Since President Trump returned to office, the U.S.-China relationship has lurched between confrontation and accommodation. Policy choices depend on who is steering the ship at any given moment: the administration has assembled Washington’s most hawkish China advisors, but the president’s deal-making instincts routinely override their counsel. The pattern has earned him the Financial Times’ label as “the last China dove in Washington.“

These divisions have produced a strategically schizophrenic policy: tariff rates soaring to 145 per cent before plummeting to 30 per cent, bans on advanced chip design tools reversed for talks of selling powerful Nvidia Blackwell chips to Beijing, and continued uncertainty over Taiwan.