When the Trump administration unveiled its 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) late on December 4, Washington’s commentariat immediately fixated on its “Western Hemisphere first” pivot and its blistering language about Europe’s looming “civilizational crisis.”
Over the past week, Chinese policy institutes and international relations scholars have been poring over the 33-page text. The emerging consensus is striking. They do not read the 2025 NSS as evidence of U.S. decline or strategic retreat. Rather, they see it as a dangerous attempt to make U.S. primacy more sustainable.
While the Western media focuses on the NSS’s isolationist rhetoric, Chinese analysts are categorizing the strategy through three distinct lenses: the Corporate Turnaround School, the Nixonian Revival School, and the Skeptical Realist School.
America as a Distressed Conglomerate
The Corporate Turnaround School assumes that the United States remains a hegemon in structural terms but is behaving like an overstretched firm under financial pressure, seeking to rebalance its portfolio rather than exit the game. On this reading, the NSS is best understood as a cost-cutting and refocusing exercise, shifting from loss-making security commitments to more profitable economic and technological lines of effort.
The most striking re-interpretation comes from scholars such as Mei Yang and Sun Chenghao, who depict the United States not as a crusading empire but as a distressed conglomerate. Mei, a fellow at the Qianhai Institute of International Affairs, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, explicitly likened the United States to a “Super National Company” burdened by five major deficits, from fiscal strain to industrial hollowing-out.
In this framing, Trump is cast as a hard-nosed CEO driving a sweeping restructuring. He is shedding what he sees as loss-making units in European security and Middle Eastern wars, while reallocating scarce resources to the “core business” of domestic manufacturing and advanced technology. This corporate metaphor reframes Trump’s agenda less as ideological revisionism than as a ruthless cost–benefit calculation under conditions of perceived decline.
Sun Chenghao, a fellow with the Center for International Security and Strategy (CISS) at Tsinghua University, supported this view, noting a “paradigm shift” from Biden’s values-based alliance network to a transactional, interest-based model. For analysts in this camp, the NSS marked a transition from “systemic rivalry” to “economic competition”: pressure on China will not ease, but the conflict is recast as a high-stakes business dispute rather than an existential ideological showdown.
A Strategic Pause, Not a Retreat
The Nixonian Revival School starts from the assumption that the NSS signals a deliberate strategic pause rather than simple retrenchment. The United States is pulling back at the margins to husband strength for a more focused, technologically driven confrontation later. Its rationale is constructed through historical analogy, mapping Trump’s moves onto Nixon’s 1970s recalibration.
Perhaps the most intriguing reading comes from Meng Weizhan, a fellow at Fudan University’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, who draws a direct parallel between Trump’s 2025 strategy and Richard Nixon’s retrenchment. In Meng’s view, just as Nixon extricated the United States from Vietnam to conserve strength for a protracted contest with the Soviet Union, Trump is pursuing a strategic pause – an Americanised version of taoguang yanghui, the Deng-era dictum to “hide one’s capabilities and bide one’s time.”
For Meng and other analysts in this school of thought, the apparent U.S. “retreat” is a trap. By prioritizing internal repair and embracing a kind of “tech Machiavellianism” – seeking dominance in AI, quantum computing, and other hard technologies while sidelining softer agendas such as climate governance – the United States is, paradoxically, borrowing from China’s own development playbook: internal governance as the foundation of external strength.
Meng warned that a United States that successfully recenters on domestic renewal and technological primacy would pose a far more formidable long-term challenge than a stretched, overextended empire trying to police the world.
Low-Cost Hegemony and Controlled Competition
The Skeptical Realist School, by contrast, assumes that U.S. hegemony is structurally intact and that talk of restraint or withdrawal is largely rhetorical; what matters is the continuity of military posture and alliance architecture. This rationale is built by comparing what Washington says with what it does on force deployment, deterrence, and economic statecraft.
The heavyweights of China’s strategic community, such as Zhu Feng of Nanjing University and Pan Xinmao of the Academy of Military Sciences, offer a sobering corrective. They reject the notion of U.S. strategic contraction outright. For Zhu, “America First” is best understood as a strategy of “low-cost hegemony”: Washington aims to preserve its global primacy while slashing the premium it once paid for providing public goods, from alliance management to regional stabilization.
In this reading, Trump is not abandoning hegemony but seeking a cheaper, more transactional version of it. Pan Xinmao added a sharper military lens, characterizing the emerging pattern as “controlled competition.” He noted that even as the NSS rhetorically recenters the Western Hemisphere, the United States has not drawn down its “deterrence stock” along the First Island Chain.
The operative strategy, in his view, is to lock in the existing security status quo in East Asia while opening a new front in “supply chain encirclement” against China – tightening technology, investment, and logistics controls to constrain Beijing’s long-term growth. For these realists, the NSS’s softer language on China – eschewing labels like “adversary” – is less a genuine reset than a tactical feint, designed to buy time for U.S. reindustrialization and coalition-building under the cover of moderation.
Perception and Misperception
Chinese analysts demonstrate a sophisticated grasp of U.S. domestic drivers but may be misreading the resilience of U.S. alliances.
On the diagnostic side, they are right to link U.S. domestic polarization to its external posture. Renmin University scholar Diao Daming, for example, described U.S. foreign policy as a “hierarchical” system in which issues that directly affect the middle class – jobs, immigration control, inflation – occupy Tier 1, while more abstract notions of global leadership are relegated to Tier 2. Chinese commentators also correctly interpret the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine less as a revival of traditional Latin American interventionism than as an effort to secure the U.S. economic flank to concentrate on competition with China.
Where their reading becomes more questionable is on the question of allied cohesion. There is a tendency, particularly in Meng Weizhan’s analysis, to treat the NSS’s civilizational language and its warning about Europe’s potential “civilizational erasure” as evidence of a terminal fracture within the West and an impending U.S. abandonment of Europe.
This risks overlooking how a more transactional U.S. approach can paradoxically strengthen allied cooperation. CICIR scholar Fan Xiaoju has already noted with concern that Japanese and South Korean fears of abandonment are driving them to arm more heavily and deepen coordination with each other, gradually weaving a denser regional web of deterrence that is less dependent on Washington’s daily mood swings. Beijing thus runs the risk of mistaking heightened allied anxiety for an actual unraveling of alliance structures.
Who Sees an Opportunity, Who Sees a Trap?
To make sense of this seemingly messy debate, it is helpful to distinguish between different vantage points shaped by institutional location and time horizon. Scholars who work closely with China’s trade and diplomatic machinery tend to focus on immediate, policy-manageable outcomes. They read the NSS’s economic emphasis as opening space for pragmatic bargains: if security is no longer the sole organizing principle, Beijing can, in their view, buy periods of relative stability through large-scale agricultural and energy imports, using targeted economic concessions to manage frictions and gain time.
By contrast, analysts whose work is rooted more in military affairs and historical analysis, are primarily concerned with the longer-term structure of U.S. power. They interpret the NSS’s language of restraint not as genuine withdrawal, but as a sign of consolidation. In their reading, a United States that stops expending blood and treasure in the Middle East and Ukraine will, by the 2030s, have greater fiscal and strategic freedom to tighten technology blockades, orchestrate supply-chain pressure, and reinforce alliance networks around China.
Policy Implications
Chinese academics’ interpretations of the NSS yield several nuanced policy implications for Beijing, Washington, and third parties.
For China, the interpretation of a “Nixonian pause” is likely to encourage a strategy of asymmetric decoupling. Beijing has strong incentives to avoid direct military confrontations that might interrupt what it sees as an American partial retreat. Instead, China should concentrate on hardening its own economic and technological base. As Pan Xinmao argued, this means accelerating indigenous substitution in critical technologies on the assumption that the coming contest will be defined by a hierarchy of capabilities rather than an existential ideological clash.
At the same time, China will try to keep the United States feeling sufficiently secure in its own hemisphere to discourage a full-scale return to global interventionism, while quietly expanding its presence in the Global South.
For the United States and its allies, the key point is that Beijing does not take the NSS’s softer rhetoric at face value. The removal of labels such as “strategic competitor” is widely read by Chinese analysts as tactical camouflage rather than a genuine shift in intent. Diplomatic language about coexistence will therefore carry little weight unless it is matched by visible adjustments in areas such as technology export controls, which the NSS in fact promises to tighten.
U.S. allies should also assume that Beijing will seek to play on fears of abandonment in Tokyo, Seoul, and Brussels, casting Washington as a narrowly self-interested power preoccupied with its own borders.
For third parties, particularly in Southeast Asia and Europe, the practical implication is to brace for a more assertive China operating under the assumption of an American inward turn. If Beijing concludes that Trump’s focus on the Western Hemisphere is durable, it will likely step up efforts to draw ASEAN economies more tightly into its orbit, arguing that access to the U.S. market is narrowing and that U.S. security guarantees are increasingly uncertain.
Seen from Beijing, the 2025 NSS is not the swan song of U.S. hegemony but an attempt to make it leaner, cheaper, and more durable. Across the corporate, Nixonian, and realist readings, Chinese analysts converge on a common thread: Trump is reallocating costs and risks, not abandoning primacy.
