Provoking your enemies, alienating your friends and actively sabotaging your own defenses is no one’s idea of a sound national security plan. And yet, this is the playbook that President Trump has apparently followed over the first 100 days of his second term. You can see it most clearly in the global fight he kicked off with China. He’s been scrapping for this showdown since before he entered politics, so you’d think that before taking on such a global powerhouse, he’d strengthen every alliance, game out every possible countermeasure and get his leadership team in peak condition. The mouthiest barroom brawler knows not to pick a fight and then turn his back, but that’s what the president is doing. He promised to “make America safe again,” but instead of building up the nation’s defenses, he’s dismantling them at precisely the moment they are most needed.
The president has a former weekend Fox News host at the Department of Defense, and aides have complained that there is “total chaos at the Pentagon.” He’s got a Trump donor with no military experience as the secretary of the Navy and picked for director of National Intelligence someone with a tendency to repeat authoritarian talking points. The national security adviser uses a commercial messaging app to share sensitive information about U.S. airstrikes with people he can’t necessarily identify. Earlier this month the president sacked the military’s well-regarded cyberwar chief after a conspiracy theorist told him to, and his administration leaked word of plans to cut the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency by 40 percent. Next up appears to be an evisceration of the State Department, particularly the bureau that has challenged some of the worst abuses of hostile authoritarian states. And of course Mr. Trump has done everything possible to infuriate NATO, America’s primary alliance of mutual military support.
This approach would be perilous at any time, but it’s particularly wrongheaded at the very moment Mr. Trump is kicking off a global battle with Xi Jinping’s government in China. Officially the fight is about tariffs, but for Beijing, international trade is never just business. China in years past has sent out waves of hack attacks on Western corporations to develop its manufacturing base and kneecapped a South Korean conglomerate to keep Seoul from adopting U.S. missile defenses. It appears to have harvested data from the popular shopping site Temu and fed it to a state-backed propaganda unit. Its hackers penetrated U.S. telecommunications networks. And all that was before Mr. Trump announced he was imposing sky-high tariffs on most of that nation’s goods. “They use diplomatic coercion, economic coercion, cyberattacks, lawfare, in extreme cases military or paramilitary threats, all to achieve a goal,” Bethany Allen, the Taiwan-based author of “Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World,” told me. In this fight, she asked, “Why would they not do the same?”
Or as Matt Pottinger, Mr. Trump’s deputy national adviser during his first term, recently wrote with a colleague in The Free Press, “While Trump has (again) become the protagonist in a trade war with China, Xi is focused on the broader battle for global power.”
Mr. Xi’s appetite for revenge is relentless. Dissidents who fled to America after the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 are still being stalked more than 30 years later, and Beijing has set up a network of secretive police stations from Sydney, Australia, to Lower Manhattan and hired former local cops to surveil enemies abroad.
