When Donald Trump first heard this quote from President Theodore Roosevelt, assuming he ever did, he obviously focused on the big stick part. But I believe we should heed the entire piece of advice.

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President Roosevelt also said that “nine-tenths of wisdom is to be wise in time, and at the right time.” He described his own approach to foreign policy as an “exercise of intelligent forethought and of decisive action sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis to make it improbable that we would run into serious trouble.” This approach won him the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a peace treaty that ultimately ended the Russo-Japanese War.

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When listening to politicians and TV talking heads, it often seems like our approach to China must be framed in either one of two ways: We can either take a super hard line with Beijing OR become apologists for them, essentially capitulating to everything they want. This is a false choice. It would be way better to approach our relationship with China with a calm and steady hand, taking a sensible and proactive approach. We need to find an appropriate balance between competing with the Chinese, holding them accountable for their military and trade transgressions, and cooperating with them on mutually beneficial issues.

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It’s true that navigating the choppy waters between China and the United States has always been tricky, but the first Trump presidency made the waters much rougher. From big things like Trade Way 1.0 to petty things like cancelling the Peace Corps and Fulbright scholarship programs in China and using racist and stigmatizing tropes like “kung flu” and “China virus” to insult them, the first four years of Donald Trump caused America’s relationship with China to deteriorate to the lowest point since the two countries re-established diplomatic relations over forty years before.

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China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, underscored this point in July 2020: “The current China policy of the United States is based on ill-informed strategic miscalculation and is fraught with emotions and whims and McCarthyist bigotry. It seems as if every Chinese investment is politically driven, every Chinese student is a spy, and every cooperation initiative is a scheme with a hidden agenda.”

 

We'd like to think this time around will be different but it’s not looking that way. So, taking President Roosevelt’s advice, our only choice is for those of us who hope to lead after Donald Trump leaves office to exercise intelligent forethought – and just hope and pray he doesn’t make this relationship irreparably worse.

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The U.S.-China relationship is one of the most important bilateral relationships in the world. China is the world’s second largest economy, with a nominal GDP of $19.53 trillion. While the United States is number one, with a nominal GDP of $30.34 trillion, purchasing power parity (PPP) adjusted GDP puts China at $39.44 trillion to America’s $30.34 trillion (this number adjusts currencies based on what goods a country could buy rather than currency exchange rates, which basically adjusts for the difference in the cost of living among countries). Most frightening, at the end of 2024 China owned $759 billion of total U.S. debt.

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Before COVID-19, American scholars and researchers could visit China, studying its archives, conducting interviews, and maintaining relationships with colleagues. Leaders in Washington often heavily relied on this knowledge when navigating policy decisions. Even at the beginning of the pandemic, Beijing was quick to provide medical equipment and vaccines to vulnerable countries in need. However, not long into the crisis, President Xi Jinping became super secretive, nontransparent, and quick to bully other countries – like when they threatened Australia with punitive tariffs for demanding an investigation into its origins. Of course, comments like “kung flu” and “China virus” probably didn’t help matters.

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This is bad because now it’s hard for us to know what exactly is going on in China. It’s also dangerous because it could cause strategic misunderstandings that endanger U.S. national security.

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Reports from China that were once routine – like its defense strategy, which was published every two or three years – have come to a grinding halt, leaving little choice but for outsiders to piece together what’s happening from open-source material and social media. This leads to us being blindsided by things like DeepSeek – the scrappy Chinese startup that recently released a new AI model that, in the blink of an eye, challenged the assumption that the United States is the dominant, undisputed force in AI – as well as the level of China’s military modernization (like when we only found out about its sixth-generation fighter jet when images of it went viral on social media).

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Now, the second Trump administration is making this obfuscation way worse by pulling funding from nonprofits that successfully track Chinese social, business, and socioeconomic trends; human-rights abuses; incidents of public dissent; and cybersecurity threats, foreign-influence operations, and other potentially malicious activities.

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Donald & Co. have obviously never read The Art of War because, if they had, they would surely recognize Sun Tzu’s wisdom when he said, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” It’s critical to know exactly who the “enemy” is and what they are up to, because then you know exactly who and what you are fighting against. It’s the only way.

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We need to embrace Sun Tzu’s advice because the list of Chinese transgressions is long: The sabotaging of democracy in Hong Kong; an increasingly antagonistic military posture toward Taiwan; the continued repression and forced labor of the Tibetan people; the blatant violation of international law in the South China Sea; cyberwarfare and sinister influence campaigns against the United States, coordinated through the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front Work Department; unfair trade practices; and the ethnic cleansing of the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities, among other epic human rights atrocities.

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Clearly, there are a lot of thorny things to navigate. But it’s times like these when …. drumroll please…. having allies is invaluable! In fact, building a worldwide coalition to deal with China is everything. This coalition doesn’t have to just be nation states. We can also include Corporate America, which may be an even more effective source of pressure. There is strength in numbers, plain and simple. China is a perfect illustration of why the United States must fully re-engage with the world and start being better friends to our allies, immediately.

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When we all create a unified block, China will have little choice but to come around because, if they don’t, they will be isolated and that simply does not work for their ambitious international plans. Oddly enough, China’s thirst for world domination is the very thing that can ultimately keep them in line… because, make no mistake, China’s plans are Ambitious with a capital A!

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We know that China has blossoming trade relationships, but the Chinese master plan goes way beyond that. In 2013, President Xi Jinping announced what would become the multibillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). One Belt, One Road extends low-cost loans and builds infrastructure – including roads, ports, railways, power plants, 5G networks and fiber-optic cables – for countries around the world. Many consider this initiative to be the most aggressive global outreach endeavor in recent history, for good reason.

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Between 2013 and 2018, China signed 173 cooperation documents with 125 countries and 29 international organizations. These countries included 18 of the European Union’s 27 members. Pre-COVID, trade between China and the countries involved with the Belt and Road Initiative had exceeded $6 trillion, with an average annual growth of 4 percent. Even during the pandemic, Beijing continued to cut deals. At the end of 2020, the European Union and China struck a deal that allows Beijing to make larger investments in E.U.-based companies.

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Ten years after Xi Jinping announced his “Project of the Century,” over 150 countries – representing almost 75 percent of the global population and over half the world’s GDP – had signed up, and China had made hundreds of billions of dollars in loans and/or grants for critical infrastructure around the world.

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The deals remain alarmingly strategic. In September 2024, in the South American town of Guyana, the Chinese were busy building everything from hotels to bridges to a $150 million international airport – while, offshore, ExxonMobil pumped thousands of barrels daily from a new oil discovery.

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Through the years, China has also, unsurprisingly, aligned more closely with other autocrats. For example, in 2021, China announced it would invest $400 billion in Iran over the next 25 years. The plan calls for improvements in everything from banking and telecommunications to physical infrastructure. In return, China will receive Iranian oil at a heavy discount. There will also be greater military cooperation between the two countries, including weapon development and the sharing of intelligence. This is just fabulous news.

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China has also been wooing Russia for a while now, to the point where Presidents Putin and Xi Jinping made pancakes together at a joint military drill. Just weeks before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin and Xi Jinping signed an agreement during the Beijing Olympics that rejected NATO expansion and framed Western democracy as some sort of evil plot. More fabulous news.

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Just how deep into the global economy does China’s reach extend thanks to One Belt, One Road? In 2019, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy – an independent, nonprofit economic research institute and think tank based in Kiel, Germany – analyzed “a total of 1,974 Chinese loans and 2,947 Chinese grants to 152 countries from 1949 to 2017.” The analysis revealed that “China’s direct loans and trade credits had climbed from almost zero in 1998 to more than 1.6 trillion, or close to 2 percent of world GDP in 2018. These loans mostly went to low- and middle-income countries. In total, estimates suggest that the Chinese state now accounted for a quarter of total bank lending to emerging markets. This had transformed China into the largest official creditor, easily surpassing the IMF or the World Bank.” ​Although these are huge numbers, they added, the actual numbers are much larger because “about one half of China’s large-scale lending to developing countries is ‘hidden’ and not recorded in the main international databases used by researchers and practitioners alike.”

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Not to be overly dramatic, but China’s aggressive moves have allowed them to begin reshaping the international order. Researchers at AidData, the World Bank, the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Kiel Institute confirm that, indeed, China has “launched a new global system for cross-border rescue lending to countries in debt distress.”

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One Belt, One Road has not always gone smoothly, of course. Countries have struggled to repay the money and projects have failed – to the point where China has slowed way down on its investments and become way pickier about what countries they give money to. The fact that many nations have asked Beijing to renegotiate, delay or forgive altogether billions of dollars of loans has put China in a tight spot for several reasons. For one, its own economy is struggling among falling prices, weak consumer spending, and a housing market crash.

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Prolonged lackluster growth has forced Beijing to announce a series of measures, including cutting interest rates, offering minimum down payments for mortgages and, finally, implementing a $1.4 trillion plan to revitalize the economy. Another reason One Belt, One Road has China on the hot seat is that, while their leaders were throwing money at other countries, 40 percent of Chinese households – over 600 million people – lived on just $1,621 in 2019 (that’s $135/month). At the same time, many local governments have piled up debt to pay for infrastructure projects, so they now don’t have the money to pay the salaries of teachers and other local workers.

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Millions of young college graduates are now unable to find work, and that is a major problem for Chinese leaders. These young people – who had been content to live with limited freedoms if there were jobs and a chance for upward mobility – seemed to have been activated by the pandemic. They were particularly angry about the social and economic havoc COVID was wreaking, made worse by Beijing’s lack of transparency and efforts to conceal any culpability China may have had. Public protests, once thought to be virtually impossible, erupted. These concerns sparked larger conversations about censorship, the treatment of whistleblowers, and the need for financial accountability – which is obviously a very dangerous can of worms for Beijing to be forced to open.

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For all these reasons and more, this just may be the perfect time to make our move. Joining with China’s Southeast Asian neighbors and our other allies, we can unite against China’s aggressive, unlawful behavior in the South China Sea – where the People’s Liberation Army has built a $50 billion+ military fortress.

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Tensions continue to escalate quickly, and it’s becoming a more dangerous situation by the day. Hainan, often referred to as China’s Hawaii, now doubles as China’s launching pad into the South China Sea, complete with advanced military weapons and nuclear-armed submarines. Meanwhile, boats that China insists are just for “fishing” patrol the shores armed with machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and high-velocity water cannons.

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In an interview with The Washington Post, retired Rear Admiral Michael Studeman, who is a former commander of the Office of Naval Intelligence, warned that “China is working very hard at having superiorities there that nobody else can match. They’ve built an ability to project power with multiple types of capabilities – air, missile, militia, ships, submarines. And we need to build up our capability and military posture with allies to forestall a Chinese attack.”

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We’ve already seen how critical U.S. treaty allies are to this fight. In 2016, in a case brought by the Philippines, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague unanimously ruled that China had no sovereignty over the waters of the South China Sea and, therefore, was violating international law by militarizing artificial islands and occupying disputed reefs and shoals. Predictably, the Chinese rejected this ruling out of hand because Beijing ostensibly believes that roughly 90 percent of the South China Sea has belonged to them since “ancient times,” pointing to waters within a “nine-dash line” that, oddly enough, appears only on Chinese maps. < Maybe Xi Jinping would like to borrow Donald Trump’s black Sharpie?  : ) >

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We also need Beijing’s cooperation in combating climate change. Chinese annual greenhouse gas emissions now account for 31 percent of emissions worldwide, which is more than those of all developed countries combined.  < the United States accounts for 13 percent >

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Last but certainly not least, we need our allies help to vigorously protect human rights, which is probably the most important thing we can all do together. After Tiananmen Square – when, in 1989, Beijing executed an estimated 10,000 civilians protesting for democracy – the United States and the rest of the world let Beijing off with little more than a slap on the wrist. At the time, the thinking was that, although the Tiananmen Square massacre was abhorrent, China was on the verge of turning things around through more transparency and substantial reforms.

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This clearly has not happened, and China is still one big human rights catastrophe. The U.S. State Department reports that in China, “significant human rights issues included credible reports of arbitrary or unlawful killings by the government; enforced disappearances by the government; and torture by the government.”

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The list goes on: “involuntary or coercive medical or psychological practices; harsh and life-threatening prison and detention conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention by the government including, since 2017, of more than one million Uyghurs and members of other predominantly Muslim minority groups in extrajudicial internment camps, prisons, and an additional unknown number subjected to daytime-only “re-education” training; and the lack of an independent judiciary and Communist Party control over the judicial and legal system.”

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….and on and on: “political prisoners; transnational repression against individuals in other countries; arbitrary interference with privacy including pervasive and intrusive technical surveillance and monitoring; punishment of family members for offenses allegedly committed by a relative; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including criminal prosecution of journalists, lawyers, writers, bloggers, dissidents, petitioners, and others; serious restrictions on internet freedom, including site blocking; substantial interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, including overly restrictive laws that applied to foreign and domestic nongovernmental organizations; restrictions of religious freedom; restrictions on freedom of movement and residence; the inability of citizens to change their government peacefully through free and fair elections; serious and unreasonable restrictions on political participation; serious government corruption; serious government restrictions on and harassment of domestic and international human rights organizations; instances of coerced abortions and forced sterilization; crimes involving violence targeting members of national, racial, and ethnic minority groups, including Uyghurs; trafficking in persons, including forced labor; the prohibition of independent trade unions and systematic restrictions on workers’ freedom of association; and existence of some of the worst forms of child labor.”

 

We and our allies must do everything within our power to stop this.