U.S. President Donald Trump¡¯s rapid-fire escalation of attacks on China ¡ª from bans of WeChat and TikTok to sanctions on Hong Kong¡¯s top official ¡ª underscores that he¡¯s dropped past restraint and decided to make confronting Beijing his priority less than 90 days before the U.S. election.
The president¡¯s increasingly aggressive stance has opened the door for hard-liners in the administration to push policies delivering on their long-held conviction that Communist Party leaders are bent on world domination, and that successive U.S. administrations underestimated the China threat.
¡°A dam has broken in the Trump administration, releasing all the pent-up ideas about how to escalate conflict with China,¡± said Graham Webster, China Digital Economy Fellow at the New America think tank. ¡°It¡¯s both a race to change facts on the ground and cement a durable enmity and a tool to distract from things that could damage Trump re-election prospects.¡±
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.