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2026 has started with a bang. Some good, some bad, but it has not been dull: The stunning success of Operation Absolute Resolve. Greenland. Phase 2 of the President’s Gaza Peace Plan. The Board of Peace floated as a potential alternative to the United Nations. More purges at the top of China’s military ranks. Potentially tens of thousands of Iranian protestors slaughtered in the streets. But for all that is new and different, on one issue we appear primed to repeat the mistakes of the past — China.
For decades, policymakers in both parties have been suckered into believing we can find a win-win with the Chinese Communist Party. In the six months after Tiananmen Square, President George H. W. Bush sent his national security advisor to Beijing twice to meet with CCP leaders who had brutally gunned down their own people. In one of the biggest strategic blunders in American history, President Clinton successfully pushed for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, while President George W. Bush finalized the deal granting China permanent normal trade relations with the United States. President Obama was duped into a worthless deal with Xi allegedly stopping data and IP theft, while the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy naïvely claimed that it was “possible for the United States and the PRC to coexist peacefully, and share in and contribute to human progress together.”
Yet if last week is any indication, rather than learning from these mistakes, the Trump administration is in danger of repeating them, just in different forms. On Thursday, news broke that the TikTok deal had been finalized, and it appears the algorithm remains in the control of CCP-linked ByteDance. Even though the algorithm supposedly will be retrained and updated by the new U.S. entity, Beijing will still hold final control of what the algorithm emphasizes or censors. Meanwhile, in the National Defense Strategy released Friday, the Trump administration stated our goal vis-à-vis China would be a “decent peace” — disconcertingly similar to the Biden NSS. The notion that the CCP is remotely interested in finding a mutually beneficial arrangement where both China and the United States can be secure, free, and prosperous defies decades of evidence to the contrary, not to mention Xi’s clearly stated aims of a new global order with Beijing at the center. While China kicked off the new year conducting joint naval exercises with BRICS Plus countries, including Russia and Iran, the current administration’s cooperative policies seem to suggest a lingering, unrealistic belief that China merely seeks admission into our system, rather than to dismantle it.
Given President Trump has repeatedly and correctly criticized previous administrations for getting played by China — and making it clear in his first term that China was a threat to be confronted — it seems odd for the Trump administration now to embrace the same faulty assumptions about the possibility of cooperation with the CCP that guided Clinton, Obama, and Biden.
Here at The Vandenberg Coalition, we will continue sounding the alarm about the existential threat China poses and offering sober, pragmatic ideas for how to combat it. Our world is rapidly changing and requires new approaches rather than repeating the mistakes of the past. President Trump is right to try to reshape an order that has failed to live up to its expectations. But making America great again will require finally seeing China for what it is — not merely a competitor, but our most dangerous adversary.
-Carrie Filipetti, Executive Director of the Vandenberg Coalition
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