Economy
Trump Is Making China Great (Again)
America might still be the world’s most powerful country economically, but by turning trade into a weapon, Washington may be accelerating the very redistribution of global influence it fears the most.
The trajectory of power
In 2026, China reduced provisional import tariff rates on 935 categories of goods. More significantly, in May it extended zero-tariff treatment to imports from 53 African countries, building on its earlier elimination of tariffs on all tariff lines for 33 least-developed African countries. These measures are hardly evidence that Beijing has suddenly become a champion of laissez-faire economics. From the European perspective, China remains deeply protectionist in important sectors and continues to face criticism over subsidies, industrial overcapacity, and its enormous trade surplus. But geopolitics is often about comparison rather than purity.
China does not need to become the world’s model of free trade. It benefits if the United States becomes increasingly associated with economic coercion while Beijing becomes comparatively more attractive as a source of markets, investment, and trade. That is already happening.
Washington has imposed new tariffs on 60 trading partners this year, including China and the European Union. The administration has also continued to explore additional measures against Chinese industrial capacity and other trading partners. The result is not simply a more protected American economy. It is an international environment in which countries have greater incentives to diversify away from dependence on the United States. This distinction matters. American tariffs may reduce America’s dependence on particular foreign suppliers. But if Washington repeatedly makes market access conditional on political compliance, other countries have a reason to reduce their dependence on the American market itself. That is how economic power begins to become geopolitical power.
Southeast Asia is already sending a warning
Few regions reveal this shift more clearly than Southeast Asia, where governments have spent years trying to avoid choosing between Washington and Beijing. The region has enormous economic exposure to China while relying on the United States for investment, technology, security, and access to the world’s largest consumer market. Its governments, therefore, have little interest in an American-Chinese confrontation that forces them to take sides. What they want is predictability.
The latest ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute’s State of Southeast Asia 2026 survey suggests that Washington is increasingly failing to provide it. Some 43.4% of respondents said that the Trump administration’s use of punitive trade measures had worsened their positive impressions of the United States, more than twice the 21.3% recorded a year earlier. The US use of sanctions, tariffs, and other trade measures was identified as the dominant source of concern about Washington’s role in the region. Even more revealing, 51.9% identified US leadership under Donald Trump as the region’s leading geopolitical concern, up from 46.9% in 2025.
This should not be interpreted as a sudden embrace of China. Southeast Asian states have their own concerns vis-à-vis China. Something subtler is happening. They are hedging, and hedging becomes easier when America’s economic policies make diversification increasingly attractive. In simple words, a country does not have to become pro-China to conclude that it should trade more with China. It does not have to trust Beijing to welcome Chinese investment. And it does not have to abandon Washington, at least publicly, to build economic relationships that make it less vulnerable to American pressure. This is precisely why tariffs can have geopolitical consequences that exceed their immediate economic effects. They encourage the rest of the world to build alternatives. And China is already positioned to supply them.
The world is becoming less American
The broader evidence suggests that this is no longer simply a Southeast Asian phenomenon. A Pew Research Center survey of more than 42,000 people across 36 countries found that China is now viewed more favourably than the United States in most of the countries surveyed. China was viewed more positively in 25 countries, while the United States was preferred in only six.
The geographic spread is striking. In four of six Latin American countries surveyed—Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Peru—China was viewed more favourably than the United States. Even more symbolically, Canadians and Mexicans now viewed China more favourably than their southern neighbors, a reversal that Pew described as unprecedented in its nearly two decades of surveying. In simple words, the data shows that America does not need to be defeated for its influence to decline. Its comparative advantage can erode if other countries increasingly see it as unpredictable, coercive, or economically transactional.
This is the strategic danger of Trump’s tariff policy. Washington appears to be treating economic interdependence as a source of American vulnerability. But interdependence can also be a source of influence. For decades, countries wanted access to American markets, capital, technology, and institutions. That economic attraction reinforced America’s diplomatic and strategic position.
If those countries begin building alternatives, the loss will not appear on a single balance sheet. It will accumulate gradually—in trade agreements, supply chains, investment decisions, payment systems, and diplomatic calculations. China understands this.
Beijing does not need to replace the United States as the world’s unquestioned hegemon. It needs only to become sufficiently indispensable so that countries can pursue their interests without looking to Washington first. That is a much more achievable objective.
And it is why the most consequential question about America’s tariff strategy is not whether it will reduce the US trade deficit or revive American industries. It is whether Washington is inadvertently teaching the rest of the world how to live without American economic primacy. The answer may increasingly be yes.
The next phase of great-power competition may therefore look very different from the Cold War-style contest many in Washington imagine. China may not overtake America in every measure of power, and the United States is unlikely to disappear from the centre of international politics. Instead, the world could become progressively more plural: more markets for China, more strategic autonomy for middle powers, and fewer countries willing to organize their economic futures around Washington. That would be a profound transformation, making China’s message, already backed by Russia and many other countries, of the Global South as the centre of global economics attractive and acceptable.
Salman Rafi Sheikh, research analyst of international relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs
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