China Hawks Ascendant: Trump’s Cabinet Picks Put Beijing on Notice

In a January 2023 interview with RCP, Waltz outlined the threat in specific terms. “The Chinese Communist Party has entered into a ‘cold war’ with the United States, and we need to wake up not only our institutions, but I think the broader American public to that fact,” he said. The Chinese spy balloons floating across the continent at that time, Waltz told RCP, ought to deliver “a Sputnik-like wake-up call.”

The announcements came fast and furious to start the week, reflecting a Trump transition team that is far more organized and efficient than the effort put forward ahead of his first term. The common thread among national security picks so far: an eagerness to confront an aggressive China.

One week after his decisive victory, the president-elect ended the day by announcing his plan to nominate John Ratcliffe, a former Texas congressman who served as his director of national intelligence, to lead the CIA. In his previous post, Ratcliffe zeroed in on China as “national security threat No. 1,” writing in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that “resisting Beijing’s attempt to reshape and dominate the world is the challenge of our generation.”

The sheer number of positions slotted to China hawks indicates a whole-of-government approach to tackling that challenge. Trump managed, during his first term, to turn the page on the old neoliberal consensus, advanced for decades by Democrats and Republicans alike, that increased trade with the power would incentivize better behavior from Beijing. When President Biden entered office, for instance, he continued many of the tariffs on Chinese goods first implemented by Trump.

Michigan Rep. John Moolenaar, who chairs the House Select Committee on the CCP, told RealClearPolitics that the new Trump roster should put Beijing on notice, saying that the selections send “a clear message to the Chinese Communist Party.” The headline? According to Moolenaar, the incoming administration “will not stand idly by as the CCP floods American streets with fentanyl, buys up our farmland, and threatens to disrupt the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.”

The former, and future, president will soon confront an increasingly aggressive power in the Indo-Pacific. But China has changed in the time since Trump occupied the Oval Office. In the wake of a global pandemic, which began in Wuhan, China, the communist superpower has experienced converging shocks to its economic system: a real estate bubble on the mainland, a debt crisis, and anemic domestic growth.

While analysts say this makes Trump’s promised tariffs more potent, even on the backfoot, China remains a danger to U.S. interests.

Michael Sobolik, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, said the early nominations and appointments reflect a government bench “deeply skeptical of the Chinese Communist Party.” They also represent an aggressive shift from the Biden administration. Added Richard Goldberg, a senior advisor at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies who served on the National Security Council, “These are no-nonsense foreign policy hands who put American interests first, believe in the doctrine of peace through strength and are clear-eyed on the threats and challenges we face from the CCP and its allies.”

As Trump moved rapidly to fill out his foreign policy and national security teams, several news outlets, including the New York Times, reported that the president-elect would soon nominate Florida Sen. Marco Rubio to be his secretary of state. Rubio, whose family escaped from Cuba after the communist takeover of the island, is one of the most preeminent China hardliners in the upper chamber.

The ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Rubio has written voluminous reports on not just the military threat China poses but also the economic and cultural challenges it poses to U.S. interests. He has long argued that the neoliberal dream, one defined by deregulated markets and unfettered global trade, even with adversaries, was both outdated and dangerous. In an interview with RealClearPolitics last summer, Rubio insisted that there are no quick fixes.

“So much damage has been done that we can't afford the luxury, at this point, of patience or half measures,” he told RCP. A new approach to China, Rubio said, “requires a level of urgency that meets the level of decadence that has been in place for 20 years.”

While Washington seems on the same page, Rubio warned in that same interview that it was easy to say that “China is a real danger” but difficult “to give up something that is cheap,” like manufactured goods, or “something that’s entertaining,” like the Chinese digital app TikTok.

“So, I do think there’s some tough decisions ahead for individual Americans in regard to some of the choices we're going to have to make as a country,” Rubio added, before stressing the importance of leadership “explaining what’s at stake here.”

Derek Scissors, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who concentrates on China and India, said that Rubio at State and Waltz as national security advisor would represent “a pretty good one-two punch.” All the same, he noted that in any administration, foreign policy is ultimately determined in the Oval Office.

“I do think putting these hawks into place matters. I don’t think it automatically means that we’re going to have a hawkish administration,” Scissors said before pointing to moments in the first Trump term where it seemed the administration had what he called “a split personality.” The scholar points to a lack of follow-through on holding China accountable for COVID-19 and his waffling on a TikTok ban as two examples where the Trump administration was aggressive but Trump the president was indecisive.

A third example: the time Trump throttled off penalties for Chinese tech company ZTE after that corporation flouted U.S. sanctions by doing business with Iran. The former president disappointed hawks when he let Beijing off the hook, tweeting in 2018 that he was working with Chinese President Xi to find “a way to get back into business, fast.” Explained the president, “too many jobs in China lost.”