By Jonathan Cheng

BEIJING -- The White House's new National Security Strategy signals a softer approach to competition with Beijing, playing down ideological differences between the two superpowers and marking a break from years in which China was singled out as posing the U.S.'s greatest challenge.

On Friday, the Trump administration released a much-anticipated, 30-page document that sets out Washington's foreign-policy priorities. The paper harshly criticizes the U.S.'s traditional allies in Europe, while emphasizing the overriding importance of the Americas in the White House's "America First" approach.

Under the Biden administration, China was explicitly named as the U.S.'s primary foreign-policy challenge. That administration was especially vocal in its support for Taiwan, the self-ruling island that Beijing has pledged to take by force, if necessary.

The new National Security Strategy maintains the language of "strategic competition" when discussing Taiwan's status and calls for working more closely with partners and allies in the Pacific to deter any attempt to seize Taiwan.

But the document also plays down ideological differences between the U.S. and China, instead placing economics and trade front and center in the relationship.

It names China only a handful of times -- almost exclusively in terms of the economic relationship. It makes other indirect references to the country, for instance mentioning unnamed competitors to the U.S. from outside the Western Hemisphere.

Most notably for Beijing, the White House document drops the Biden administration's declaration that the U.S. does "not support Taiwan independence." And while it signals general continuity with Biden's opposition to "unilateral changes to the status quo from either side," it softens that language somewhat to a statement that it "does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait."

Taken together, the new document represents what Beijing's leaders are likely to see as "a relatively favorable turn in U.S. grand strategy," said Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor of China studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

Weiss, who advised the Biden-era State Department, pointed in particular to the fact that the strategy document doesn't name China as the U.S.'s greatest challenge, as the Biden White House did in 2022.

"Beijing treats every written American commitment as a negotiating floor, " said Ryan Fedasiuk, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. The National Security Strategy, he said, "establishes the baseline from which Beijing negotiates, and the baseline just moved."

Fedasiuk said that what he regards as a tempering of the U.S. stance -- from one that "opposes" unilateral changes to the status quo over Taiwan during the Biden years to one in which the U.S. merely "does not support" any unilateral change in the new Trump document -- will be cheered in Beijing.

"Beijing will pocket this concession and use it as the starting point for the next negotiation and ask for even greater flexibility," said Fedasiuk, a former State Department official who also teaches at Georgetown University.

The new strategy document eschews Biden's favored language of maintaining a "rules-based" international order -- a term that appeared no fewer than eight times in the 2022 paper. The phrase appears just once this time, with a tone of derision, to slam what the Trump White House calls the failures of Biden-era policies.

The new document, said Weiss of Johns Hopkins, "crystallizes the United States' turn away from international leadership and democratic values toward a narrower focus on U.S. power and preventing any other country from becoming globally or regionally dominant."

The White House reserves its harshest critiques for Europe and what it describes as a decline in Western "civilizational self-confidence," which Weiss said "are peripheral to Chinese concerns." The withering tone toward the U.S.'s traditional allies in Europe could rattle Washington's partners in Asia, where American troops and alliances have long been a central pillar of the region's security.

On other fronts, though, there is evidence that a more traditional foreign-policy stance on maintaining alliances remains in favor, despite increased tariffs and tougher trade policies aimed at U.S. partners in Tokyo, Seoul and Taipei, as well as demands that they shoulder more of the burden of their own defense.

The document calls explicitly for working with regional allies and partners to "deny any attempt to seize Taiwan or achieve a balance of forces so unfavorable to us as to make defending that island impossible." It also emphasizes the importance of the "Quad" grouping of the U.S., Australia, Japan and India, which shares intelligence and coordinates maritime policy in the Pacific. Beijing has railed against the group as an effort to contain it.

Apparent contradictions muddy the picture. Weiss points to other language in the document that she describes as being critical of multilateralism -- especially its statement that "larger, richer, and stronger nations" will always play an outsize role in international affairs.

In general, the new strategy's focus on China is centered primarily on trade, which the Trump White House document describes as "the ultimate stakes" in Asia. The administration paints a picture of a bilateral trade relationship that had shifted over the decades to one in which the U.S. and China were "near-peers."

While decrying China's trade practices, it also signals its hopes for a "mutually advantageous economic relationship with China."

The paper is in line with Trump's attempts, in both his first and second terms, to refashion the trade relationship between the world's two largest economies. It pledges to work with regional allies and partners to "counteract predatory economic practices" and "ensure that allied economies do not become subordinate to any competing power."

In recent years, Beijing has used economic coercion to punish trading partners such as Australia. A number of its trading partners have also complained that China has hollowed out their own industries by dumping cheap goods onto their markets.

Write to Jonathan Cheng at Jonathan.Cheng@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 06, 2025 10:00 ET (15:00 GMT)

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