Could a U.S.-China War Break Out Post-Trump?

Another way the Thucydides Trap could be sprung

Recently, I took a trip down memory lane, to examine some columns I wrote about the U.S.-China relationship at the beginning of the first Trump administration. Two in particular stuck out for me: one on how the United States should not spend significant financial or military resources to compete with China for influence in the developing world, but should focus on our own capacities, and a second one about how Trump’s laziness and incompetence might make it possible for America to avoid war with China, because we’d wind up surrendering supremacy without fighting. I ended that latter piece (which was actually published first) as follows:

If the power transition is inevitable . . . then America will inevitably have to cede primacy. But this is something dominant powers have a great deal of difficulty doing. We may only be able to do it if we can make ourselves believe that we've done nothing of the sort.

In the end, the key to avoiding the Thucydides Trap may be for the dominant power to delude itself into believing that surrender is victory.

Who could better achieve that goal than President Donald Trump?

The second Trump administration has vastly exceeded the first in its incompetence and also, despite the blizzard of executive actions, on the laziness front—the pace of activity has been frenetic, but there’s no indication that anyone is actually doing the work to make sure the right decisions are being made or that they are being executed well. This applies across the board: to spending, to staffing, to defense, to energy, to immigration—the things that the administration claims to care about are being handled in as slap-dash a manner as the things it clearly doesn’t care about. After the insultingly stupid roll-out of the administration’s massive tariffs, I think it should be clear by now to anyone who isn’t completely in the tank for the administration that, as my colleague Damon Linker put it last week, they are motivated overwhelmingly by the impulse to destroy, and have neither the inclination nor the ability to build.

Does that mean my 2017 take is also even more true than ever? That one silver lining of the Trump chaos is that we can all relax about the likelihood of catastrophic war with China, because America is just going to surrender our primacy without a real struggle?

Maybe. But I’m not sure. What I do think is true is that we should be thinking, now, about post-Trump trajectories. Even if the Trump ship rights itself to some degree— if we don’t see the collapse of America’s economy and/or democracy—I fear we may still be stuck in the Thucydides Trap, just backing in from another angle.

Let’s start with the economic front. The tariff bomb that President Trump dropped had a variety of contradictory motivations, but the clearest thread was the desire to revive America as a manufacturing power. The initial returns to that strategy are phenomenally negative—we’re all aware of the decline in the dollar and the ructions in the bond market, but the negative reaction of manufacturers is even more dramatic; they are laying off workers and shelving plans to build. Meanwhile, the administration has responded to market chaos by promising that they don’t really mean to pursue North Korean-style autarky, but are in fact eager to make some kind of deal to climb down.

If they mean that, then deals will happen. But market confidence will not be so easy to restore, and America’s leverage will look significantly weaker in the wake of Trump’s actions than it was ten years ago, or five years ago, or even last year. If Trump blinks before Xi does—and he has already done some blinking—everyone will know it, and will calibrate their own negotiating postures accordingly. And if Trump doesn’t blink then the scenarios get increasingly ugly. The best case end result at this point is likely to be higher interest rates, reduced investment, and a restoration of world trade on terms that are at least somewhat worse for America than what obtained prior to the administration’s action—not great, but hardly the end of the world.

But in that scenario the same problems still obtain that existed prior to the tariff announcement. America will still be massively outproduced by China—indeed, China’s lead in automation should enable them to become even more dominant than they are now despite their aging population. America will still be vulnerable to disruptions of crucial materials and components during wartime. America will still be lagging in crucial technologies like batteries (which power autonomous drones among other things)—and we will be facing the prospect of losing ground in areas where we are currently leading, like aerospace. All the strategic reasons why we worried about deindustrialization and the challenge of China will remain; in fact those trend lines may well have worsened.

Now consider the diplomatic and military situation. Europe could respond in various ways to America’s abandonment. They could turn toward deeper political integration, and work to build a meaningful independent military capacity. They could disintegrate, with different countries pursuing their own national goals, sometimes significantly at odds with each other. They could also respond mostly with dithering and paralysis, as has been their default for the past generation. These different possibilities have significantly different implications for Russia’s position as well as for Europe’s own future. But in all cases, it makes rational sense for the nations of Europe, either together or separately, to pursue relationships with China that are not brokered by or aligned with the United States. United, Europe is a second-tier power; divided, they are a collection of third-tier powers. If they can no longer trust or rely on the United States, and they are threatened by Russia, they simply cannot afford to also play hardball with China. If America avoids war with China, that might be a net positive for global stability. But if we wind up in a conflict, it puts us in a worse situation in terms of our ability to sustain a long war—particularly if China uses economic leverage on Europe to try to pressure the United States.

The situation in the Indo-Pacific looks somewhat different, where a variety of countries are more directly threatened by China than by any other power. For Taiwan of course, but also for Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia and so forth, the most comfortable position is to have good commercial relationships with both the United States and China while relying on the United States to protect them from possible Chinese encroachment or coercion. If America tries to force these countries to choose sides, it’s not clear that they can afford to cut China off. But even if we don’t force that choice, doubts about the long-term capacity of the United States to compete will change these countries’ timelines for continuing to pursue that balancing act.

In other words, America’s geopolitical competitiveness will be deteriorating in a similar fashion to its economic competitiveness. At a certain point, it will be clear to both the United States and our Asian allies that time is not on America’s side, and that therefore the alternative to conflict is accepting a power transition. Depending on how China handles that reality, that could lead to rapid bandwagoning in their region, and a precipitous collapse in the American position. That doesn’t necessarily mean war—but it could if both we and our Asian allies foresee that possibility, and choose to act before it transpires.

This is another version of the Thucydides Trap, but not the one we usually hear articulated. The classic formulation is that the dominant power tries to preserve its position against a rising power by forming a blocking coalition, which leads the rising power to build its own coalition to counter that blocking, and eventually the rising power either launches a war to break out or does something that provokes the dominant power into starting one to preserve its dominance. That’s what happened in the run-up to World War I, and in the run up to World War II in the Pacific, and in the Biden years, as all our major opponents lined cooperated together, it looked like it might be happening again with China; Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Hamas’s attack on Israel, looked like they might be the first battles of the next world war.

The optimistic short-term case, in like with my 2017 take, is that by abandoning the fight early the second Trump administration has made such a war much less likely. The administration has already abandoned Ukraine; what it will do with Iran remains to be seen, but my sense is that the president himself is eager to claim a diplomatic victory even if his many hawkish advisors object. Its economic moves have been catastrophically self-destructive. All of this should make China feel sanguine—and if China feels time is on their side, then that reduces the risk of war. But only if America also thinks time is on its side.

Can we plausibly believe that now, though? In the first Trump term, I thought Trump might neuter the most hawkish American faction, and China might quietly achieve supremacy without the public noticing. But it’s too generally obvious now what’s happening. That could make us more trigger-happy—which, in turn, could make those of our Asian allies who fear America’s retreat more willing to do things to provoke conflict sooner than later, much as Serbia was willing to do in 1914.

I doubt this administration would rise to the provocation. Trump is a bully; he’s more interested in picking fights with weaker powers. Faced with a determined and powerful opponent, I think he’d quickly back down, while brazenly denying having done so. But depending on the provocation, he might not feel able to—and, more to the point, the next administration, particularly if it isn’t overtly MAGA-inflected, will almost certainly declare an aim of restoring America’s international position, much as Biden did, while a MAGA-inflected successor wouldn’t have Trump’s unique bond with nationalist-minded voters to lean on and thereby dissipate opposition to moves that, objectively, look like retreat, or even surrender.

Which might make 2029 the ideal moment for an American ally to do something provocative that triggers a catastrophic U.S.-China war.