Washington’s China policy lacks strategy, coherence and a clear framework in US President Donald Trump’s second term, mirroring his first, according to a former senior official in the Joe Biden administration.
Former Biden officials, speaking at a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace event on Tuesday, said there was little evidence of systemic policy when they assumed power in early 2021, after Trump’s first term, a pattern that appeared to be repeating itself.
“There were themes about how to compete with China,” said Laura Rosenberger, a former senior National Security Council official. “But there was no real integrated policy approach ... across different arms of the US government”.
The critique follows the delay in a planned summit between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping that was meant to stabilise ties as Washington becomes increasingly focused on the war it started along with Israel against Iran.
She also warned that Trump, with his unilateral bias, was again engaging in a “complete marginalising of our allies” and is, in some ways, going even further, “putting ourselves backwards in terms of our ability to harness that power”.
Rosenberger was joined at the Carnegie event, titled “Did Biden Get China Right? Lessons Learned and What Comes Next”, by fellow former officials Rush Doshi and Julian Gewirtz, who also helped shape Biden’s China policy.
The event coincided with the release of the report “Implementing the Biden Administration’s China Strategy” for Carnegie’s American Statecraft Program, which drew on dozens of interviews with Biden officials.
“The Biden administration framework on China was invest, align, compete – and that align element of our approach to China policy was really critical,” Rosenberger said.
“I do think we are really seeing a move away from the competitive approach to China by this administration,” she said, pointing to Trump’s G2 rhetoric, his approach to trade negotiations and the deprioritisation of controls on technologies like AI chips.
Trump revived the term G2, or “Group of Two”, in a 2025 social media post. The concept first emerged in the 2000s as a proposal for China and the US to work together to tackle some of the world’s key challenges.
Doshi echoed Rosenberger’s assessment, saying Trump’s second term approach has oscillated wildly between “extremely confrontational and then rather surprisingly accommodating”, in contrast with Biden’s approach, which he said was neither accommodating nor confrontational but competitive.
“Trump came in and put 145 per cent tariffs on China, which is a pretty crazy thing to do, and it pushed the Chinese into a corner where they reached for that rare earths ‘break glass’ tool, which reset and rescrambled the board,” he said.
“Since then, the Trump administration has been far more accommodating, largely because they went too hard in the beginning, and they have to kind of back off in the current period.”
The Trump administration’s apparent step back has allowed Beijing to take an important lesson from this, according to Doshi. “They feel, for the first time, they’re standing alongside the US as a true equal, having withstood the full force of American economic power,” he said.
In a 2026 report, the Brookings Institution argued that Trump has done more than meets the eye, shifting the emphasis of the relationship “away from an ideological battle or great power struggle toward competition focused on trade and technology”.
“Proponents of Trump’s new approach toward China argue that it is delivering results: progress on curbing the flow of fentanyl, promises of new purchases of American agricultural products, and a reduction in the risk of major power war,” the report said.
As for similarities between Trump and Biden’s policies, Gewirtz identified an emphasis on engagement between the country’s two leaders as a key point of continuity, calling it the agenda-setting mechanism over anything else.
Trump was due to meet Xi at the end of March for a highly anticipated bilateral summit. Trump said the delay would last “five or six weeks”.
Speakers on Tuesday said the two presidents agree on at least one thing: China as a long-term strategic competitor requiring both economic and diplomatic tools. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
