Trump vs China: Did America Just Expose Its Weak Hand?

Donald Trump returned to the White House promising to confront China from a position of American strength. But as Xi Jinping arrives in Washington for a crucial Trump-Xi summit, has the strategy instead exposed some of America’s biggest vulnerabilities?

In this GVS Deep Dive, Najma Minhas examines the changing US-China balance of power: Trump’s trade war and tariffs, China’s rare-earth leverage, the AI and semiconductor race, Taiwan, America’s military commitments and the Iran war, strains within US alliances, India’s strategic hedging, BRICS, and China’s expanding manufacturing and export power.

The United States remains the world’s dominant military and financial power and retains enormous advantages in technology, capital markets and alliances. But history shows that great powers can remain extraordinarily powerful even while the relative balance underneath them begins to change.

From Britain’s relative decline as America emerged as an industrial superpower to today’s competition between Washington and Beijing, this episode asks whether US strategy is actually containing China — or exposing vulnerabilities that Beijing has spent decades preparing to exploit.