Flashpoints | Diplomacy | East Asia

The NSS is likely to offer China short-term relief – but cause for long-term concern.

U.S. President Donald Trump greets Chinese President Xi Jinping before a bilateral meeting at the Gimhae International Airport terminal in Busan, South Korea, Oct. 30, 2025.

Credit: Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok

Since Trump’s return to power in 2025, China-U.S. relations have oscillated between confrontation and signs of rapprochement, driven by unprecedented tit-for-tat tariffs, tighter technology controls, and inconsistent diplomatic signals. Against this uncertain backdrop, the newly released 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) is likely to offer Chinese leaders short-term relief: it tempers ideological language, clarifies U.S. priorities, and suggests a more predictable basis for managing competition.

However, the NSS also lays foundations that could, in the long run, complicate China’s external environment and strengthen the forces arrayed against it.

Grounds for Optimism

For Beijing, the strongest basis for near-term optimism is the 2025 NSS’s striking departure from earlier U.S. conceptions of strategic competition. In Trump’s first term, the 2017 NSS cast China as a “revisionist power” bent on reshaping the international system, while the Biden administration’s 2022 NSS elevated the rivalry into a global contest between “democracies and autocracies.”

The 2025 document abandons both approaches. It does not present China as an ideological challenger, nor as the central threat around which U.S. global leadership must be rebuilt. Instead, it defines competition in national interest terms – economic leverage, industrial strength, and border security – rather than a question of transformation in the world order. This shift lowers the emotional and moral charge surrounding the relationship and immediately reduces the risk of framing misperceptions that fuel instability.

A second ground for optimism is the narrowing of U.S. strategic interests. Previous National Security Strategies presented China as the pacing challenge in a global arena, requiring deep engagement by the United States across multiple regions. The 2025 NSS instead places overwhelming emphasis on U.S. domestic renewal – reindustrialization, energy dominance, and restoring economic independence – and treats strategic competition as something that must be shaped around those priorities. For Beijing, a United States that is focused inward, and more constrained in its international appetite, offers a temporary window in which Chinese foreign policy can operate without the constant anticipation of counter-initiatives from Washington.

Third, the NSS introduces a greater degree of predictability after a year of unprecedented volatility in bilateral ties. Since Trump’s return to power, Chinese officials have faced rapid escalations in tariffs, shifting export controls, and fluctuating diplomatic signals. The 2025 NSS, regardless of one’s assessment of its tone, at least imposes coherence. It identifies clear economic boundaries, sets out the rationale for technology restrictions, and avoids proposing transformational objectives vis-à-vis China. In the short term, this structured articulation of U.S. priorities helps stabilize expectations on both sides, something Beijing has consistently sought.

A fourth area where the document offers reassurance is its treatment of Taiwan. The 2017 NSS described China as seeking to “displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific,” while the 2022 version highlighted Taiwan’s role in a systemic contest over the international order. The 2025 NSS, by contrast, upholds long-standing U.S. declaratory policy without introducing new political or ideological framing. It emphasizes deterrence and the prevention of unilateral changes to the status quo, a position that Beijing dislikes but understands, and omits any language suggesting support for Taiwanese independence.

Finally, China may draw optimism from the NSS’s lack of coalition-building rhetoric. The 2022 strategy positioned alliances as ideological partnerships defending democratic space, and the 2017 strategy emphasized mobilizing networks to counter revisionist powers. The 2025 document instead insists that allies must “step up” primarily for reasons of burden-sharing, not political solidarity, and frames cooperation in transactional terms.

For China, this signals a less cohesive U.S.-led front in the near term, and potentially more opportunities to work around, rather than against, U.S. diplomatic initiatives. At minimum, it suggests that Washington will expend less energy on constructing a unified coalition aimed at containing China across multiple domains.

Why This Optimism May Be Misplaced

Despite the short-term relief the 2025 NSS offers, its deeper strategic logic is far less favorable to China. The document reframes competition not as a clash of political systems but as a contest for material advantage, including industrial capacity, technological dominance, and economic security. This shift may be less ideologically charged than the 2017 and 2022 NSS documents, but it is also more actionable.

By declaring economic sovereignty and reindustrialization as core national imperatives, the NSS lays the groundwork for a sustained geoeconomic campaign targeting the very foundations of China’s long-term growth and competitiveness. Beijing has long been more vulnerable to U.S. economic statecraft than to ideological pressure, making this reframing strategically impactful over the long haul.

A second challenge stems from the coherent geoeconomic toolkit the NSS empowers. The 2017 NSS emphasized unfair trade practices and IP theft, and the 2022 NSS focused on securing the innovation base and supply chains. The 2025 strategy goes further by embedding trade, tariffs, critical technology controls, and energy dominance into a single, integrated framework of enhancing national power. It explicitly calls for restricting economic engagement with China to “non-sensitive factors,” tightening the definition of acceptable exchange. For China, this signals not a relaxation but a long-term consolidation of U.S. leverage over finance, semiconductors, data flows, and capital, which are domains essential to Beijing’s technological modernization.

Third, the NSS may accelerate a dynamic China has long sought to avoid: more capable and more autonomous U.S. allies. The strategy demands not ideological solidarity, as in the 2022 NSS, but concrete defense contributions. In practice, this could push Japan to advance its defense reforms, encourage Australia to deepen its technological integration with the United States, and motivate frontline states like the Philippines to further expand access arrangements. A more distributed security architecture driven by local initiative rather than U.S. orchestration may complicate China’s regional calculus in unpredictable ways and increase the likelihood that resistance to Chinese ambition will emerge from multiple, mutually reinforcing sources.

Fourth, the 2025 NSS creates uncertainty about the trajectory of U.S. force posture, which may cut against China’s interests once the National Defense Strategy (NDS) is released. The NSS itself maintains continuity on deterrence, including commitments to Taiwan and the First Island Chain, but offers few details on operational or capability priorities. If the forthcoming NDS emphasizes long-range precision fires, dispersed basing, AI-enabled targeting, and enhanced maritime denial, U.S. military posture may become more threatening to Beijing’s regional ambitions, rather than less. The current lull in overtly confrontational language may therefore mask a future sharpening of the U.S. defense approach.

Lastly, any short-term optimism should be tempered by the fact that the 2025 NSS eliminates a number of stabilizing mechanisms that earlier strategies preserved. Both the 2017 and 2022 NSS documents, despite their sharp critiques of Beijing, stated explicitly that competition did not preclude cooperation in areas of mutual interest, ranging from nonproliferation to climate and global health. The 2025 strategy pointedly shrinks that space, dismissing these domains as ideologically driven or strategically irrelevant.

While China has never relied on China-U.S. cooperation to advance its core interests, such buffers nonetheless helped moderate the rivalry and offered channels for diplomatic signaling. Their removal means the relationship will operate with fewer safety valves, making long-term competition more rigid even if the immediate tone appears more stable.

Looking Ahead

The 2025 NSS ultimately offers China a mixed picture: short-term stability paired with long-term structural pressure. Its de-escalated ideological framing may ease immediate tensions, but the deeper logic points toward a more focused, economically fortified, and strategically disciplined U.S. approach to competition. Beijing may welcome the calmer tone, yet the strategy confirms that Washington is settling into a durable competitive posture rather than retreating from it.

In the coming weeks and months, several developments will clarify how much weight the NSS carries in practice. The most important will be the run-up to the summit between President Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in China next year**,** which will test whether the NSS’s stabilizing language can translate into concrete confidence-building measures or at least prevent further tariff and technology escalations.

Equally significant will be the National Defense Strategy**, **which will reveal whether Washington intends to sharpen its military posture in the Indo-Pacific. The next diplomatic moves with Japan, Australia, and the Philippines will also indicate whether the United States plans to accelerate allied capacity in ways that ultimately narrow China’s room for maneuver.

For now, the NSS should be read not as a turning point but as a strategic overture. Its real impact will depend on how these next steps unfold, whether they reinforce the document’s stabilizing elements or bring its more competitive impulses to the fore. Observers should therefore watch carefully: the trajectory of China-U.S. relations in 2025 and beyond will be shaped less by the NSS itself than by what follows in its wake.