by Victor Davis Hanson
China’s reluctant deal to curb fentanyl and ease trade tensions signals not surrender, but a strategic pause as America reasserts its strength at home and abroad.
China has tentatively agreed to curtail sales of fentanyl to Mexico and other Latin American nations.
For three decades, Beijing sent the raw product to Latin American and
Mexican cartels. The gangs then processed and disguised the toxic brew
as less lethal narcotics and prescription drugs for export. The cartels
laundered the profits with additional Chinese help, along with the
feigned ignorance of the Mexican government.
Since 1999, imported fentanyl-laced drugs have killed approximately
600,000 Americans through addiction and accidental overdoses. That
number nears the death toll of all Americans killed during the Civil
War.
Following Donald Trump’s recent visit with Chinese President Xi
Jinping, China is reportedly set to lift restrictions on its rare earth
mineral exports to the U.S. That was a self-interested move, since the
U.S. and its allies were already mobilizing to become immune to Chinese
cut-offs. Xi Jinping also agreed to resume purchases of U.S. soybeans.
Trump’s concessions include agreeing to reduce tariffs on Chinese
goods to 47 percent, while maintaining tariffs on most Chinese imports
at levels still higher than those of almost any other importing country.
No doubt, more details will emerge of other concessions. Both China
and Trump’s domestic critics will undoubtedly seek to refute the
administration’s insistence that the U.S. won most of the advantages.
For nearly half a century, over the Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II,
Obama, Trump’s first, and Biden administrations, Americans more or less
came to accept that more Americans would die from fentanyl than were
lost in all foreign wars in U.S. history. If China really does comply
with its agreement, and the cartels cannot find alternate sources of raw
product, then Trump might become the greatest savior of American lives
in U.S. history.
So why did the Chinese government agree to these tentative
agreements, given that no prior president has been able to stop the
Chinese fentanyl supply chain or to tariff its goods without fearing a
destructive trade war?
Trump dealt from a position of strength, here and abroad, in a way
that prior presidents did not. He had permanently destroyed the
half-century-long utopian fantasy of Wall Street investors and left-wing
dreamers that the more concessions China received, the more it would
become affluent, powerful, and politically Westernized. That toxic
narrative had insisted that an emerging consumer and reformist class
would inevitably democratize the country as the ossified Chinese
Communist Party died on the vine.
Instead, the opposite happened.
China stole Western technology with impunity, manipulated its
currency, made a mockery of copyright and patent laws, and spread its
Belt-and-Road imperialism. It did indeed become affluent and powerful,
but also arrogant. The communist government rearmed, destroyed the rules
of the world trade system, bullied its neighbors, created the greatest
global mercantile system in world history, and sought every means to
weaken the West, from the Spratly Islands and the Panama Canal to the
World Health Organization and the Wuhan lab—along with former Senator
Dianne Feinstein’s chauffeur and Rep. Eric Swalwell’s intern.
Yet in 2025, a shocked China reviewed the first ten months of the
Trump administration and found it erratic, unpredictable—and ultimately
scary. It then concluded that the U.S. has finally awakened, as Trump
began augmenting the sources of U.S. power, much of it underrated or
ignored over the last decades.
In 2025, NATO has become energized as never before. Most members have
met their promises to invest two percent of GDP on defense. Many may
double that commitment. The inclusion of Sweden and Finland is more
valuable to the alliance than the addition of almost any other new
members of the last thirty years.
China’s Middle East clients are humiliated. For now, Iran, Hezbollah,
Hamas, and the Houthis are licking their wounds. There will be no
Iranian bomb for years. Russia has withdrawn from the Middle East after
the fall of its client Assad kleptocracy.
Russia remains bogged down in Ukraine in a Verdun-style bloodbath.
Its gas refineries are under constant drone attack. Putin’s military
campaign so far has provided no model for a Taiwan invasion, and perhaps
instead a lesson of caution.
India and China are slowly reducing their covert imports of Russian
oil. After needlessly incurring one million casualties, Putin is
terrified that his oligarchal class and officer castes increasingly see
him as a 73-year-old, ill liability. He now fights only to inch
westward, hoping to reach a symbolic DMZ line that would justify his
military blunder. In a cost-to-benefit analysis, his four-year invasion
does not compute well in the Kremlin.
Meanwhile, a muscular NATO and an anemic Russia allow a rearming
U.S.—its military recruitment targets now easily met for the first time
in years—to begin turning to Asia. China’s past bullying, together with
perceived Biden appeasement, had terrified America’s Asian allies in the
Pacific.
Yet now Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines
are slowly mobilizing their defenses, mostly because they perceive the
U.S. is no longer afraid to help its friends and to punish its enemies.
For all the talk of an ascendant Chinese military, parity with America
is still years away, given that in terms of strategic weapons and
aircraft, and capital ships, the U.S. is far ahead in both quantity and
quality.
So our Asian partners vie with each other to increase foreign
investment in the U.S., buy American weapons, and receive strong Trump
guarantees for American assistance in extremis. Taiwan is building five
new chip factories in the U.S.
Australia is partnering with America to ensure that China cannot
strangle the West by cutting off rare earth minerals in the future.
Japan is slowly building a navy not seen in the Pacific since World War
II.
When China reexamined the domestic U.S., it became further
discouraged. The Chinese con of supplying the world with solar panels
and wind turbines while it builds coal and nuclear plants is now
sputtering. Trump will produce more traditional energy—oil, gas,
nuclear, and coal—than any other nation in history. Despite its green
dogmas, Europe will follow suit or stagnate further.
The Chinese applauded America’s anti-meritocratic DEI programs. They
saw them as destructive as their own ideological blunders of the Maoist
past, when dogma destroyed merit and the economy and standard of
living with it.
But now DEI is dying. There are no more open borders. Illegal aliens are being deported at an accelerated rate.
The U.S. stock market is at record highs. Inflation is still low by
historical standards. GDP may exceed 3 percent for 2025. If only half
the promised trillions of dollars of foreign investment are realized,
the sum will become the greatest sudden infusion of foreign cash in
America in our history.
When China looks at Silicon Valley, it becomes further uncertain. The
left-wing tech barons are no longer eager to invest in and partner with
the unreliable Chinese. Many are becoming realists, as they are
empowered and set free by Trump, in the opposite fashion of the Biden
administration’s statist efforts to pick sycophantic winners and declare
the noncompliers losers.
In areas like AI, robotics, genetic engineering, cryptocurrency, and
military technology, the Chinese likely fear that they may no longer
catch up to a riled U.S.
Like its 1941-1942 awakening, America will rearm, clamp down on arms
transfers and espionage, and reassert itself as the most powerful nation
in the world, a fact that will attract more allies and turn remaining
enemies into neutrals.
In summary, during the Biden administration, China had expected to
see 70,000 Americans die annually without facing consequences. It
expected to continue openly stealing American technology and waging
one-sided trade against the U.S., as it picked off America’s demoralized
Asian allies.
China wagered that the U.S. was slowly and inevitably turning into a
North American Europe—depressed and drug-ridden, insidiously becoming
socialist, borderless, and flooded with unassimilated and often hostile
illegal aliens. Suicidally, it would continue to forgo cheap fossil
fuels for expensive and unreliable “green” energy while chasing its tail
with self-destructive DEI, transgender, and crime policies.
Its universities would continue to indoctrinate a new generation of
anti-American socialists in the spirit of leftist radicals like Zohran
Mamdani, Jasmine Crockett, and AOC to update the moribund dreams of
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
The U.S. is reascending at home and abroad, and its allies, including even Europe and especially Asia, are reenergized.
Conservative movements and governments are rebounding in Europe. So
for Chinese strongman Xi Jinping, it was time to cut a deal, to pause,
to regroup, and to hope that in three, seven, or eleven years, another
Obama- or Biden-naif would return. And then it might finish its now
half-century-long effort to relegate a calcifying U.S. to the 1950s
version of the British Empire.
Or so China assumed.
But then America said, “Not yet, not quite yet…”
Victor Davis Hanson
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/11/03/not-quite-yet-china/
Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter
The
State Election Board has cited 'unexplained anomalies in
vote tabulation and storage related to the 2020 election' in a letter to
you dated November 7, 2024. The Voting Section of the Civil Rights
Division has also been made aware, in correspondence to it on August 1,
2025 from voter transparency advocates, of multiple
instances of government obstruction of transparency requests,
including high-resolution ballot scans, signature verification
documentation, and various metadata requests."