What matters most for China is not whether the United States is in decline but how to understand a country that seeks to shape history while being no longer willing to bear the costs under the old rules. The United States today stands at a historic crossroads. To understand, one must begin with this fundamental reality.
Recently, we conducted a research trip to the United States, visiting about a dozen government agencies, think tanks and business organizations in an effort to better understand the country and its policies related to China.
What struck us most was not a sense of American decline nor the emergence of any new consensus in Washington. Rather, it was a pervasive sense of uncertainty—stretching from the streets to conference rooms, and from society at large to the policy community. Few people seemed able to clearly explain the current state of U.S. domestic or international affairs. At its core, this uncertainty reflects a broader condition: The U.S. is undergoing a profound transformation, and the ambiguity is a symptom of a country in transition.
To understand the changes unfolding in the U.S. today, one must begin not with its approach to the external world but with how it is managing its internal challenges. Many of the country’s most pressing problems are domestic rather than international—immigration, deteriorating public security, economic anxiety, industrial hollowing-out, rising energy costs and the political and social tensions these issues have generated. Donald Trump is not the starting point of these changes, but rather a political outcome of the long-term accumulation of domestic contradictions, social challenges and governance pressures in the United States.
Domestic politics therefore constitute both the backdrop and the driving force of this transformation. Under mounting internal pressure, the Trump administration has sought to reorder national priorities. U.S. attention has increasingly shifted from maintaining the global order toward addressing domestic governance, and from grand strategic narratives toward the resolution of concrete problems. Changes in decision-making patterns within the Trump administration, growing divisions within the strategic community, the evolving role of the United States in the international order and adjustments in U.S. policy toward China are all rooted in this broader context.
Against this backdrop, the Trump administration’s decision-making style differs markedly from that of previous U.S. governments. It relies less on traditional procedures—such as setting direction through grand strategy and doctrinal documents, building consensus through bureaucratic processes, coordinating across agencies and incorporating diverse inputs from think tanks and society. Instead, decision-making has increasingly taken on a “small group” character, in which a limited number of core actors determine key policies. The pace and direction of policy are more directly shaped by the president, with less reliance on complex procedures and broad-based consultation, and a greater willingness to bypass established processes.
For the United States, documents such as the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy remain important. Yet in practice, decision-making is now less determined by formal texts or strategic blueprints than by developments in the real world and by how the president interprets them. This approach may enhance pragmatism and efficiency, allowing policies to be more problem-oriented and less constrained by rigid strategic narratives. At the same time, it also makes U.S. actions more difficult to predict.
Perceptions of these changes within the U.S. strategic community are increasingly divided. Trump was, in many ways, the elephant in the room during our visit. In Washington, there exist two almost entirely different interpretations of what kind of president he is. Conservatives tend to view Trump as capable, pragmatic and efficiency-oriented—energetic, engaged, able to handle multiple issues simultaneously and possessing clear views on each. Liberals, by contrast, often see the Trump administration as abnormal—arbitrary in its actions, inconsistent in its policies and lacking strategic coherence.
This divergence is not merely a matter of partisanship or ideological preference; it is, more fundamentally, a contest between different interpretive frameworks. In the liberal view, a normal American president is one who formulates a clear strategy, ensures top-down coordination, advances policy through structured bureaucratic processes and draws broadly on societal input. By contrast, a president like Trump—highly personalized and opaque, focused on solving concrete problems rather than articulating grand strategy, dismissive of bureaucratic procedures and strongly transactional in orientation—is seen as abnormal.
Conservatives, however, tend to focus less on whether Trump conforms to established governing norms and more on how he seeks to solve problems. In their view, Trump is intelligent and capable, and in their view much of the criticism directed at him stems from a failure to understand how he thinks and operates.
At the level of foreign policy, the United States has not withdrawn from global affairs; it has, instead, changed the way it engages with the world. It no longer seeks to shape history through the same methods as before, nor does it aspire to serve as a long-term, universal and institutional pillar of the international order.
In the Trump administration’s view, previous U.S. governments placed excessive emphasis on alliance-building, leadership in multilateral institutions and rule-making, all of which led to an overextension of national power and a misallocation of strategic resources. In contrast, tariffs, sanctions, deterrence, issue-based transactions and military capabilities have become central tools for sustaining U.S. global influence.
In other words, the desire of the United States to maintain global influence has not diminished; what has declined is its patience with traditional modes of leadership. The Trump administration is less willing to bear the costs of endeavors that it perceives as misaligned with U.S. interests. For this reason, the changes underway in the United States cannot be simply characterized as either strategic retrenchment or expansion. Rather, they represent a restructuring of how the country participates in and shapes the global order.
More unexpectedly, perhaps, is that the importance of China within the U.S. political agenda appears to be declining—an indication that U.S. strategic competition with China may be entering a new phase. Although China remains one of the most important factors for the United States, the “China content” in the current U.S. political agenda is decreasing. It no longer dominates American foreign policy narratives to the same extent as in the past. This shift does not reflect a reduced importance of China, per se, but rather an internal redirection of political attention. For the Trump administration, issues such as Iran, domestic inflation, rising energy prices and the midterm elections are absorbing significant attention.
Notably, the relative decline in the prominence of China may not be a short-term phenomenon. One reason is that the Trump administration’s approach toward China is more pragmatic. Unlike the Biden administration, it does not seek to construct an overarching “strategic competition” framework that integrates national capacity-building, economic de-risking, industrial policy and alliance coordination into a single narrative. Instead, it tends to manage China-U.S. relations on an issue-by-issue basis, preferring to address specific problems directly rather than embedding them within a broader strategic storyline. As a result, the model of organizing U.S. grand strategy and domestic political narratives around China—a defining feature of the past decade—appears to be loosening. If conservative leadership persists, this trend may continue.
Taken together, the uncertainty observed in Washington today should not be seen as a temporary phenomenon but rather as a symptom of of a transitional phase in the United States. It reflects a reordering of national priorities driven by social pressures, a concentration of presidential power that increases decision-making efficiency, a strategic community divided in its interpretive frameworks, a transformation in how the U.S. engages with the world and a gradual decline in the centrality of China within U.S. politics. These interconnected developments, unfolding from the domestic to the international level, together form the underlying logic of America’s ongoing transformation.
For China, what matters is not whether the United States is in decline, but how to understand a country that still seeks to shape history while being no longer willing to bear the costs under previous rules. The United States today stands at a historic crossroads. To grasp many of the emerging dynamics in China-U.S. relations, one must begin with this fundamental reality.
