By Victor Davis Hanson

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…”

First published in American Greatness