A velvet reset: Trump’s new strategy hands China breathing space

For years, Washington framed China as the defining adversary of the American century. The National Security Strategy released on December 4 has quietly abandoned that posture. At just 33 pages, the document mentions China sparingly and never as an existential threat. Instead, it treats Beijing as a major power with which the United States must reach “reciprocity and fairness” in trade.

The shift is deliberate and, from a Chinese perspective, long overdue. After a decade of being cast as the villain in successive Pentagon papers and Biden-era strategies that labelled China a…