Provoking your enemies, alienating your friends and actively sabotaging your own defenses is no one’s idea of a sound national security plan. And yet, this is the playbook that President Trump has apparently followed over the first 100 days of his second term. You can see it most clearly in the global fight he kicked off with China. He’s been scrapping for this showdown since before he entered politics, so you’d think that before taking on such a global powerhouse, he’d strengthen every alliance, game out every possible countermeasure and get his leadership team in peak condition. The mouthiest barroom brawler knows not to pick a fight and then turn his back, but that’s what the president is doing. He promised to “make America safe again,” but instead of building up the nation’s defenses, he’s dismantling them at precisely the moment they are most needed.
The president has a former weekend Fox News host at the Department of Defense, and aides have complained that there is “total chaos at the Pentagon.” He’s got a Trump donor with no military experience as the secretary of the Navy and picked for director of National Intelligence someone with a tendency to repeat authoritarian talking points. The national security adviser uses a commercial messaging app to share sensitive information about U.S. airstrikes with people he can’t necessarily identify. Earlier this month the president sacked the military’s well-regarded cyberwar chief after a conspiracy theorist told him to, and his administration leaked word of plans to cut the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency by 40 percent. Next up appears to be an evisceration of the State Department, particularly the bureau that has challenged some of the worst abuses of hostile authoritarian states. And of course Mr. Trump has done everything possible to infuriate NATO, America’s primary alliance of mutual military support.
This approach would be perilous at any time, but it’s particularly wrongheaded at the very moment Mr. Trump is kicking off a global battle with Xi Jinping’s government in China. Officially the fight is about tariffs, but for Beijing, international trade is never just business. China in years past has sent out waves of hack attacks on Western corporations to develop its manufacturing base and kneecapped a South Korean conglomerate to keep Seoul from adopting U.S. missile defenses. It appears to have harvested data from the popular shopping site Temu and fed it to a state-backed propaganda unit. Its hackers penetrated U.S. telecommunications networks. And all that was before Mr. Trump announced he was imposing sky-high tariffs on most of that nation’s goods. “They use diplomatic coercion, economic coercion, cyberattacks, lawfare, in extreme cases military or paramilitary threats, all to achieve a goal,” Bethany Allen, the Taiwan-based author of “Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World,” told me. In this fight, she asked, “Why would they not do the same?”
Or as Matt Pottinger, Mr. Trump’s deputy national adviser during his first term, recently wrote with a colleague in The Free Press, “While Trump has (again) become the protagonist in a trade war with China, Xi is focused on the broader battle for global power.”
Mr. Xi’s appetite for revenge is relentless. Dissidents who fled to America after the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 are still being stalked more than 30 years later, and Beijing has set up a network of secretive police stations from Sydney, Australia, to Lower Manhattan and hired former local cops to surveil enemies abroad.
Yet Mr. Trump’s Justice Department broke up its task force on covert foreign influence, despite a series of busts of unregistered Chinese operatives and propagandists working throughout the United States. It paused the enforcement of foreign bribery laws and tried to freeze investigations into, among other things, possible Chinese attempts to influence the mayor of New York. Team Trump deep-sixed efforts to counter Chinese and other foreign propaganda, despite its increasingly sophisticated efforts to interfere in America’s politics. It tried to pull the plug on Radio Free Asia and its sister networks, which for decades have provided nearly 60 million people with a powerful alternative to authoritarian propaganda like China’s.
Steve Tsang, a prominent authority on Beijing’s geopolitics, told me Mr. Trump has already “done more damage to American capacities to confront China than anybody has ever imagined possible.”
The Trump administration didn’t just undermine defenses against Chinese spywork and influence-peddling. It betrayed dissident groups, which have been a thorn in the Xi government’s side, as well as the people uncovering Beijing’s most closely guarded trade secrets.
Take the case of China Labor Watch, which has spent the past quarter-century quietly assembling a network of investigators. They exposed horrific working conditions — pregnant women assembling Barbies for less than two dollars per hour, coffee harvesters expected to work 12-hour days for three months straight. Those investigations had real impact: Disney and Samsung suspended or cut ties with Chinese suppliers following the China Labor Watch reports, and some Chinese products lost access to the U.S. market. And it was a bargain for the United States, which got all that impact from about $700,000 a year from the National Endowment for Democracy. The funding was frozen without warning.
The endowment sued the Trump administration after a couple of months, and regained much of its funding. But by then China Labor Watch had lost many of the sources it spent years cultivating. “Cutting this support is like withdrawing the forward outposts of U.S. influence,” Li Qiang, the group’s leader, wrote to me last week. “Every time groups like ours are defunded, it marks not just a retreat of U.S. leadership on human rights, but an acceleration of China’s success in the global battle over values and accountability.”
MAGA world insists that Mr. Trump’s moving-target approach to tariff negotiations is “three-dimensional chess.” His bullying approach to diplomacy may hurt some allies’ feelings, his supporters say, but it will bring some of America’s most lethal adversaries to the negotiating table. That might sound persuasive if Mr. Trump weren’t already signaling that he’s ready to back down to Mr. Xi in this trade fight.
Beijing is capitalizing on the mess. “When the White House established the Department of Government Efficiency, few could have predicted just how efficiently it would expose the rot at the heart of the U.S. government,” read a recent editorial in the state-backed People’s Daily Online. The U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center warned earlier this month that China’s security services were contacting federal workers who’ve been laid off to try to lure them to Beijing’s side. Same goes for once-valued sources overseas. Mr. Li of China Labor Watch showed me a LinkedIn message from someone he understood to be an agent of the Chinese government, dangling the idea of an alternate funding source. He declined it. Other groups may not be able to afford to.
A showdown with China was one of the most consistent promises Mr. Trump made to the American people. His voters knew this was the war he wanted. But how many of them could have guessed that he’d wage it in China’s favor?
Noah Shachtman is a longtime national security reporter and a former nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he participated in cybersecurity discussions with the Chinese military. He has served as editor in chief of Rolling Stone and The Daily Beast.
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