At the end of 2025, global politics is in a state of cautious armistice. The 2025 NSS under Trump and Xi Jinping’s China’s National Security in the New Era (2025) lay bare divergent visions of power, statecraft, and global order. The era in which the United States sought to coopt China into the liberal international order has ended, exposing the definitive shortcomings of American grand strategy.
The release of the United States 2025 National Security Strategy narrows American national interests. The document critiques old elites who made hugely quixotic and destructive bets on globalism and so-called free trade. US pushes NATO countries to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense and a renewed emphasis on border control, hemispheric defense. The “Trump Corollary,” an extension of the Monroe Doctrine 2.0 acts to deny non-Hemispheric competitors.
In Asia, US aims to challenge China’s economic dominance, secure supply chains and work closely with India through the QUAD to keep Indo-Pacific stable. The “China Hawk” discourse is rooted in US domestic populist politics.
As the world’s second-largest defense spender, China’s actual military expenditure estimated by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) at approximately $318 billion in 2024.China’s A2/AD capabilities aim to deter U.S. intervention in Asian contingencies, and thus do not support claims of a total “China threat.”
China’s Strategic Vision: Rejuvenation and Multilateral Leadership
China’s 20th CPC Congress Report (2022) outlines a comprehensive grand strategy aimed at achieving rejuvenation of the Chinese nation across all fronts. Beijing actively promotes new global public goods through initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Global Development Initiative (GDI), and the Global Security Initiative (GSI). By the end of 2024, 82 countries had joined the GDI, and 119 countries had supported the GSI. China champions true multilateralism and opposes unilateralism and the forming of blocs targeted against particular countries.
At their first face-to-face meeting since 2019, held on the sidelines of the 2025 APEC summit in Busan, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping reached a tentative trade truce. Washington agreed to reduce tariffs on Chinese goods from 57 percent to 47 percent and China paused its rare earth export controls and resuming substantial purchases of U.S. agricultural goods. Domestic political signaling played a key role in Trump’s trade strategy. For now, both sides have stepped back averting a full-blown trade war.
Xi’s revanchist policy integrates assertive defense of China’s core interests including Taiwan, Hong Kong, and maritime claims, alongside comprehensive goals for the armed forces focusing on modernization, combat readiness, and achieving PLA centenary objectives by 2027.Beijing reiterates that it will not renounce the use of force and resolving the Taiwan question is a matter for the Chinese, a matter that must be resolved by the Chinese. The US, meanwhile denounce any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.
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China’s 2025 White paper identifies four inviolable red lines: the Taiwan issue; democracy and human rights; China’s development path and political system; and the right to development. In rejecting prospects for an Asia-Pacific analogue to NATO, China contest the divisive implications of the Indo-Pacific Strategy.
Historically, Chinese foreign policy and national security were regime survival focused grand strategies, with Mao’s three strategic phases leaning to one side, punching with two fists, and one horizontal line, a large area to changing Cold War alignments. Deng Xiaoping continued this survival strategy in the late 1970s, aligning with the U.S. and expanding military engagement. Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao largely preserved Deng’s roots. Hu advanced the concept of “peaceful rise” or “peaceful development.”
Xi’s designation as core leader and the insertion of his eponymous ideology into the Party Constitution provided a political mandate for a more assertive vision. As transformational leader, Xi pursues assertive fenfa youwei diplomacy. His foreign policy, formalized through Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy and articulated as “Major-Country Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics,” breaks with his predecessors.
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In the early 1990s, after securing a credible nuclear deterrent, China reoriented its grand strategic priorities from regime survival to national rejuvenation. Xi’s strategy, grounded in what Avery Goldstein describes as reassurance, reform, and resistance, signals a deliberate evolution from the earlier “peaceful rise” paradigm. In 2013, Xi met with President Obama to reassure the United States, advocating a “new type of great power relationship” and seeking to avoid the so-called “Thucydides Trap.” The proposal was ultimately rebuffed by Washington.
Beginning in 2009-2010, U.S. analysts and media commentators observed what they interpreted as a growing assertiveness in Chinese rhetoric and behavior. China’s evolving security diplomacy is also visible in its renewed emphasis on South-South Cooperation (SSC). Despite its economic rise, Beijing continues to identify itself as the world’s largest developing country and a member of the Global South. This positioning grants China historical legitimacy, allowing it to frame its leadership as a continuation of SSC’s original promise to transform global order rather than as great-power domination.
*The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not represent TDI. The contributor is responsible for the originality of this piece.
Suloja Khadka
Suloja Khadka is a PhD candidate at Fudan University focusing on Nepal–China relations, China’s political development, and Nepal’s foreign policy. She contributes to scholarship on the behavior of rising powers in the international system.
