Trump's trade rhetoric: The collapse of American hegemonic logic

Editor's note: Xu Ying, a special commentator on current affairs for CGTN, is a Beijing-based international affairs commentator. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

When U.S. President Donald Trump declared that "China totally violated the trade agreement," it was less a statement of fact than a calculated political maneuver – a soundbite engineered to manipulate public sentiment and redirect scrutiny away from the structural failures of U.S. economic policy. The claim is not only factually ungrounded but emblematic of a deeper pathology in American strategic behavior: the persistent conflation of negotiation with coercion, and of domestic fragility with external threat.

As China's Ministry of Commerce said on June 2, "The United States has seriously undermined the consensus reached during the China-U.S. economic and trade talks in Geneva by successively introducing multiple discriminatory restrictive measures against China."

In reality, it is the United States – not China – that has undermined the foundations of trade stability. On May 12, Beijing and Washington reached a 90-day tariff truce, a temporary framework designed to ease tensions through synchronized tariff reductions. Yet within three days, the U.S. moved aggressively to violate both the spirit and the letter of the accord.

On May 13, it issued a new ban on Huawei's Ascend series of artificial intelligence chips; on May 14, it suspended export licenses for aviation technology essential to China's C919 aircraft program; and later, it added a dozen Chinese firms to its export control list. These actions, taken in rapid succession, were not inadvertent missteps – they were deliberate acts of escalation, revealing a lack of contractual sincerity and a broader agenda of containment under the guise of commerce.

However, the legal institutions in the United States have not remained silent. On May 28, the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that tariffs imposed by the Trump administration under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act were unconstitutional, reinforcing the conclusion that his trade measures are not only diplomatically corrosive but also legally indefensible. Yet Trump continues to repackage these failed policies as populist victories, weaponizing trade discourse to serve domestic political objectives.

The rare earth issue provides further insight into the asymmetric logic Washington now employs. While China has fulfilled its obligation to lift export restrictions on critical minerals, it has retained safeguards to ensure that such exports are not redirected toward military use – requiring end-use verification, for example. These are reasonable measures in a volatile geopolitical environment.

Yet the U.S. has demanded unrestricted access, not only to commercial-grade materials but to entire segments of China's strategic supply chains, while simultaneously refusing to lift restrictions on Chinese access to semiconductors and aerospace technologies. In effect, the U.S. seeks one-sided concessions under the veneer of reciprocity, transforming supply chains into tools of strategic blackmail.

It is no coincidence that leaked documents from the U.S. Commerce Department reveal a proposed tradeoff: rare earth access in exchange for relaxation of tech export restrictions – a transactional logic that exposes the coercive ambitions behind the trade rhetoric.

Trump's fixation on the U.S.-China trade imbalance is similarly disingenuous. The structural nature of the deficit reflects not Chinese manipulation but American economic choices. China is a critical destination for over half of U.S. soybean exports, nearly a third of its cotton, and significant volumes of integrated circuits. Meanwhile, the United States enjoys clear dominance in service exports and reaps massive profits from U.S. multinationals operating within China.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, from 2001 to 2023, U.S. service exports to China expanded from $5.63 billion to $46.71 billion. Studies from the U.S. think tank Peterson Institute show that the vast majority of tariff costs falls on American consumers and firms. Thus, the trade war has not "punished" China – it has redirected costs onto the very U.S. electorate Trump claims to defend. It is a geopolitical own goal masquerading as nationalist policy.

The real motivations behind Trump's posture are not economic, but political and strategic. His accusations against China are not made in the pursuit of better terms, but to create political leverage and generate headlines. By staging trade confrontations, he hopes to set the tone for negotiations in which China is cast as recalcitrant and the U.S. as magnanimous. But his approach – demanding Chinese rare earth exports while refusing to ease chip sanctions, proposing "resource-for-technology" swaps behind closed doors – reveals a preference for coercion over dialogue. This "maximum pressure" approach is a strategic miscalculation that treats interdependence as vulnerability rather than strength.

Just as telling is the domestic political timing. Facing a mounting public debt, persistent inflation, and the economic fallout from his own tariff policies – particularly in the swing states heavily reliant on agriculture – Trump needs an external villain to redirect public frustration. Blaming China allows him to reframe structural failures as foreign betrayal, while masking the domestic costs of his protectionist doctrine. That his campaign team had already been briefed on Chinese export data 10 days earlier suggests the statement was not reactive, but choreographed.

This political theater is not limited to economic issues. The intensification of technological containment against China reveals a broader strategy to halt Beijing's rise in critical sectors. Since January 2025, Washington has imposed sweeping restrictions on investment in Chinese AI and quantum computing, and demanded full-process surveillance of semiconductor exports by global foundries. These are not national security measures – they are instruments of techno-nationalist siege. That China has since made visible advances – developing the Jiuzhang 3 quantum computer and indigenous AI chips – suggests the futility of this strategy. Isolation breeds innovation, not submission.

With the 2026 midterm elections approaching and Trump's approval ratings falling – particularly in the economically battered manufacturing and farming states – the China narrative offers a short-term political payoff. It feeds into the hawkish instincts of his conservative base, while offering the illusion of foreign policy strength. Yet it is a hollow performance. Behind the curtain, his advisors are exploring partial tariff rollbacks, confirming the inconsistency of the policy and the performative nature of its public defense.

The global community, for its part, is no longer passive. The World Trade Organization is adjudicating multiple complaints against U.S. trade practices, and retaliatory tariffs from allies such as Canada and the EU signal growing frustration. Simultaneously, global investors continue to bet on China: German chemical giant BASF is building plants in southwestern China for sustainable future, Airbus is expanding production in Tianjin, and regional frameworks like BRICS and RCEP continue to deepen. As the dollar's share of global reserves falls to a 30-year low , the world is quietly decoupling from the unipolar assumptions that once underwrote American dominance.

China, for its part, has responded with restraint and precision. Its countermeasures – targeted export controls on seven categories of heavy rare earths, for instance – have exposed the dependency of U.S. military supply chains, driving up terbium prices by 300 percent. Domestically, the push for self-reliance is accelerating, with meaningful breakthroughs in advanced technologies despite American-led blockades. Crucially, China has reaffirmed that questions of sovereignty, especially regarding Taiwan, are not subject to transactional compromise – a signal that should leave no room for misinterpretation.

Trump's rhetoric is not merely incorrect – it is a projection of imperial anxiety in a world where the tools of dominance no longer yield the same returns. His attempts to recast trade as a zero-sum battlefield may energize a certain political base, but they offer no solution to the structural challenges facing the United States. Hegemony cannot be preserved through belligerence, nor can interdependence be unwound through bluster.

In the end, history will show that attempts to use tariffs and technology embargoes as tools of containment were the last gasps of a waning order. China will continue to engage the world through multilateral frameworks, strategic patience, and economic openness. If Washington cannot transcend its zero-sum instincts, it risks becoming not just less competitive, but increasingly isolated. The path forward lies not in rhetorical escalation, but in strategic sobriety. Anything less will only accelerate America's geopolitical eclipse.

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