President Donald Trump has never had a strict foreign policy doctrine, but coming into office, the influential figures around him could be classified into three broad camps. There were the so-called “primacists,” who supported a traditional muscular and assertive US rule in the world; the “restrainers,” who wanted to dial back US commitments abroad and avoid costly military operations whenever possible; and the “prioritizers,” or “Asia-firsters,” who favored scaling back US involvement in the Middle East and support for Ukraine in order to focus on what they saw as the real threat: the growing military strength of the People’s Republic of China. 

If you had to put money on one of these camps winning out at the beginning of the second Trump administration, the prioritizers seemed like a logical bet. It was a position that both traditional Republican hawks like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and America Firsters like Vice President JD Vance could get behind. The defense scholar Elbridge Colby, whose 2021 book, The Strategy of Denial, is effectively the prioritizer bible, got an influential strategic planning role as undersecretary of defense for policy. After 20 years of frustrating US military engagement in the Middle East, there was broad consensus among both Democrats and Republicans of various stripes that the country needed to focus on other issues. 

What few would have anticipated is an administration that has effectively run the prioritizer playbook in reverse: quick to use military force abroad, engaged in yet another open-ended and costly war in the Middle East, and diverting valuable resources away from the Pacific while taking a remarkably accommodating stance toward China. In Trump’s second term, his foreign policy has been defined by deprioritizing Asian affairs in many ways. 

This surprising state of affairs will be highlighted this week as Trump heads to Beijing for a summit meeting with Xi Jinping. The summit was originally scheduled for March, but it was postponed due to the war that the White House no doubt hoped would be over by now. A meeting between the two most powerful men in the world might normally dominate the global conversation for a week, but in this case, there’s a good chance it will be overshadowed by events in the Persian Gulf. 

In the lead-up to the meeting, Trump seemed to be doing everything possible to not upset relations with China. As one White House official told Politico last month, the administration is “walking on eggshells” with Beijing in hopes for a breakthrough on trade relations. This approach has continued despite widespread reports of Chinese assistance to the Iranian forces that have fought and killed US troops. “I thought I had an understanding with President Xi, but that’s alright. That’s the way the war goes right?” Trump said, discussing an unspecified “gift” from China to Iran intercepted by the US military in April.      

How did we get to the point where the president is taking a more aggressive and hawkish approach to nearly every global issue — except for America’s main global rival? 

From unconventional hawk to unexpected dove

Trump distinguished himself during his first campaign for president with his inflammatory rhetoric about China “raping” the United States, but he was never a traditional China hawk. His focus has always been squarely on trade and economic competition, rather than geopolitics, military competition, or human rights. 

Nevertheless, officials in Trump’s first administration — including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger — pushed a maximally hawkish line on China and promoted a narrative that, while the first two decades of the 21st century had been dominated by the fight against extremist groups, the decades to come would be dominated by Cold War-style “great power competition” with China. 

The overwhelming focus on great power competition as the organizing principle for American foreign policy — and, to a large extent, domestic policy, as well — was taken up with gusto by the Biden administration. The imperative to prepare for a potential war with China, likely in the Taiwan Strait, was widely referred to as the “pacing challenge” in the Pentagon and prompted investments in a swathe of new programs and technologies. Over the past decade, the prospect of a real shooting war between the two nuclear armed superpowers has become disturbingly plausible, and military planners are far from comfortably confident the US would prevail in such a conflict. 

One might have expected the overwhelming focus on competition with China to continue or even accelerate with Trump returning to office. But ironically, “the second Trump administration has gone out of its way to downplay the notion of great power competition, which is something that the first Trump administration introduced into Washington’s strategic lexicon,” said Patricia Kim, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center. 

On the trade front at least, the second Trump administration came into office looking to pick a fight, slapping “emergency” tariffs on China that reached as high as 145 percent, citing unfair trading practices, as well as China’s role in the international fentanyl trade. But when China retaliated with punishing tariffs of its own and sparked market panic by suspending exports of the rare earth metals (essential materials for automobile, electronics, and defense manufacturers) over which China has a near monopoly, the White House backed down on the trade war. That retreat, combined with the February Supreme Court decision that limited the administration’s ability to unilaterally levy tariffs, made it clear the US was not as well positioned for a trade war as the administration had thought.

The simplest explanation for why Trump backed down from his trade war with China may be that China showed that it is able to fight back. “Trump is kind of a bully, and bullies don’t like to have even fights,” said Jeremy Shapiro, research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations. 

Reverse prioritization

Colby’s 2021 book warned that America would be unable to counter China’s military rise if the US continued to expand its security commitments throughout the world by pushing for NATO expansion into Eastern Europe for instance and getting bogged down in costly long-term wars in the Middle East. “What is used for the Middle East will not be available for Asia,” he warned starkly. 

The second Trump administration has followed the prioritizer playbook by substantially reducing aid to Ukraine — though he hasn’t eliminated intelligence sharing with Ukraine’s military or halted weapons sales paid for by other countries — and completing the withdrawal of US troops from Syria. On the other hand, the US has taken on a swathe of new international commitments, including a militarized new approach to Latin America, and it has actually ramped up ongoing counterterrorism operations in places like Somalia. In contrast to the first Trump administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy, which heralded a new era of Great Power Competition, the document released in 2025 was more focused on the threat posed by woke governments in Europe than authoritarians in Beijing.   

“They have probably been more engaged outside of Asia than any administration has been in at least a decade,” said Zack Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies US strategy in China. 

Those commitments have been dwarfed by the current war in Iran, which has dramatically drawn down US stocks of precisely the sort of advanced munitions like tomahawk cruise missiles and Patriot interceptors that would be vital in a conflict over Taiwan. The war has also required diverting resources (including THAAD interceptors, an aircraft carrier strike group, and a marine expeditionary unit) from the Indo-Pacific region to the Middle East.  

“We have patiently accumulated these capabilities [in the Pacific] over time,” said a former senior US official who spoke with reporters on condition of anonymity last week. “It has now been vacated. It is all back in the Middle East.”

The eternally postponed pivot to Asia

This is hardly the first US administration that sought to redirect US attention to the Pacific, but it hasn’t quite yet. As the Wall Street Journal’s Alex Ward recently joked, “The ‘pivot to Asia’ is the U.S. foreign policy version of ‘infrastructure week.’” 

Given the number of pressing global conflicts that come across the president’s desk every day, particularly in the Middle East, “it takes a tremendous amount of discipline in the US government system to ensure you actually can execute an Indo-Pacific strategy,” said the former US official.  

Still, one would have thought that the particular distraction that the US recently got involved in — another open-ended and draining Middle East war — would be one that this particular administration would avoid. Trump, after all, distinguished himself from his Republican rivals in 2016 by his willingness to criticize the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his team is stocked with veterans of those wars, including Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who came to see them as strategic blunders. 

It’s now clear that the “great power competition” framing of the first term was more the work of Trump’s advisers than the president himself, who has always seen Xi more as a peer with whom he can cut deals than a rival for global dominance whom he must defeat. 

“The idea that the administration was going to prioritize Asia was something that was pushed by a number of people, especially on the defense side, who really believe that that would be the better approach from the US,” said the AEI’s Cooper. “The problem ultimately is that the president of the United States doesn’t share that view.”

Shapiro, of the European Council on Foreign Relations, who co-wrote the article that originally laid out the three “tribes” framework — primacists, restrainers, and prioritizers — says all three are present within the administration, but Trump ultimately doesn’t fit neatly within any of them. And in contrast to previous presidents who relied primarily on advice from their own officials and intelligence services, Trump often seems to put more stock in advice from outsiders he considers peers. This can include foreign leaders like Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who effectively made the case for the war with Iran, or business leaders like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who advocated for Trump to ease restrictions on selling his company’s most advanced microchips to China, undermining an export control regime that took shape under the first Trump administration. 

In Washington’s China-watching circles, Trump is often described as his own China “desk officer.” His policies are often based on his own intuitions, and he’s far less hemmed in by more conventional advisers than during his first term. So it was always probably a mistake to attempt to glean clues about how he would approach America’s most important geopolitical relationship from the views of those around him. It also makes the outcome of any meeting between these two leaders particularly hard to predict. 

Where is the US-China relationship heading?

It’s not quite as if everything is entirely rosy in the US-China relationship. The two countries remain locked in a legal and diplomatic spat over their interests in the Panama Canal, for instance. The White House has accused China of “industrial-scale campaigns” to steal artificial intelligence advances. A potential plan to require government reviews of new AI models is motivated by the imperative of keeping an edge over China, notwithstanding the White House’s recent flip on chip exports. 

And while the potential for military conflict may not be front and center when it comes to the White House’s rhetoric these days, the scenario remains at the center of the US military’s planning and doctrine. 

“I don’t think the Chinese are counting on the US leaving their sphere of interest,” said Brookings’ Kim. “If anything, I think they see strategic encirclement as increasing.”

Chinese leaders likely know that with the Iran war not going according to plan, Trump may feel he needs a global win — and US allies are nervously watching what he may be willing to concede in order to get one with Xi by striking a deal on trade or another issue. Trump’s comments in February, suggesting that he was discussing potential arms sales to Taiwan with Xi raised alarm bells in Taipei. The White House has also held off on approving about $15 million dollars worth of sales until after the summit to avoid offending Beijing. Xi may hope to get Trump to make an explicit statement in opposition to Taiwanese independence, overturning decades of purposeful US ambiguity on the question. If there is anything even close to that for the US side, it could boost the standing of political factions in Taiwan that want a more accommodating relationship with the mainland. A Taiwan under Chinese control might once have been considered the nightmare scenario for “Asia firsters” in Trump’s orbit. But even Colby now argues that Taiwan is “very important,” but not “essential,” for the overall goal of “denying China regional hegemony over Asia.”

This visit was already postponed once due to the war in Iran and is likely to be a bit more low-key than anticipated when it was first announced. Trump is bringing a few US CEOs along with him but fewer than when he visited in 2017. Unlike that visit, during which Trump was deeply impressed with the pomp and ceremony he was greeted with, this meeting is notably not being described by the Chinese as a “state visit plus.” It’s just a standard summit. 

The summit may well result in some investment deals and perhaps some statements on issues like fentanyl and AI governance. The administration has made several calls for China to do more to help resolve the ongoing Strait of Hormuz crisis, but Beijing has shown little interest in getting more deeply involved in Middle East crises. 

Low-key or not, the summit will be closely watched by US allies in the region. “Given President Trump’s criticism of wars of choice, and given the Asia-first orientation of some of his advisors, if even this administration is finding itself bogged down in the Middle East and distracted from the Indo-Pacific, I think a lot of allies and partners will conclude that the United States has a propensity for distraction, is fundamentally unreliable, and they’re going to have to make calculations accordingly,” said Ali Wyne, senior researcher on US-China relations at the International Crisis Group.

The summit may ultimately be taken as confirmation that, for all the talk of an Asian century, the US remains perpetually mired in the Middle East. If that’s ever going to change, it’s not likely to happen under this president. 

TORONTO — At a conference bookended by speeches from President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the leading lights of the global center-left gathered to consider their fate. 

The Global Progress Action Summit was billed as a “progressive version of CPAC,” the right-wing conference that has become a premier gathering for populist conservatives from around the world. And indeed, the conference was preoccupied with its right-mirror image — with speakers admitting that the far right had outmaneuvered them in the past, and advancing ideas for how to blunt its seemingly persistent appeal going forward.

“This is the raison d’être for this work,” as Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress (one of the conference’s organizers), put it to me. 

For years, liberal elites on both sides of the Atlantic saw figures like President Donald Trump as a blip to be outlasted. The right’s “fever” would, as the last two Democratic presidents suggested, eventually break after electoral rebukes — returning the old establishment to its traditional leadership positions.

The evidence on this theory is in, and it has failed. Biden’s presidency did not mark the end of Trumpism, nor have far-right electoral defeats in countries ranging from France to Poland been Waterloos.

“It’s clear that Democrats can’t just treat this as some random anomaly or self-correcting problem,” Pete Buttigieg, secretary of transportation under Joe Biden and a rumored 2028 candidate, told me in an interview at the conference. “Look around the world for evidence of that.”

The conference organizers chose to meet in Toronto because Canada was an exception to these trends. Canada’s center-left Liberal party has been in power for 11 unbroken years; its main opposition, the Conservative Party, has grown more populist in recent years but remains considerably more moderate than Trump’s Republicans or the typical European far-right faction.

Yet few attendees had anything like a plan for making their countries more Canadian. In fact, their comments revealed an implicitly opposite approach: Instead of figuring out how to head off the far right entirely, the center-left was learning to live with their presence.

That means redefining victory not as crushing the far right, but defeating it the way they would any other normal political opponent.

“This is not normal” — except it is

The main reason behind the new liberal stance is simple, brute reality: polls and election results show that the far right is simply part of the new normal.

In the US, Trump long ago transformed the Republican Party in his image. The right-wing Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, began her political career as a neo-fascist activist and is now a major world leader. The far-right AfD is topping German polls despite frequent accusations of neo-Nazi ties, and France’s National Rally is the odds-on favorite to win the presidency in 2027. Two days before the conference, the United Kingdom’s Reform Party stomped to victory over the ruling Labour Party in local elections so resoundingly that the centrist Prime Minister Keir Starmer is now on resignation watch.

One theory, popular among conference goers, is that this far-right trend could be blunted by economic success. Speaker after speaker touted various policies in this area, on the implicit — and sometimes explicit — assumption they could deliver victory by striking at the heart of the far right’s appeal.

“It’s gotten harder to get and stay in the middle class,” Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan told me. “That economic stress is causing people to head into the arms of someone who will tell them they have an easy solution and they have someone to blame.”

A version of this approach, widely termed “deliverism” at the time, was an animating idea behind the Biden administration’s pursuit of a large stimulus and redistributive policy. But it’s also easier said than done: Biden did deliver low unemployment, high economic growth, and more manufacturing jobs in cutting-edge industries — producing a US economy that The Economist famously termed “the envy of the world” in October 2024. That obviously didn’t work out as planned, as voters revolted against spiking inflation and grew more pessimistic than ever.

Slotkin’s response is that Biden simply delivered in the wrong ways, trumpeting good economic statistics while ignoring the devastating effects of higher prices.

“They tried to tell the American people that they were better off than they felt they were,” she says. “Even while it was happening, I said, ‘If I hear one more Harvard economist tell me people are better off than they really think they are,’ I’m going to lose it.’ Because people know their own pocketbooks.”

The underlying premise is questionable. The best social science has shown, time and again, that the far right’s base is motivated less by the economic anxiety that Slotkin cites and much more by concerns about cultural and demographic change. The far right persists across different democracies with different economic circumstances and models because all of them are, in one way or another, grappling with changes wrought by mass immigration and shifting cultural roles surrounding race and gender.

But what’s interesting about Slotkin’s approach is just how normal it is. 

Trying to beat the other party by delivering concrete economic goods is perhaps the most traditional of traditional political strategies. “It’s the economy, stupid” was James Carville’s famous tagline back when he was running Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. It is also a necessarily cyclical strategy; eventually, the economy will perform poorly under your watch, and your party will lose. Slotkin’s deliverism isn’t a strategy for vanquishing the far right, but beating it temporarily in the traditional manner of democratic politics. It is how you deal with a rival, not an existential threat.

Of course, the far right can indeed pose a kind of existential threat by attacking democracy. When the Hungarian center-left lost the country’s 2010 election, they did not get another fair shot in 2014. Instead, they were forced to compete on increasingly uneven ground, locking them out of power until this year’s wave election gave Prime Minister Viktor Orbán no choice but to concede defeat.

Center-left politicians are, at this point, acutely aware of the danger. On the American side, Buttigieg suggested that this required fundamental political reform. 

“If return to normal could have been done, could have succeeded, the last administration would have done it,” he says. 

He believes the ultimate goal should be to create a system where moderate Republicans could break with Trump more easily when democracy is on the line. True MAGA, he estimates, represents only 20 percent to 30 percent of the population; perhaps changing the way the system works could bring its political representation more in line with that.

How exactly to get here from there was more fuzzy: the two reforms he floated as examples, ranked-choice voting and California-style jungle primaries, would almost certainly be insufficient. Moreover, even his ideal state concedes a significant role for MAGA — one not far from what we see in many European democracies, where far-right parties are always a visible part of the legislature. In Germany, for example, the AfD has reached a position of significant influence while commanding a small plurality (roughly 27 percent) in the polls. 

Even the most radically ambitious vision, in short, still sees MAGA as a persistent and durable force in American politics.

Maybe normal politics can work

But if liberals now seem to be conceding that the far right won’t simply be vanquished, they also are growing more hopeful as to their ability to contain it.

Even as the far right has risen in power around the world in recent years, it’s also held power in relatively few places — and the closer it gets to governing, the more voters seem to remember why they kept them out of power so long in the first place. 

Trump’s second administration is a case in point. The president followed through on his promises to boost the economy by throwing up protective tariffs, blowing up government agencies, expelling immigrants, and slashing taxes — only to see his approval scraping new lows on issue after issue. Government by the far right and for the far right is so far backfiring on its own terms and producing a doom loop of corruption, infighting, war, and economic uncertainty. 

Elly Schlein — the leader of Italy’s Democrats, the center-left opposition to Meloni’s government — was perhaps the most optimistic in this regard. Coming off of a recent victory in a national referendum, where the opposition defeated a Meloni proposal to increase her control over the judiciary, Schlein saw a far-right whose ascent was finally starting to ebb — primarily as a result of its own governing failures.

“The time of right-wing nationalists is over, because they are not delivering with people,” she said in a panel appearance. 

The strategy for the left must not be “running after them or trying to speak their language” — an implicit rebuke to leaders like the UK’s Starmer, who tacked to the right on immigration and got wiped out. Rather, Schlein suggested, the center-left should try to force the conversation onto “uncomfortable ground” for the right — meaning economic issues like “housing, wages, healthcare, and education.” 

Though Schlein is a leftist, one occasionally termed Italy’s AOC, her advice sounded strikingly similar to the moderate Slotkin’s. Both believed that the center-left can survive periods of far-right government and then, subsequently, return to power by attacking the incumbent’s corruption and unequal governance. The battle will never be over, but losing once doesn’t necessarily mean the setback is permanent. 

Perhaps the most striking piece of evidence that “normal” political rhetoric can work — even in the context of democratic backsliding or outright authoritarianism — came from the success of new Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar.

As it happened, the day of the conference was the day that Magyar was officially sworn into office — and, as such, everyone was talking about him. In our conversation, Slotkin explicitly cited “the Hungarian model” as an inspiration for her own approach to thinking about beating back the far-right tide.

Magyar campaigned both on economic issues and as an agent of structural transformation, while linking the two topics together. Focusing on the Orbán regime’s ostentatious corruption, he argued that the current government’s nature had made its very existence a barrier to prosperity for ordinary Hungarians. He promised not just a change in economic policy, but also the functional demolition of what Orbán had built: transforming politicized institutions and even prosecuting top government officials and allies who committed crimes on the former government’s behalf.

Now, the circumstances in Hungary are different from those in any other Western democracy. Orbán was not just a far-right politician but an authoritarian who had twisted every aspect of the political system to try to maintain power indefinitely. After 16 years of such a regime, and amid an economic disaster, Magyar’s message was unusually likely to hit (especially given his clever tactics for getting around the government’s tight control over information).

But his success at least offers a hint of hope for the otherwise beleaguered liberal movement represented at the conference. If a country that had crossed the line into authoritarianism can come back through the tools of “normal” politics, the thinking goes, then perhaps the world’s oldest democracy and its allies can save themselves the same way.