Atlas Wept

In the 2025 National Security Strategy, the War for America's China Policy Rages On

At long last, the Trump administration has offered an answer to the question: What kind of relationship does the United States want with China?

A mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing.

But what precisely does this entail?

The new National Security Strategy is what all strategies are — a consensus document produced through least-common-denominator bargaining between its authors. But rather than picking winners from the divergent worldviews of the economic nationalists, hard-power competitors, and transactional restrainers within his administration, President Trump’s 2025 NSS appears to be a strange and at times contradictory amalgam.

The result offers some clues as to the trajectory of American power — and makes clear that the war for America’s China policy is far from over.

The Document as Battlefield

In an ideal world, the National Security Strategy exists to impose order on the interagency by answering fundamental questions about what America wants, how much it will pay to achieve it, and which tools it will deploy toward those ends.

The 2025 NSS instead reads like a ceasefire agreement between warring camps — each faction securing its preferred language in different sections, without an overarching framework to reconcile the contradictions.

On economics, for example, the NSS promises to “rebalance America’s economic relationship with China, prioritizing reciprocity and fairness to restore American economic independence” — clarifying two paragraphs later that “Trade with China should be balanced and focused on non-sensitive factors.” This could mean almost anything. Then an articulation of the ultimate U.S. objective:

“If America remains on a growth path — and can sustain that while maintaining a genuinely mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing — we should be headed from our present $30 trillion economy in 2025 to $40 trillion in the 2030s. Our ultimate goal is to lay the foundation for long-term economic vitality.”

Read that again. The NSS envisions growing the U.S. economy by a third over the next decade while also “restoring American economic independence” from the same Chinese manufacturing base that currently produces components essential to that growth. The administration’s theory of victory involves maintaining a “mutually advantageous” relationship with the country it elsewhere describes as America’s primary strategic competitor.

This is not a unified declaration of American intent, but three separate strategies crammed into adjacent paragraphs.

Economic Nationalism Ascendant

The clearest factional victories belong to the economic nationalists. The document’s middle sections are characterized by their worldview — that economic security is national security, and that dependence on foreign supply chains constitutes a “civilizational vulnerability.”

The NSS commits to “reindustrialization” through “the strategic use of tariffs and new technologies that favor widespread industrial production in every corner of our nation, raise living standards for American workers, and ensure that our country is never again reliant on any adversary, present or potential, for critical products or components.” Here is the calling card of Mr. Navarro — tariffs as permanent policy rather than negotiating leverage. The goal is not to extract concessions from Beijing but to restructure American production away from Chinese supply chains.

A similar pattern characterizes descriptions of the defense industrial base. “America requires a national mobilization to innovate powerful defenses at low cost, to produce the most capable and modern systems and munitions at scale, and to re-shore our defense industrial supply chains.” This is not about increasing U.S. military or technological power in relative terms, but rebuilding American manufacturing capacity as a matter of national survival.

The segment on energy is likewise a nod to economic nationalists, advancing the project of industrial revival and exploiting domestic resources: “Restoring American energy dominance (in oil, gas, coal, and nuclear) and reshoring the necessary key energy components is a top strategic priority.” The document categorically rejects “disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.” The focus is on removing the regulatory constraints that nationalists see as obstacles to American industrial resurgence.

Permanent tariffs, supply chain independence, energy dominance, and rejection of climate constraints are the throughline of the NSS. If this were the entire document, the strategy would at least present a coherent vision of American power.

Superficial Wins for Hard-Power Hawks

The hard-power faction can likewise claim partial victory. The Taiwan section keeps intact a core element of the U.S. catechism on cross-Strait policy — maintaining that “the United States does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait” — but remains suspiciously quiet on China’s widely reported ask that the United States “oppose” rather than “not support” Taiwan independence. The NSS says:

“There is, rightly, much focus on Taiwan, partly because of Taiwan’s dominance of semiconductor production, but mostly because Taiwan provides direct access to the Second Island Chain and splits Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters.”

This line is important win for hard-power advocates. It subordinates U.S. economic interests in Taiwan to national security needs: Taiwan matters because it enables the United States to protect and project national power in Asia.

The NSS also pledges to “build a military capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain” and “harden and strengthen our military presence in the Western Pacific.” Yet this is undercut by inexplicable hedging in the phrase “deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Why is this merely “ideal,” and not labeled as an explicit priority? Is the United States open to the prospect of losing military overmatch in the Western Pacific?

The segment on alliances is where the document’s factional compromises become painful to read and particularly chafing for U.S. partners to bear:

“Given President Trump’s insistence on increased burden-sharing from Japan and South Korea, we must urge these countries to increase defense spending, with a focus on the capabilities—including new capabilities—necessary to deter adversaries and protect the First Island Chain. We will also harden and strengthen our military presence in the Western Pacific, while in our dealings with Taiwan and Australia we maintain our determined rhetoric on increased defense spending.”

At the same time hard-power advocates seek allied cooperation and prefer extended U.S. deterrence commitments, transactionalists insist they must pay more.

The same pattern appears on technology competition. The NSS acknowledges the need for “offensive cyber operations” and improved capabilities to “bolster the resilience of the American technology sector.” It commits to “maintaining economic preeminence” and describes advanced technology as essential to deterrence. But it offers no theory for how surgical export controls will work when the NSS simultaneously promises to use American technology as an “inducement” to swing states: “America should similarly enlist our European and Asian allies and partners, including India, to cement and improve our joint positions... by receiving long-term U.S. investment.”

So which is it? Are advanced chips strategic assets to be denied to China, or commercial products to be offered as diplomatic carrots? The NSS does not resolve this tension because the factions cannot agree on the answer.

Restraint as a New Architecture of Great-Power Relations

There can be no doubt that realism and restraint are the intellectual throughline of the 2025 NSS. The document’s opening pages announce: “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” America will practice “burden-sharing and burden-shifting,” with “dozens of wealthy, sophisticated nations that must assume primary responsibility for their regions and contribute far more to our collective defense.”

The Hague Commitment demanding 5 percent of GDP defense spending from NATO allies earns a prominent mention, as does the concept of “realignment through peace” — the idea that “seeking peace deals at the President’s direction, even in regions and countries peripheral to our immediate core interests” strengthens American influence at minimal cost. This is the theory of transactionalist foreign policy working at its best — extracting value and promoting America’s positive influence in the world through presidential dealmaking rather than incurring the burdens of sustained strategic investment.

The China section contains the purest distillation of restrainer thinking. After describing decades of mistaken engagement policy, the NSS pivots:

“If America remains on a growth path — and can sustain that while maintaining a genuinely mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing — we should be headed from our present $30 trillion economy in 2025 to $40 trillion in the 2030s, putting our country in an enviable position to maintain our status as the world’s leading economy. Our ultimate goal is to lay the foundation for long-term economic vitality.”

The transactionalist view of the U.S.-China relationship is not unlike the “new model of great power of relations” sought by Beijing: An overwhelming focus on economic development, pursued through mutual advantage — what some might call win-win cooperation. Under this framework, great powers can simultaneously compete and cooperate, extracting benefits through discrete deals even under the conditions of structural rivalry.

This explains the NSS’s puzzlingly optimistic view for the future of U.S.-China relations. After 11 months of whiplash on tariffs, export controls, and defense posturing, the document describes “a virtuous cycle as strong American deterrence opens up space for more disciplined economic action, while more disciplined economic action leads to greater American resources to sustain deterrence in the long term.” The belief that the United States can simultaneously deter China militarily while growing its economy through managed trade is precisely what both economic nationalists and hard-power competitors reject as dangerous fantasy.

What the Contradictions Reveal

The most illuminating passages are where factional worldviews collide within single paragraphs.

Look, for example, at the section on burden-sharing. The NSS declares:

“The United States will stand ready to help — potentially through more favorable treatment on commercial matters, technology sharing, and defense procurement — those countries that willingly take more responsibility for security in their neighborhoods and align their export controls with ours.”

This sentence attempts to reconcile the interests of all three factions at once, but actually exposes how their priorities contradict one another. Hard-power competitors want technology sharing to make allies more capable, but economic nationalists see this as surrendering the technological advantages America needs to rebuild its industrial base. Transactionalists want to induce allies to undertake more of the burden for their defense — by providing them favorable commercial treatment — but this requires lowering the tariffs nationalists insist are permanent policy to reshore American supply chains.

These objectives work at cross-purposes. If the goal is comprehensive technological denial to China, why offer to share technologies with allies who might leak it through inadequate security measures? If the goal is to increase allied defense spending, why condition it on commercial deals that might undermine nationalist reindustrialization? If the goal is burden-shifting to accommodate a multipolar world, why maintain forward military presence that enables allied free-riding and risks dragging America into foreign entanglements?

The NSS cannot answer because each faction would give a different response.

Taking Stock of the Battle Damage

Strategies reveal themselves not in what they promise but in how they force trade-offs. The NSS’s most glaring omission is any theory of prioritization when the factions come into conflict.

If forced to declare “winners” and “losers” in the battle for the NSS, the economic nationalists come out ahead. The document’s commitments to reindustrialization, energy dominance, and supply chain independence are specific, actionable, and unqualified. These are not merely aspirational but policy priorities that enjoy presidential backing and a large degree of bipartisan support and resources.

The transactional restrainers rank second for their influence over the document’s opening and closing frameworks. The NSS explicitly embraces burden-shifting as organizing principle of American statecraft. It describes great power competition as manageable through presidential dealmaking, including through a “mutually advantageous” relationship with China.

Though they have made some superficial gains in American declaratory policy and kept long-running elements of U.S. Pacific strategy intact, hard-power competitors finish last. They get their military commitments and keep Taiwan policy intact, but almost every hard-power priority is immediately qualified by demands for burden-sharing or domestic economic growth. The NSS avoids committing to the sustained defense spending increases that hard-power advocates see as essential, and it acknowledges the need for technological denial but offers no coherent theory of how to achieve it when economic and diplomatic considerations pull in opposite directions.

The Ultimate Question Unanswered

Let us return to that central claim: America wants a “mutually advantageous economic relationship” with China.

What does this mean?

If it means balanced trade with certain guardrails around sensitive technologies — allowing commerce in non-sensitive sectors while denying China capabilities relevant to military power — that is plausibly achievable. But it requires defining what counts as “sensitive” and accepting that China will remain economically integrated with American prosperity, to the chagrin of economic nationalists.

If it means reshoring critical supply chains, rebuilding American industrial capacity, and reducing economic dependence on Chinese manufacturing, then that requires accepting a long-term restructuring with significant near-term costs. It probably also requires accepting that China will not reciprocally depend on American goods, and may retaliate against U.S. efforts to break its own dependence — threatening the framework of “mutual advantage.”

If it means leveraging trade access to extract concessions on non-economic issues like fentanyl, rare earths, or support for the Russian defense industrial base, then that implies the United States will continue to seek opportunities to generate leverage — including through tariffs and export controls — and that these measures are meant to be traded away during negotiation, not tools for permanent economic restructuring or measures undertaken to safeguard national security.

These are three different theories of what a “mutually advantageous” economic relationship with China entails. By embracing all three, the NSS has chosen none of them.

A Frozen Conflict for a New Cold War

The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy suggests two possible trajectories for American power.

The optimistic scenario is that this document represents the opening bid in an internal negotiation that will eventually produce strategic clarity. Perhaps the NSS’s contradictions are deliberate — laying out all factional positions so that implementation decisions can force choices the document itself avoided. Maybe this is strategic flexibility rather than strategic confusion.

A more sober read is that the NSS has inadvertently frozen the factional conflict within President Trump’s administration, ensuring it continues through 2026 and beyond. Each camp secured enough language to claim partial victory while preventing any alternative worldview from dominating American foreign policy. The result is a document that says everything and therefore commits to nothing.

This is not unusual for National Security Strategies, which often paper over internal disagreements with aspirational language. What is unusual is how transparent the factional seams have become, and the extent to which they are working at cross-purposes.

The NSS was an opportunity to end the bureaucratic war for America’s China policy. Instead, it has formalized the conflict by enshrining all three competing approaches as equally legitimate — and risks perpetuating exactly the policy whiplash that has characterized the first year of Trump’s second term.