This week on Sinica, I speak with Patricia Kim, a Fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center, where she focuses on U.S. policy toward China and the broader Asia Pacific. One year into Donald Trump’s second term, Pattie and her colleague Joyce Yang have published a comprehensive Brookings assessment titled “Making America Great Again? Evaluating Trump’s China strategy at the one-year mark,” which examines whether the administration’s stated objectives on reindustrialization, AI leadership, strategic dependence, and global standing are actually being met. We discuss the paradox of Trump’s China policy (which is surprising consistency in goals despite the absence of a formal strategy document), with its mixed results on economic rebalancing and supply chain security, the troubling deterioration in U.S.-China diplomatic and military channels, and why the administration’s approach to allies and partners may be undermining its own objectives. Pattie brings analytical discipline and empirical rigor to debates that are often long on rhetoric and short on evidence, cutting through a lot of noise to assess what’s actually working, what isn’t, and where the strategy is running up against reality.
4:45 – Does Trump have a China strategy? Consistency without a formal framework
8:15 – Assessing the economic rebalancing goals: reindustrialization and tariffs
15:30 – Technology competition: export controls and AI leadership
23:45 – Supply chain security and strategic dependence challenges
31:20 – The deterioration of diplomatic and military-to-military channels
39:50 – The ally and partner problem: how Trump’s approach undermines his own goals
47:15 – Global standing and American credibility in the Trump era
52:30 – Paying it forward: The Lost in Translation series at Brookings
Paying it forward:
Lost in Translation Series (Brookings Global China Project)
Recommendations:
Pattie: To Dare Mighty Things by Michael O’Hanlon
Kaiser: Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman
