It’s All About China...What observers call a trade war is, for Trump, simply part of a larger war—in the Middle East, in South America, in Ukraine—against an entire axis

Tablet Magazine ^ | October 30, 2025 | Lee Smith

[Red Badger]

Shortly after October 7, 2023, Israeli forces sorting through the remains of the 1,200 people killed during the deadliest attack on Israel since the 1973 Yom Kippur war recovered drones that Hamas and other Iranian proxies had used to target Israeli civilians. Officials found that the unmanned aerial vehicles contained multiple U.S.-origin electronic components, and further investigation showed that these parts had been procured by Chinese firms then transferred to Iranian front companies, which in turn passed them on to Hamas. The Iranians distributed U.S.-made technology bought by the Chinese to other proxies as well, including the Houthi rebels, who used them to target U.S. and allied shipping.

Although people don’t readily make the connection, this episode from the Middle East throws into sharp relief the nature of the U.S.-China power competition. Indeed, though observers like to frame President Donald Trump’s policy on China narrowly as a trade war, tariffs and other economic measures are simply instruments the White House is deploying in a larger war against the China axis. It’s a conflict fought at home and abroad that has ramifications for U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Supplying Ukraine to defend itself against Russia is part of Trump’s campaign against the China axis. Targeting Venezuelan drug cartels, shutting down fentanyl shipments, and supporting allies like Argentina’s President Javier Milei to stand firm against Chinese encroachment into Latin American are as much a part of the campaign as Trump’s China tariffs. Campaigns against China, Russia, Venezuela, Iran and its proxies have dominated the U.S. news cycle the last year because the Trump administration sees the China axis as the most dangerous threat to our national security. It’s all about China.

Sadly, certain cohorts of Americans, including many under 30, can’t perceive this—for a very good reason: The reckless and deracinated foreign policies of the last several administrations have made it impossible for Americans to understand the purpose of foreign policy—including most significantly the nature of our alliance system—because successive White Houses before Trump have subverted the national interest by rewarding our adversaries at the expense not only of our allies but of America itself. In fact, that bug became a feature in the system that Trump is trying to fix.

The confusion goes back much further than Bill Clinton’s blunder in ushering China into the World Trade Organization, George W. Bush’s Middle East failed freedom agenda, and Barack Obama’s destructive Iran deal. Indeed, it starts at the beginning of the U.S.-China relationship, when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger made their historic February 1972 trip to the city then called Peking. Historians of the period and policy experts hail the “opening to China” as a strategic masterstroke, with the two men using the weaker communist power as leverage against the considerably more powerful Soviet Union. Journalists at the time called Nixon and Kissinger’s policy playing the “China card.”

It’s one of the few accomplishments credited to one of America’s most controversial presidents and it made Kissinger postwar America’s most celebrated diplomat. But the opening to China was among the worst bets American statesmen ever made. And yet the furthest that critics of Nixon and Kissinger’s China policy will go is to claim that while bringing China into the international order later proved problematic, the opening move was a brilliant strategic gambit. But that’s a whitewash. And it’s not how Trump sees it.

“The worst thing Nixon did wasn’t Watergate,” the president told me for my book The China Matrix. “It was allowing China to take advantage of this country. He and Kissinger are the ones that opened up China. And it was a terrible mistake. It didn’t have to be this way.”

Trump believes that the U.S. alliance system is crucial to advancing the national interest. Its essential structure was designed 80 years ago for the purpose of fortifying a post-WWII bicoastal superpower, whose interests stretch from Latin America to Europe and Africa to Asia with strategic waterways in between, like the Persian Gulf and the eastern Mediterranean. The best-known aspect of that global security architecture is NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Trump is famously critical of NATO—more critical of the fact that treaty members have become accustomed to not paying their fair share for mutual defense than of its usefulness. Indeed, after years of policy experts wondering whether NATO has outlived its purpose, Trump’s focus on the China axis has made an alliance whose chief purpose is to deter Russian ambitions in Europe more relevant than it has been since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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TOPICS: Business/Economy; Computers/Internet; Government; Military/Veterans
KEYWORDS: bush; clinton; hamas; houthi; kissinger; nato; nixon; obama; october7

[MacNaughton]

It’s one of the few accomplishments credited to one of America’s most controversial presidents and it made Kissinger postwar America’s most celebrated diplomat. But the opening to China was among the worst bets American statesmen ever made.

Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, United Arab Emirates

The New Development Bank, headquartered in Shanghai, China, is the premier institution of BRICS.

A graph illustrating the estimated nominal GDP (Nominal) share of the BRICS and G7 countries from 1990 to 2025.

[wjcsux]

That’s one ugly building.

[faithhopecharity]

Totally agree about Nixon’s mistake empowering communist China.

[sauropod]

Bkmk