Making China Great Again

We’re watching it happen in real time: middle powers are quietly recalibrating away from the United States and edging closer to China.

Yesterday, Canada announced a renewed trade and diplomatic relationship with Beijing. As part of the agreement, Canada will lower tariff barriers on up to 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles from 100% to 6.1% in the initial phase—returning rates to their pre-2024 level. Those punitive tariffs were imposed by the former Trudeau government largely to mirror U.S. penalties. Ottawa is now signaling that automatic alignment with Washington no longer comes at any price.

In return, China will lift tariffs on Canadian agricultural and aquacultural exports, including seafood and canola—trade benefits estimated at nearly $3 billion annually. And this appears to be only the opening move.

Not long ago, this would have been unthinkable. Canada’s relationship with China was deeply strained after the 2018 arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver, carried out at the request of the United States. Beijing responded by detaining two Canadian citizens, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, in what was widely understood as retaliation. Although both men were released in 2021, relations never truly recovered.

So what changed?

Trump 2.0 happened.

More bullying. More belligerence. More unpredictability. Explicit threats to Canadian economic and political sovereignty. A United States increasingly willing to discard trade agreements, undermine security alliances, and treat even its closest partners as disposable. And wherever the U.S. retreats—or simply becomes unreliable—China is prepared to fill the space.

America’s traditional allies aren’t waiting to see how U.S. domestic politics resolves itself. They are rebuilding their militaries, reinforcing regional security arrangements that intentionally exclude Washington, and forging new trade relationships with partners they believe will honor commitments. For better or worse, China increasingly fits that role.

This has triggered an uncomfortable reassessment across the so-called free world. Have we been sold a simplified story about China? Does it truly matter, in strictly geopolitical terms, that it is a one-party state with different cultural values? Is it the responsibility of middle powers to enforce human-rights norms abroad—especially when their primary ally now routinely violates international law, tears up agreements, and treats norms as optional?

None of this is an argument that China is benign. It is authoritarian. It suppresses dissent. It commits grave abuses against minorities. These facts are real, documented, and morally troubling.

But geopolitics is not a moral seminar. States do not choose partners based on virtue; they choose them based on predictability, reciprocity, and self-interest. And here is the uncomfortable truth many governments are arriving at: China is often more transactional, more consistent, and more disciplined in honoring agreements than the United States has become.

What we are witnessing fits a familiar historical pattern. Dominant powers enter a phase of excess—overreach abroad, polarization at home, contempt for institutions, personalization of power. Eventually, allies hedge. Rivals consolidate. The system adapts around the declining center.

The United States is now deep in that excess phase. Trump is not the cause so much as the accelerant. Each threat, each broken alliance, each act of unilateral coercion hastens America’s relative decline and China’s ascent. Power is not being seized by Beijing so much as abandoned by Washington.

This reversal would have seemed unimaginable within my lifetime. Yet it is now unfolding in plain sight—not because China has changed dramatically, but because the United States has.