The DC-Silicon Valley anti-China coalition is falling apart

The DC-Silicon Valley anti-China coalition is falling apart

Arriving in the White House in 2021, President Joe Biden set about dismantling much of his predecessor’s foreign-policy agenda. But there was one clear area of continuity: China. Here, Biden retained the first Trump administration’s confrontational approach, expanding the use of export controls on advanced technology and keeping China as the U.S. military’s pacing threat. In a time of deep political division, the newly formed China consensus appeared all-powerful. When the House voted in January 2023 to establish a select committee on “Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party,” the tally was 365 to 65. Once President Donald Trump returned to power, observers expected more of the same. But Trump has instead moved U.S. China policy in the opposite direction, seeking to de-escalate bilateral tension in favor of “constructive strategic stability” and revealing that the bipartisan consensus on the “China threat” may be more ephemeral than many assumed. Indeed, there is good reason to believe the peak of anti-China sentiment in U.S. politics has passed. China’s place as the primary U.S. strategic competitor has its roots back in the early 2000s, but the narrative really took hold during Trump’s first term, when it won support from five different groups. The first group was Trump’s Rust Belt base, to whom he and others supplied a narrative that scapegoated China for the economic and social dislocation they had suffered. China was also blamed for deaths of despair, including overdoses caused by fentanyl, whose precursor chemicals often came from China. This groundswell against globalization was seized upon by a second group, made up of critics of the conventional economic case for global free trade: Trump himself, Peter Navarro, and Robert Lighthizer. Beginning in 2018, they imposed tariffs on some $360 billion of Chinese imports. The Biden administration maintained and entrenched this departure from free-trade globalism, announcing a “worker-centered” trade policy and reviving a U.S. industrial policy. Between them, the two administrations made bipartisan a shift away from the previous economic orthodoxy toward one focused on competitive trade with China. The third group consisted of the foreign-policy establishment of liberal internationalists and conservative hawks. For this group, China filled a gap in U.S. foreign policy that had been empty since the end of the Cold War: the foreign adversary against which the U.S. could organize a global security bloc. In Trump’s first term, the role fell to the administration’s primacists and their allies – John Bolton, Matt Pottinger, and Mike Pompeo, who went to the Nixon Library in July 2020 to call for “a new alliance of democracies.” Two years later, Biden’s National Security Strategy called China “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective.” Accordingly, Biden and his national security team set about trying to contain Chinese power. The fourth group contributing to the anti-China consensus were the offensive realists, such as John Mearsheimer and Elbridge Colby. Although they explicitly positioned themselves against the China hawks on both sides of the aisle who viewed the adversary through more ideological framings, they converged on a preference for slowing China’s rise. This cohort came to fear that China’s growing military capabilities and ambitions posed a direct threat to U.S. interests in East Asia. In response, they urged the United States to double down on its military investments in Asia to preserve U.S. advantages where they still existed. Silicon Valley was the fifth and final group. Though initially skeptical of national allegiances and defense contracts, America’s technologists came around in the late 2010s, when new business interests and renewed geopolitical competition changed their calculus. In November 2017, Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive and a prominent Democratic donor, told an audience in Washington that China would catch up with the United States by 2020 and “dominate the industries of AI” by 2030. Silicon Valley’s few Republicans fully embraced the geopolitical turn. Palmer Luckey founded Anduril in 2017 to build defense technology for the Pentagon. Peter Thiel and Alex Karp took Palantir public in 2020 with a filing that declared working with the Chinese Communist Party “inconsistent with our culture and mission.” Before long, this position transformed from taboo to commonplace. By the 2024 presidential election, Silicon Valley had bet on a combination of Trumpian nationalism and anti-China alarmism. There were holdouts, Nvidia and Apple among them, but they were now fighting the discourse rather than shaping it. For much of the last decade, alignment among these groups created a seemingly unshakeable anti-China consensus. Yet the common thread was always made up of separate strands, whose unwinding should come as no surprise. Each group had its own reason for diagnosing China as a menace and has now found its own reasons to move in the other direction. For starters, although China still receives much of the blame for the economic dislocation of American workers, it was always only one villain in the story – and the most distant. Other competitors for the same slot have come to dominate domestic discussion: migrants, “woke” elites, and other assorted culture-war enemies have all been held responsible for the plight of America’s dispossessed, displacing China as a sole focus of concern. The trade hawks have also had to temper their zeal. The second Trump administration came in boasting about tariffs, with real trade warriors in key positions: Navarro at the White House, Jamieson Greer at USTR, Howard Lutnick at Commerce. “Liberation Day,” on April 2, 2025, was the big move. Within a week, the tariff on Chinese goods stood at 145%; but this effort hit a wall when China restricted its exports of rare earth metals. Since then, both sides have sought to de-escalate in the economic domain. The Trump administration still professes a desire for some rebalancing but has settled on a renewable trade truce as acceptable for now. The liberal internationalists and neoconservatives continue to advocate a global containment strategy, but their influence is waning. While they still represent the largest cohort in Congress and occupy many think tank sinecures, they no longer dictate the terms of discussion. Their arguments have also started to fall flat abroad. “Allies and partners” who see relative U.S. decline are in no rush to back Washington and alienate Beijing, preferring instead to hedge. The China threat remains central to the realist prioritizers, but they, too, have been forced to moderate their position. China’s military rise and the failed U.S. war with Iran have hastened the shift in the bilateral military balance while forcing a reevaluation of what the United States military can realistically achieve in Asia. Since the U.S. cannot afford a war with China in the medium term, realist prioritizers have started to shift the goal, from the pursuit of dominance to a “decent peace.” Finally, the tech elite has softened somewhat on China. Jensen Huang and Nvidia were attacked in Congress, by both parties, for wanting to sell chips to China, but won the argument in the White House. The administration reversed its ban on the H20 chip in July 2025 and approved sales of the more powerful H200 in December, in exchange for a share of the revenue. Meanwhile, the general public has decisively rejected the argument that an AI race with China requires all-out support for Silicon Valley. Polls show widespread support for AI regulation and broad opposition to the construction of data centers. American skepticism of Silicon Valley has so far eclipsed any anxiety over Chinese technological advancement. Beyond the shifting perspectives of these five groups, the American public’s fatigue with confrontational foreign policy is also a factor. The public reaction to the war with Iran underscores the limited tolerance voters have for the disruption caused by unnecessary conflict. None of these changes guarantees peaceful U.S.-China relations going forward. Despite recent leader-level summits filled with ceremony, the two sides continue to compete intensely in the security and economic domains. U.S.-China interactions will continue to be contentious for some time. Still, the unraveling of the ad hoc coalition that created the apparent anti-China consensus makes any form of “new cold war” unlikely — and creates the potential for a real change in how the United States approaches China over the next decade.