October 15, 2025

America’s Self-Loathing Is a Losing Hand

By: David Feith

This article was originally published in The Washington Post.

Around 10 years ago, the United States began a historic shift in its grand strategy toward China, abandoning the belief that engaging Beijing would liberalize its regime and integrate it into a U.S.-led world order. It was a fragile but significant turn, the result of an accumulation of concerns that ideally would usher in a more effective U.S. strategy.

And it did — in many ways, even more dramatically than expected. President Donald Trump forced a rethinking of China policy as no conventional leader could. Then came the Biden administration, which repudiated many Trump policies but kept his approach to China largely intact. This prompted a thousand headlines about Washington’s new hawkish bipartisan consensus on China and the likely dawn of a New Cold War.

U.S. competition with China demands strength and clarity — not exhaustion and doubt.

And yet nine months into the second Trump term, Washington is not adopting a Cold War posture toward Beijing. The second Trump administration has taken a soft line on issues from TikTok to semiconductor export controls to Taiwan, with little pushback from Congress or the public.

The great American rethink on China hasn’t been as great as many of us thought — or hoped — would be. The last decade has seen no “Sputnik moment” of national awakening and mobilization. The reasons are varied. Three decades of integration weren’t going to be undone quickly. China presents complex problems that are not easy to solve and political leaders are prone to distraction and division. But there are even deeper challenges. After decades of foreign policy missteps, failed wars, deindustrialization and the covid debacle, public trust has eroded. Americans today doubt America’s strength, competence and virtue. Isolationism finds adherents on both left and right. So, increasingly, does a harder-edged self-loathing that sees America as the world’s villain and harshly opposes the projection of American power.

Read the full article on The Washington Post.

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