Behind the chaos, Trump prepares to take on China
Every day brings a new barrage of announcements by US President Donald Trump and billionaire bigot buddy Elon Musk. Working on the basis that, if they throw enough shit at the wall, some of it will stick, Trump and Musk are creating pandemonium in Washington, DC.
But while all may seem to be chaos in the halls of power, there is a thread of logic behind it all. Trump is ripping up accepted political norms at home and the liberal world order abroad because, in his view, they have failed to secure American supremacy. Trump’s package of measures, taken together, constitutes a strategy to break America from its cycle of relative decline and come out on top.
Trump’s program is squarely aimed at China. China’s rise to world power status is an existential threat to US hegemony, and Trump's program is the latest attempt to hold China down and assert US global power.
US relations with China have undergone a series of twists and turns since 1949, when the Communist Party (CCP) defeated the US-backed Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government in a bloody civil war. The US refused to recognise the new government and imposed a total financial and trade boycott. In the Cold War environment, where the USSR and US competed for world supremacy, Mao Zedong’s Communists, who looked to Moscow, were part of the enemy camp.
In the Korean War, which started just months after the CCP took power, China and the United States came to blows. Following North Korean leader Kim Il Sung’s invasion of the US-backed regime in the South, the US sent hundreds of thousands of troops to prop up its client government and pushed North Korean forces back close to the border with China. Fearing a US invasion, China responded by dispatching the People’s Liberation Army to drive the Americans back. Before long, a stalemate had been reached. There followed two more years of inconclusive fighting before a ceasefire was declared in 1953, which is still in place today, a frozen conflict.
The Korean War did two things to China. It reinforced the country’s close relationship and, indeed, military dependency on the USSR, and it forced the CCP to transform the economy. In the first year or two of Communist rule, the government proceeded cautiously with economic reform and looked to the capitalists to rebuild the economy, which had been wrecked by years of war and foreign occupation. The immense economic strain imposed by the Korean War and the fact that war could resume on the Korean peninsula at any moment drove home to the CCP the need to drastically speed up the process of industrialisation for military purposes. Soviet-style central planning seemed the surest way to do so. Within the space of three years, the Communist government expropriated the capitalist class and replaced them with a bureaucratic Communist regime based on state capitalist lines, much as Stalin had done in Russia in 1929. Self-sufficiency and autarky were prioritised, and foreign trade and investment, except for Soviet aid, were reduced to a minimum.
China’s close relationship with the USSR lasted only a few years. Mao’s Communists grew to resent what they regarded as overbearing Soviet interventions and were suspicious of its overtures to the US after Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956. In 1964, the two sides split, China declaring the Soviet Union a traitor to the cause of world communism.
Just as the Korean War had consolidated one alignment of imperialist forces, the Vietnam War was the trigger for another. By the late 1960s, Washington had realised it was losing in Vietnam: it had the military firepower to destroy the country but could not crush the popular Vietnamese resistance. It was facing a growing anti-war movement at home, and US soldiers were mutinous. The US wanted to get its ground troops out. For its part, China, which backed the North Vietnamese government, was looking to break out of its diplomatic isolation. Such was its enmity with Moscow that reconciliation with the USSR was not an option. Vietnam peace talks, which started in Paris in 1968, provided the backdrop for a rapprochement between the US and China based on their common hostility to the USSR. In 1972, US President Richard Nixon visited Beijing, and a new imperialist era was born. Formal diplomatic relations between the US and China were restored seven years later.
China may have broken from its isolation, but it was still desperately poor. In the early 1980s, the Chinese government began steadily to relax state control over its economy to stimulate growth. The process advanced in fits and starts. Inflation and growing economic inequality associated with market reforms sparked widespread discontent, which erupted in 1989, known best for the massive student protest in Tiananmen Square in Beijing but which also involved numerous worker protests in several cities.
The CCP’s response to Tiananmen Square and its need to increase foreign investment to finance development was twofold: one, an energetic opening to foreign trade and investment and, two, the ratcheting up of political repression to block direct challenges to Communist rule and prevent workers from organising to push up wages. Foreign investment by Chinese diaspora businesses began to flood in to take advantage of tax breaks and cheap land and labour, initially to produce low-end textiles and household goods.
Starting soon after economic reopening, the Chinese government also shut many of the country’s state-owned enterprises—those in declining industries and unlikely ever to make a return on investment. Tens of millions of workers lost their jobs in the north of the country, while tens of millions more from rural areas headed to seaboard cities in the south, where they filled the production lines of the new factories, having none of the rights of the existing urban workforce. Before long, Western investors had joined their Asian peers in heading for China.
The 1990s and 2000s were the heyday of collaboration between US and Chinese capital and governments. US businesses shifted low-end production to China in search of big profits and new export markets. Even where industry remained in the US, the entry of hundreds of millions of low-paid Chinese workers into the world labour market helped US capitalists keep wages down. For its part, the Chinese government got Western investment, R&D, know-how and access to wealthy markets. Both benefited when China used its rapidly growing foreign exchange reserves to buy US government bonds, enabling the US to finance its government debt at low interest rates.
China rose from a marginal economic player, less than 2 percent of world economy in 1979, to become the number two economic power when it superseded Japan and Germany in 2010.
There were certainly tensions in the relationship with the US. In 1999, the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade as part of its war with Serbia. The US “war on terror” in Afghanistan in the early 2000s was aimed, at least in part, at preventing China’s growing influence in Central Asia. Each side needled the other about their respective domestic political regimes. Business owners on each side told of industrial sabotage, theft of intellectual property, unfair government subsidies, legal systems stacked in favour of the other side and so on. Nonetheless, the US believed it could incorporate China within the US-dominated world economy and, on that basis, sponsored China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001.
China’s rise to number two economic power was celebrated by many Western ideologists, both the right and some formerly of the left. They said China’s economic miracle was proof that capitalist “free markets” trumped socialist central planning, an argument given greater force by the collapse of the USSR in 1991. However, the pleasure they took from China’s growing integration into the US-superintended world economic system soon turned sour as China began to use its new-found economic prowess to challenge the US.
Starting in the 2010s, alarm bells about China’s growing threat to the US began to ring in Washington. Chinese companies were now marching into markets in Central and Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia that the US once regarded as its exclusive domain. China was now using loans to entice formerly Western-aligned nations closer to it. China was no longer restricted to low-end household goods but was now using its growing pool of skilled engineers to design and manufacture high-end, technology-intensive products matching US and European standards. With Western economies advancing only sluggishly after the 2008 global financial crisis, China’s rapid rebound and annual growth of up to 12 percent only highlighted the US’s relative decline. The country that the US had helped grow to world status was now coming back to bite it.
Just as threatening to the US were China’s moves to use its economic and technological advancement to build a military force capable of pushing the US out of the South China Sea, a region the US had dominated since the Pacific War, and which was now the most dynamic in the world. China has built a navy and a fleet of sophisticated jet fighters capable of reaching far from its shores. It is establishing military outposts on shoals and islets in the South China Sea. It is carrying out flyovers and naval missions close to Taiwan’s shores to forestall any moves by Taiwan to independence and to prepare to blockade or invade the island at some point. China has developed missiles capable of sinking US aircraft carriers. While China lacks the deep and broad relations the US enjoys with many nations in the Asia Pacific, the CCP is trying to remedy its soft power deficit through increased financial, trade and military ties with island nations in the south and south-west Pacific, seeking to edge out traditional relations with the US and its allies, including Australia.
The US maintains a military lead over China, but the global nature of its imperial interests is also a weakness. It may outspend China on its military by nearly three to one, but its forces are stretched across several continents. Chinese imperialism, by contrast, is focused on domination closer to home in the South China Sea. The US’s difficulties in supplying Ukraine with war materiel in its war with Russia indicate problems in its defence industrial capacity at home. Much US military spending is wasted on weapons systems that are already obsolete by the time they roll off the production line. Long-term offshoring of production of vital components for the war machine, including to China itself, has become a big concern for the Pentagon.
China’s challenge to US hegemony in the Asia-Pacific has dominated US foreign and defence policy for 15 years, from presidents Barack Obama to Joe Biden. It lies at the heart of successive US national security and national defence policy documents. It explains Obama’s 2012 call for a “pivot to Asia” whereby 60 percent of the US Navy would be deployed to the Asia-Pacific. It underpinned Biden’s bid to build alliances to defend the so-called international rules-based order threatened by the “autocracies” of China and Russia. It helps explain growing US military spending and its withdrawal from the Middle East following the failed occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Make America Great Again” is a program to prepare the US to fight and win a war with China. It is not only that; there are plenty of right-wing causes to be pursued, such as hostility to vaccinations, that do not have a direct or necessary military connection, but the overall direction is clear.
Most obviously, there are tariffs and other incentives to encourage US companies to shut down industrial and IT production in China or areas such as Taiwan that are vulnerable to China and bring it home. Such a move would normally be financially unsustainable for many US companies since the cost of doing business is so much higher in the US. Trump’s solution is to try to slash the cost of doing business in the US, with the working class paying the price. What may simply look like gifts to his business mates, such as big corporate tax cuts, the savaging of the IRS, deregulation of environmental and labour provisions, the dismantling of the National Labor Relations Board and the invitation to fossil fuel companies to “drill, baby, drill”, are all aimed at incentivising US companies to rebuild the US’s industrial base.
Preparing for war is not just a matter of military hardware. It also involves rallying the population. This explains Trump’s ideological offensive against “woke”, DEI, trans rights and “cultural Marxism”. In their place, Trump and his cabinet want a patriotic population that evinces a willingness to fight and die for the country. They admire Israel with its highly militarised society and a big majority of the Jewish population fanatically devoted to wiping out the Palestinians. They want, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth put it, “to revive the warrior ethos”. If successful, this will have the added benefit of breaking political opposition at home and intimidating the working class, making easier the job of driving down wages and conditions and sacking workers.
Imperialist competition forces the contending powers to begin to mirror each other. So, in both the US and China, we see a repressive and reactionary government, the purging of dissent within and without the state machine, an incessant propaganda effort dedicated to fostering patriotism and “traditional values” and the diversion of funds from civilian to military use.
Trump and his loyal appointees in the state apparatus probably understand the opportunity that now lies open. It is not just Trump’s shock and awe tactics, the disarray in the ranks of his liberal opponents, his domination of the Republican Party, his control over both houses of Congress and the support of a conservative majority in the Supreme Court. The broader geopolitical situation also favours his initiatives to re-establish US power. US imperialism is currently enjoying some respite from its relative decline in the past two decades. In the Middle East, the US’s chief ally, Israel, has enjoyed a string of victories over Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. Iran has been further weakened by the fall of longstanding ally Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
In Europe, the cards are also falling the US’s way. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Europe’s economic stagnation have highlighted Europe’s dependence on the US. Trump is now seeking to exploit this as he opens closer relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and tells his NATO European allies to fend for themselves. If this comes to pass, the US will be free to redeploy some of its extensive military assets currently based in Europe to the Asia Pacific, where China continues to increase its imperialist presence.
Then there is the changing political alignment in Europe. Members of the hard right who identify with Trump are on the rise, while the centrist parties that long championed the so-called liberal world order are suffering serious electoral losses and, in some cases, forming blocs with the Trumpian hard right.
And finally, there is the US’s emergence as one of the world’s largest energy exporters, a position it can use as leverage against friends and foes alike.
This, then, is Trump’s project in its essentials. It is important to note, however, that it may not succeed. His coalition of supporters and financiers comprises various forces that do not all see eye to eye. The component parts of MAGA are unpopular among broad swathes of the population, and the president faces mid-term elections in November next year that may result in him losing his double majority in Congress—that is, if he is not stopped by a popular backlash in the workplaces and streets before then. Important sections of the capitalist class are suspending judgement on the program, particularly the attempt to unwind global flows of capital and trade. Growing interest repayments on government debt weigh on the budget, sticky inflation limits the Fed’s ability to cut interest rates, and a full-blown trade war could seriously damage the US economy. Nonetheless, this is the direction of travel in which Trump and his allies wish to take the country, and whatever reservations some capitalists and senior functionaries in the military and public service may have, they share with Trump a belief that the status quo is not working and things must change.
None of this is to say that war with China is about to break out. Both sides understand they are currently not prepared for one. But history has shown that the most dangerous times are those when a rising power challenges the hitherto dominant power. The last time a dominant global power—Britain—faltered, the instability and rivalry resulted in two world wars and fascism in Europe. This is hardly a prospect that should give us any comfort.
