Mira Rapp-Hooper
The Chinese flag, in Beijing, August 2025Maxim Shemetov / Reuters
MIRA RAPP-HOOPER is a Partner at The Asia Group and a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She was Senior Director for East Asia and Oceania and Director for Indo-Pacific Strategy at the U.S. National Security Council during the Biden administration. She is the author of Shields of the Republic: The Triumph and Peril of America’s Alliances.More by Mira Rapp-Hooper
In the United States, bipartisan consensus is painfully hard to achieve—except on the issue of China. Even as American political polarization has intensified over the last eight years, both Republicans and Democrats have agreed that an increasingly powerful Beijing poses an economic, technological, and security threat to Washington and its close allies.
This consensus is, in part, Donald Trump’s achievement. During the president’s first term in office, his officials raised alarms about Beijing’s growing technological prowess, its military buildup, and its dominance over the critical minerals industry. They slapped sanctions on Chinese entities, imposed tariffs on U.S. imports of Chinese goods, placed some restrictions on the country’s access to semiconductors, and even labeled Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang a genocide against the Uyghur people. Upon taking office, the Biden administration kept and, in many cases, expanded on these policies and positions. It took the Trump team’s diagnosis and built a government-wide strategy to comprehensively address the China challenge through domestic investment, cooperation with allies, and hard-nosed diplomacy. When Trump returned to office four years later, China was one of the only areas in which analysts expected continuity.
Yet Trump has dashed these expectations. In fact, since starting his second term, the president and his closest advisers appear determined to build a commercially based détente with Beijing. The president imposed crippling tariffs on China in April but then quickly lowered them. He has loosened multiple export restrictions at the behest of Beijing. And he has sought a leader-level meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in hopes of moving the two countries closer to a trade deal and overall rapprochement. The two are now set to talk this week, on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in South Korea.
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