An Own-Goal of Historic Proportions:

On Rubio, Student Visas, and America’s Strategic Folly

Written in haste — forgive the unpolished prose.

Measured disbelief is getting harder to maintain.

On Wednesday, just a couple of hours ago at the time of writing, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced via tweet that the U.S. would begin revoking the visas of Chinese students, including those “with connections to the Chinese Communist Party” or studying in unspecified “critical fields.” (Read the State Department announcement here). This follows an extraordinary spate of similarly short-sighted, spite-driven moves from the Trump administration: instructing embassies and consulates to pause all visa issuance for international students, stripping Harvard of its ability to host them, and publicly castigating elite universities for enrolling what they consider too many foreign students.

As the child of immigrants who came to the U.S. for graduate (Dad) and undergraduate study (Mom), and as someone who has spent decades trying to foster mutual understanding between Americans and Chinese, I’m struggling to find words that adequately capture just how self-defeating — and frankly stupid — this is. It is hard to think of a better example of an own-goal in the annals of American soft power. Somehow, we just keep doing it.

This will be framed, no doubt, as a national security measure. But no serious person believes this is about genuine risk mitigation. It’s about spectacle. It’s a gesture meant to placate a political base that’s been primed to see every Chinese student as a CCP sleeper agent, and every American university as a hotbed of un-American radicalism. It’s part of a larger campaign that, rather than diagnosing the real ailments of higher education or geopolitical rivalry, seeks only to punish and purge.

I’m reminded of the explanatory pivot we all saw after the “Liberation Day” tariffs, when a hugely dumb move that got immediate pushback, most importantly on the bond market, was suddenly recast in terms of sticking it to China.

Let’s be clear about what this will accomplish, beyond the obvious harm to individual lives, which is already considerable. Harvard alone has more than 7,000 international students, many of them now in limbo, fearful of attending their own graduation ceremonies or returning home for fear they won’t be readmitted. Some are canceling research trips; others are reconsidering whether to enroll at all. U.S. students, too, are beginning to balk at schools where international peers are treated as disposable pawns.

But beyond the immediate damage, this move will have profound systemic consequences. American universities, especially elite ones, rely on international students — many of whom pay full freight — to keep the lights on and the research flowing. It’s not just a matter of revenue. Those students help fund financial aid for their less affluent peers, subsidize public goods like libraries and laboratories, and often go on to produce the research, inventions, and companies that bolster American competitiveness. This is way beyond the petty, vindictive attack on the elites who’ve shunned the MAGA right. This is blowing our damn foot off.

And no, this isn’t just about Harvard. Other institutions — many of them with smaller endowments — are watching nervously, wondering if they’re next.

The soft power cost is immeasurable. For decades, a degree from a U.S. university was the golden ticket, and not just for the prestige and the improved job prospects back home. It was often the start of a lifelong affinity for America, its values, and its people. Some of China’s best-known reformers and tech founders were educated in the U.S. They returned to China with not just skills and credentials, but admiration for an open society that welcomed them. Those days are ending. We are actively teaching the next generation of global talent that America is hostile, capricious, and unwelcoming. We are ceding the moral high ground — one that was, I’ll grant, already eroding fast — with alarming speed.

Of course, the stated rationale here is that Chinese students — especially those in STEM fields — pose a security risk. But what does it mean to have “connections to the Chinese Communist Party”? Is it having parents who are civil servants? Being part of the Communist Youth League, which millions of students join by default? Being a Young Pioneer in grade school? Having gone to a top university that receives state funding?

We’re not vetting threats. We’re painting with a broad-ass brush dipped in sinophobia and paranoia.

So how is Beijing likely to respond? I said on social media when I saw Rubio’s tweet —and I’ll double down here — that Chinese officials will publicly condemn this policy, as they’ve already condemned the Harvard international student ban (before the courts placed an injunction on it). But behind closed doors, they may be unstoppering the baijiu. For years, the leadership has been fretting about brain drain — watching a steady stream of top-tier talent flow overseas, often never to return. If your goal were to shut off that flow and make the U.S. less attractive to the best and brightest, you couldn’t design a better system than the one the Trump administration is now building. Why rely on expensive inducements like the Thousand Talents program when you have Washington now doing your recruiting and retention work for you? This is going to be Qian Xuesen times a thousand.

This is not just bad for America. It’s corrosive to the already threadbare fabric of the U.S.-China relationship. Student exchange, for all its many challenges, has been one of the last remaining areas of genuine, good-faith engagement between the two countries. It has been a crucial vector of mutual understanding, and one of the few mechanisms still capable of generating interpersonal trust in an era of escalating suspicion.

To treat international students — especially Chinese ones — as potential enemies first and scholars second is to take a sledgehammer to one of the very few bridges left standing. That this is happening while bilateral trust is already at historic lows makes it all the more tragic. The bilateral relationship doesn’t just need “strategic competition” and military deterrence; it needs ballast. It needs spaces where Chinese and Americans can encounter one another as human beings. We are closing those spaces.

There’s a grim irony here, too. The very people cheering these policies the loudest are often those who claim to be defending American greatness. Yet what made America “great” in the eyes of so many abroad wasn’t just its GDP or aircraft carriers. It was its openness, its world-class universities, its confidence in ideas, and its ability to attract the world’s talent. Again, I’ll own that much of the shine had already come off. But we’re betraying the ideals we have left. And we’re trading them for a pile of nativist grievances and bad-faith nationalism.

I’m not writing this out of some unthinking allegiance to the “globalist” ideal or some misty-eyed nostalgia for better days of U.S.-China convergence, though I confess I’ve been known to indulge that. I write this because even if one accepts the premise that the U.S. and China are in strategic competition, it is utter fucking lunacy to jettison one of the clearest advantages America has always enjoyed. This is not strategy. This is spite.

There’s still time to reverse course. The courts may block the worst of these efforts. Cooler heads in universities, Congress, and even in some corners of the State Department may prevail.

But the damage is real, and it’s done. The lesson, for those watching from Beijing to Boston, is unmistakable: MAGA will burn it all down to satisfy the vindictive impulses of their leader. It can’t see two steps ahead. It’s not serious or confident enough to actually compete. And it no longer knows the difference between protecting its interests and setting itself on fire.