Advantage
China: Trump’s tantrums push US allies closer to Beijing
Amy
Hawkins Senior China correspondent
Beijing
appears to be following Napoleon’s maxim: ‘Never interrupt your adversary when
he’s making a mistake.’
In the
search for stability, some western nations are turning to a country that many
in Washington see as an existential threat
Sun 25
Jan 2026 12.06 CET
If
geopolitics relies at least in part on bonhomie between global leaders, China
made an unexpected play for Ireland’s good graces when the taoiseach visited
Beijing this month. Meeting Ireland’s leader, Micheál Martin, in the Great Hall
of the People in Beijing, China’s president, Xi Jinping, said a favourite book
of his as a teenager was The Gadfly, by the Irish author Ethel Voynich, a novel
set in the revolutionary fervour of Italy in the 1840s.
“It was
unusual that we ended up discussing The Gadfly and its impact on both of us but
there you are,” Martin told reporters in Beijing.
China is
on a charm offensive with western leaders, a path cleared by Donald Trump’s
increasingly erratic and destabilising power grabs on the global stage.
Although Europe breathed a sigh of relief this week when Trump withdrew the
threat of using military force in Greenland and said he would not impose
tariffs on opponents of his plans in the Arctic, the US no longer seems like a
reliable partner.
An
editorial in the Chinese newspaper the Global Times made Beijing’s pitch clear:
headlined “Europe should seriously consider building a China-EU community with
a shared future”, the state media article said the world risked “returning to
the law of the jungle” and that China and the EU should cooperate in building
“a shared future for mankind”.
No
country can afford to cut ties or truly antagonise the world’s biggest economy.
But in the search for stability, US allies are turning to the country that many
in Washington see as an existential threat: China.
“With US
policy again looking unpredictable – underscored by tensions and tariff threats
over Greenland – European leaders are making sure to keep channels with Beijing
open,” says Eva Seiwert, a senior analyst at the Mercator Institute for China
Studies. “The risk is that this approach sustains or even deepens existing
dependencies on China at a moment when Europe’s stated goal is de-risking.”
Mark
Carney, elected as Canada’s prime minister on promises to stand up to bullying
from the US, set the tone for western countries’ recalibration with China when
he travelled to Beijing last week. “Canada is forging a new strategic
partnership with China,” Carney said. The global order, he said, was at a point
of “rupture … not a transition”.
Officially,
China views this rebalancing with caution. Another article published in state
media this week explicitly hit back at the idea that China welcomed the current
chaos.
Song Bo,
a fellow at Tsinghua University’s Center for International Security and
Strategy, says Chinese policymakers are unwilling to publicly admit that the
global order has fundamentally changed.
“We have
always believed that we are the greatest beneficiary of the international order
established after the cold war,” Song says, referencing China’s rapid economic
growth that came with the globalisation of the 1990s and 2000s. “It is
difficult for us to accept that the current order is undergoing a major
transformation.”
Another
perspective on the matter comes from Ryan Haas, a senior fellow at Brookings.
In a post on X, he wrote: “In viewing Trump’s efforts to gain control of
Greenland, Beijing appears to be following Napoleon’s maxim: ‘Never interrupt
your adversary when he’s making a mistake.’”
Because
although China pledges allegiance to the international rules-based order, Xi
has long talked of the world undergoing “great changes unseen in a century”,
echoing Carney’s sentiment of global “rupture”. Seiwert says: “Beijing could
use Carney’s language rhetorically to suggest a shared diagnosis of US-centric
instability, even if there is no convergence on values, interests or outcomes.”
Carney’s
pitch for China comes in part from his hostile relationship with Trump. In
Trump’s rambling address to Davos, he lambasted Carney for failing to be
“grateful” to the US. “Canada lives because of the United States. Remember
that, Mark,” Trump raged.
Rather
than kowtow to the southern neighbour, Carney is trying to lessen his country’s
dependence on the US. In Beijing, he agreed to lower tariffs on Chinese
electric vehicles from 100% to 6.1%, diverting from an alignment with
Washington that had left one of China’s key exports in effect blocked from the
North American market.
Chinese
EVs are now on course to make up about one-fifth of Canada’s EV sales, if not
more. The deal is a major political win for China, even if it represents only a
small share of China’s EV exports. Concerns about economic dependence on China
and even Chinese interference in Canadian elections appear to have dropped down
the agenda.
Keir
Starmer, the UK prime minister, arrives in China next week with a slightly
different set of circumstances. He has a warmer relationship with Trump,
although his rhetoric hardened in recent days with spats over Greenland and the
Chagos Islands. And he is under pressure at home to show he is tough on China
when it comes to security and human rights, two issues that inflamed the issue
of the controversial Chinese mega embassy application in London, which the
government approved this week in the face of intense opposition.
“Starmer
may not have proved himself an effective prime minister or knowledgable about
China, but he is not stupid,” says Steve Tsang, the director of the Soas China
Institute. “He will want to improve relations with China to improve the UK’s
economy and trade, but he is not going to see China as a more reliable partner
to the UK than the US.”
Nevertheless,
like Carney, Starmer will be hoping to ink deals and drum up much-needed
investment in the UK economy. He will be accompanied by representatives from
blue-chip British companies and is expected to revive a UK-China CEO council,
despite growing concerns about the national security risks of Chinese
investments.
The pivot
to Beijing is far from straightforward. Song notes that the leadership of the
European Commission remains hostile to China, something that Chinese officials
and business leaders find hard to square with the supposedly warmer ties
between China and individual European countries.
According
to Song, the bloc’s overall frostiness and the war in Ukraine are the biggest
barriers to deepening ties. “Without resolving these two issues, Sino-European
relations will not see any significant improvement,” Song says.
Ukraine
may be particularly high on the agenda for Petteri Orpo, Finland’s prime
minister, who lands in Beijing on Sunday. “China’s support for Russia has
definitely strained relations with the Nordic states and Finland is no
exception,” says Patrik Andersson, an analyst at the Swedish Institute of
International Affairs. But Andersson notes that Finland’s China relations have
typically been more stable than those of Sweden and Norway, and this visit is
likely to bolster those ties.
In the
months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022,
European countries wrestled with the fact that many were dependent on Russia
for key commodities such as fossil fuels. There were calls to avoid falling
into a similar situation with China, the world’s most important supplier of
clean energy technology. Even back in 2020, the chair of the UK’s joint
intelligence committee, Simon Gass, said: “China represents a risk on a pretty
wide scale.”
Such
concerns may be fading into the rearview mirror as middle powers seek to cling
on to a world of multilateralism in the face of a wrecking ball swung by the
country that was once its greatest defender. China insists Trump’s behaviour is
nothing to celebrate. But the outcome may nevertheless strengthen Beijing’s
position on the world stage.
Additional
research by Lillian Yang
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