A report to be released Monday by Democrats serving on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee charges that the Trump administration has ceded diplomatic ground and global influence to China.
The report argues that Beijing is “filling the void we have left behind” by shuttering international aid operations and institutions like Voice of America, slashing funding for basic research and alienating key American allies.
The minority-issued report comprises the first comprehensive political and policy response by Democrats to the series of budget cuts, confrontations with top research universities and termination of programs that comprised the elements of American soft power that have defined President Trump’s first six months in office.
Perhaps the most interesting element of the report: Democrats chose the relationship with China — rather than Mr. Trump’s early refusal to back Ukraine, or the effects of tariffs — to frame its national security critique.
In an interview, Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the ranking Democrat on the committee, who initiated the report, said that was because “Democrats and Republicans alike agree on one thing: that one of the biggest threats to our future in the United States, both our economic and our national security future, is competition with China. And yet as I look at what the administration has done since it came into office, they have made decision after decision that undercut any coordinated strategic response to how we deal with China.”
So far Mr. Trump has not met with Xi Jinping, China’s president, and his few telephone interactions with him, officials say, have not gone beyond familiar talking points on the future of Taiwan, China’s nuclear buildup, and disputes over export controls of key technologies. Mr. Trump has focused almost entirely on the trade relationship, his aides say, and there are signs of division inside the administration over shifting the focus of American forces out of Europe and the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific.
Asked for comment on the report, which the administration had not yet seen, a White House spokeswoman, Anna Kelly, said: “Senate Democrats enabled and applauded Joe Biden’s weakness when they denied the Wuhan lab leak theory and allowed a spy balloon to surveil our country.”
“Under President Trump, America is strong again, and his foreign policy is effective because of his willingness to look anyone in the eye to get better deals for the American people.”
The report focuses on several moves by Mr. Trump that Democrats contend have given China major openings, whether or not they were intended that way. But its suggestions for change would amount to a rejection of the Trump administration’s “America First” philosophy, and seems unlikely to sway many, if any, of the Republicans in the majority. That makes the report more a road map for Democrats seeking to counter the administration, rather than a plan of action for the country over the next three and a half years.
The report opens with the cutbacks at the State Department, whose U.S.-based staff is being reduced by about 17 percent, and in international assistance programs focused on food, medicine and education. China, it notes, has increased its diplomatic budget by 8.4 percent, committed $500 million to the World Health Organization and “continues to spend billions on international educational and cultural exchange programs.”
The report likens China’s spending to what the United States did when it expanded the Peace Corps and gave help to foreign students seeking to study at its colleges and universities.
“China is using its diplomatic levers across Global South nations to paint the United States as an unreliable partner,” the report concluded.
But the Democrats were most withering about the cuts to the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, which for decades pierced authoritarian veils around the world. The report noted that in recent years some of that support came from then-Senator Marco Rubio, Mr. Trump’s secretary of state and national security adviser, who has not publicly dissented from the administration’s decision to lay off nearly all the staff at both outlets.
“To date, the administration has not offered a viable alternative for the United States to counter Chinese propaganda,” the report said.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
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