in my view, as it’s derisively dismissed. This is just basic chess one would expect of a superpower. Either way, the actual results suggest to me that even if the United States indeed has no clue what it’s doing, it’s managing to rack up a lot of strategically consequential wins in spite of itself.
Crisis / chaos can indeed be a useful tool (and one might well consider it’s the essentially the only one Trump has ever had in his tool kit).
In any event, thanks again for indulging me. Your opinion counts and I sincerely appreciate it.
I appreciate this exhange, and will reflect further. I can see how both narratives make sense.
‘Do not interrupt your enemy while he is making mistakes’
Chinese proverb.